An intersectional history of the shared struggle for human rights from 1776 to present, Paul Ortiz’s new book, An African American and Latinx History of the United States, places Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa at the center of the development of democracy in the United States. Recovering the internationalist perspectives of the anti-slavery and Reconstruction-era movements for global emancipation, ordinary people sought to build bridges of solidarity between the nations—not walls.
While elites used the whip, the gun and the US Constitution to enforce racial inequality, working class people built multiracial labor movements culminating in making of a New Deal in the 1930s. Generations later, immigrants workers organized the largest general strike in the history of the Americas on May 1, 2006. An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a recasting of American history which explores the power of the people to organize and triumph over corrupt institutions.
Event cosponsored by the Racial Capitalism Working Group, the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, and New Directions in American Studies, Barnard.
