Du Bois insisted Black people’s historical significance lay in their labor, not enslaved status.

Evidence

Now let us pay close attention to what Du Bois was saying: slavery was the specific historical institution through which the Black worker had been introduced into the modern world system. However, it was not as slaves that one could come to an understanding of the significance that these Black men, women, and children had for American development. It was as labor. He had entitled the first chapter to Black Reconstruction, “The Black Worker.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 930

Categorization

• XREF: This is the hinge of the Black radical tradition’s self-understanding: Blacks as a laboring class within world capitalism, contrasting with race-first or slave-status framings.