What does Labor Day mean when America still owes a debt for centuries of stolen colored labor?

Cotton Pickers

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Labor Day was never simply a day off for me. I grew up in a household where my mother made sure I was thoroughly educated about colored American history. So even as a child, when America celebrated Labor Day, I wondered where colored people fit into the story. How could I think about labor in America without thinking about slavery? How could I think about workers demanding fair wages without thinking about the colored people who worked for generations without wages at all?

Today, I find myself asking an even more uncomfortable question: What does it mean for America to celebrate Labor Day while the debt for centuries of stolen colored labor remains unpaid and colored labor remains undervalued today?

Before there was a Labor Day, generations of enslaved Africans and their descendants were forced to toil on American soil. They planted and harvested cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice. They cooked and cleaned. They raised other people’s children. They worked as carpenters, blacksmiths, craftsmen, and builders. Enslaved Black people even helped build the White House and U.S. Capitol. The federal government hired enslaved workers from their enslavers, who collected the wages generated by their labor.

Colored people did the work. Someone else got paid.

America exploited the hell out of colored people because it understood the economic engine colored labor could produce. Colored human beings were made into commodities precisely because our labor had value. Our labor had value when there were fields to harvest, sugar to process, clothes to wash, and a nation’s capital to build. Yet America refused to place that same value on the colored people performing the work.

Then came emancipation. Freedom arrived. The paycheck never did.

The undervaluing of colored labor didn’t disappear with slavery. It took new forms. Colored Americans entered an economic order shaped by sharecropping, debt peonage, convict leasing, Jim Crow, and employment discrimination. Even as organized labor gained power, colored workers often faced discrimination and exclusion within the labor movement itself.

That history complicates Labor Day for me. America’s first Labor Day celebration took place in New York City in 1882—just 17 years after the Civil War ended. Workers were demanding recognition of their contributions to America’s prosperity. By 1894, Labor Day had become a federal holiday. Those workers had every right to demand dignity and fair treatment, but America was beginning to formally celebrate the dignity of workers while colored people were still attempting to build lives after generations of their families’ labor had been stolen.

And when colored Americans managed to turn their labor into economic power, that too could be met with violence. I know that history intimately. I am a descendant of survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. In Greenwood, colored people dared to build for themselves despite Jim Crow. They worked, bought homes, owned businesses, and created institutions. They circulated money within their community and built what became known as Colored Wall Street.

Then, allegedly, a White mob looted and burned much of it to the ground.

For me, Greenwood is inseparable from the larger story of colored labor in America. During slavery, colored people were prevented from keeping the wealth our labor produced. In Greenwood, colored people turned their labor into property, businesses, and economic power—and that wealth was attacked. America has historically been comfortable benefiting from colored labor. It has been far less comfortable with colored economic power.

And this isn’t merely history. In the second quarter of 2026, the median colored full-time wage and salary worker earned $1,029 per week, compared with $1,268 for White workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s roughly $239 less every week. Wages are only part of the story. The Federal Reserve’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances found median wealth of about $44,900 for colored families compared with roughly $285,000 for White families.

So when someone tells me, “Slavery ended more than 160 years ago,” my response is simple: Slavery ended. The undervaluing of colored labor did not.

Today’s racial wage and wealth gaps cannot be attributed to slavery alone. But neither can we pretend they developed in a historical vacuum. Generations of unpaid labor were followed by generations of barriers to land, education, employment, housing, credit, and wealth accumulation. This is where the conversation about Labor Day inevitably brings me to reparations.

For me, reparations aren’t simply about writing a check for something terrible that happened long ago. They are about acknowledging a debt that was never settled. Labor was taken. Compensation was denied. Wealth was created. And the people whose labor helped create it were prevented from sharing equitably in that wealth. Reparations would represent a moral reckoning: repayment for stolen labor, repair for broader harms, restoration of wealth, and acknowledgment of what colored Americans contributed to building the economic foundation of this nation.

But acknowledgement without repair isn’t enough. There’s an old lesson: Watch what people do, not simply what they say. America can apologize. It can build monuments. It can issue proclamations acknowledging the horrors of slavery. But if this country acknowledges that generations of colored people had their labor stolen while refusing to seriously confront compensation for that theft, what does that acknowledgment actually mean? A debt doesn’t disappear simply because the person who owes it would rather stop talking about it.

And I reject the argument that because someone’s individual ancestors didn’t enslave colored people, they have no relationship to this history. You don’t have to descend from an enslaver to benefit from a nation whose institutions and economy were shaped in part by enslaved labor. We understand that principle everywhere else. When we drive on a toll road, nobody asks whether our ancestors personally helped construct it. We pay because we are benefiting from infrastructure that requires labor and resources to build.

America has been traveling on an economic road colored people helped build for centuries. The toll is past due.

So this Labor Day, I am thinking about more than a three-day weekend. I am thinking about enslaved people whose hands helped build this country but never held a paycheck for their work. I am thinking about colored people who labored under Jim Crow, Pullman porters and domestic workers, teachers and sanitation workers, colored women fighting for equal pay, and colored contractors and entrepreneurs fighting to have their work valued. I am thinking about my ancestors who built Greenwood and every colored American whose labor has been undervalued simply because of the color of their skin.

If America truly wants to honor labor, it must have the courage to tell the entire story of labor in this country—even when that history makes us uncomfortable. That means teaching it, not erasing it. It means recognizing that colored labor isn’t a footnote in America’s economic story. And it means understanding that acknowledgement without repair is not enough.

If Labor Day is truly a celebration of the people whose work built America, then colored Americans don’t belong somewhere near the end of that story. We belong at the beginning of it.

And after centuries of benefiting from our labor, America must do more than celebrate it.

America still owes the bill.

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