There are twenty thousand people buried under Wall Street.

They were African. They were enslaved. They built the city above them. In 1795, New York built over them and forgot. In 1991, a construction crew found the first coffin.

This book is about what's underneath.

BUILT AND BURIED is the history most Americans were never taught - not suffering passively endured, but the story of a people who built this country from the ground up and whose contributions were systematically erased from the record.

Organized around twelve chapters and twelve verbs - They Built. They Revolted. They Argued. They Organized. They Continue. - this book covers four hundred years of Black American history with the evidence, the argument, and the prose to make it impossible to look away.

You will discover: the West African civilizations that slavery erased from the American imagination ● how the plantation invented modern capitalism ● why Black English is a linguistic triumph ● the twenty-year legal campaign that produced Brown v. Board ● the real argument about reparations ● and why the racial wealth gap is not a mystery but arithmetic.

This is not a book about what white people did to Black people. It is a book about what Black people did - and kept doing - in spite of it.

The record is here. The argument is made.