They built the Capitol. They fought in every war. They cultivated the land, forged the metal, and raised the walls of a nation that refused to call them citizens.

Now, the record is being set straight.

Blood, Mud and Bricks: African American’s Contributions to Building America is a meticulously researched, unflinching account of the Black men and women whose labor, ingenuity, and sacrifice literally constructed the United States — from its earliest colonial foundations to the halls of Congress they were barred from entering.

Author and legal scholar Sonya Ogletree, JD/MBA traces a sweeping arc through American history that most textbooks have deliberately omitted:

• The 400–600 enslaved laborers who quarried stone, cut timber, cast bronze, and built the U.S. Capitol — including Philip Reid, the enslaved craftsman who helped cast the Statue of Freedom that crowns the dome to this day
• The agricultural genius imported from West Africa — rice cultivation, crop introduction, and farming innovations that powered the Southern colonial economy
• The soldiers erased from glory — from Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre to the Buffalo Soldiers of the Western frontier, to Robert Smalls, who commandeered a Confederate warship and sailed his family to freedom
• The Black Wall Streets — Tulsa, Rosewood, Durham, Atlanta, Elaine — prosperous communities systematically destroyed through massacre, arson, and land theft
• The financial warfare — from sharecropping usury to redlining to reverse redlining — a centuries-long campaign to prevent Black wealth accumulation
• The Reconstruction-era Black congressmen — 16 African Americans elected to the U.S. Congress between 1870 and 1901, then silenced for nearly three decades by Jim Crow voter suppression

This is not a story of victimhood. This is an accounting. A ledger of contributions worth an estimated $14 trillion in today’s currency — contributions that were stolen, erased, and denied.

Blood, Mud and Bricks is the book America owes itself. It is the foundation beneath the foundation.

Releasing Veterans Day, November 11, 2026 — because the people who built this nation also bled for it.

Companion workbook available separately.