“Eat the wealthy.”

That’s what was emblazoned on the back of Chris Smalls’s red and black bomber jacket he wore during a White House meeting with President Biden back in May. The conversation got here after Smalls, 33, formed the Amazon Labor Union (or ALU), and made history leading the primary successful US union campaign at Amazon.

Smalls’s unionizing efforts was prompted by his firing from an Amazon warehouse position where he pushed against inhumane hours, poor advantages and inadequate wages. Smalls’s rallying cry echoed the grievances of the greater than 800,000 Amazon staff, whose back-breaking labor helped contribute to the e-commerce giant’s $1322.24B net value.

Briefly, he was David to the tech world’s Goliath.

What’s much more remarkable about that is that he’s young, working-class and Black, three qualities which have long counted against laborers within the workforce when aiming to affect systemic economic change.

His story is eerily familiar and as old as time, or at the very least so long as America has been around.

Before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, plantation owners treated their slaves similarly to factory staff—closely tracking their labor output, cotton-picking for instance, against profit margins. Generational wealth was built for many who owned slaves and over time, these fortunes were distributed in other systems we see today.

And while enslaved people labored, their owners profited, which led to the gradual growth of their territories and the next diminishment of the slaves’ humanity. TIME’s Caitlin Rosenthal wrote: slaves were accounted in the way in which as livestock, “with slaveholders literally constructing balance sheets denominated within the units of human lives. An initial inventory plus births equaled a final inventory minus deaths.”

This nearly absolute and unregulated power over human lives eventually led to the southern region of the US becoming one among the leading economies on this planet. From 1801 to 1862, the quantity of cotton picked every day by an enslaved staff jumped 400 percent, according to historian and creator Edward E. Baptist.

Just like the slaveholders of the past, modern capitalists’ glaring apathy toward working-class laborers for the advantage of their bottom line seems to maintain reverberating through time. The important thing difference between at times though, is that we’ve the power to highlight those that make a difference on this planet each day, particularly the Black staff of yesterday and today.

As labor union organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs stated when fighting for the rights of Black women staff within the 1900s:

“The elemental idea of a democracy is that we’re all individual members of the social mechanism, and as such, each is needed in the whole working of the entire.”