“The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” said President Donald Trump in his second inaugural address, on Jan. 20, as he cited his foreign policy initiatives.

The Gulf of Mexico would be changed to the Gulf of America and Denali peak renamed as Mt. McKinley. But he paid special attention to the Panama Canal, which he saw as “foolishly” returned to Panama under former President Jimmy Carter. “We’re taking it back,” he promised.

Part of his justification for American ownership of the Panama Canal is that the U.S. “spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives” to build it. Indeed, the American construction of the canal had a heavy cost, but it is not one that Trump has acknowledged.

The popular telling of the canal’s origin is a story of America’s technical prowess, of man’s triumph over nature and of the cunning of figures like Theodore Roosevelt, who supported Panama’s secession from Colombia and in the process seized land rights to what would become the Panama Canal.

These histories for the most part ignore that the great majority of the workers were Black migrants from the Caribbean. They came from the islands of Barbados, Jamaica, Martinique and others, then plantation economies and colonies of European nations. It was these migrants who paid for the construction of the canal with their lives — some 5,000 to 8,000 individuals, by historians’ estimates. It’s unclear how Trump arrived at the 38,000 figure.

On arrival, workers faced a system of racial segregation. Skilled workers, mostly white Americans, were placed on the “Gold Roll.” They received high salaries and access to employee benefits. Black Caribbean workers, on the other hand, were placed on the “Silver Roll” and received much lower pay rates in local coin, along with substandard lodging, food and healthcare.

This payroll system extended throughout the canal construction from 1904 to 1914. All spaces under American sovereignty, including cafeterias, barracks, hotels and hospitals, were racially divided between Gold and Silver. Rather than a shining beacon of American progress, the canal construction was if anything one of the most glaring examples of Jim Crow exported abroad.

This system of segregation also created disparate survival outcomes for canal workers. Of the 5,609 fatalities officially recorded by canal authorities, Black workers make up 80%. A body count alone cannot capture the experiences of Black workers, who risked death every day from dynamite explosions, rock blasts, train accidents and tropical disease. One Black Caribbean worker named Alfred Dottin remembered the early days of construction: “The working conditions in those days were so horrible it would stagger your imagination. … Death was our constant companion.”

The construction also cost Panama decades of sovereignty. As Panamanian historian Marixa Lasso described in her book “Erased,” the canal was not built upon cleared virgin, uninhabited forest but instead required the destruction of multiracial Panamanian towns after the U.S. presumed to take the land. The “lost towns” fell under the waters of new reservoirs created to flood the locks. New construction provided administration buildings for the American canal authorities and suburban-style lodging inhabited mostly by white American engineers and their families.

Panamanians were rarely welcome within this American enclave, and tensions remained high throughout the 20th century. They finally erupted on Jan. 9, 1964, when a group of students rushed to the Canal Zone and raised Panama’s flag over Balboa High School. In response to their protest, American students and staff attacked the students, and authorities tear-gassed the crowd, eventually resulting in the death of 28 people, 21 of whom were Panamanian. These protesters are celebrated every year in Panama on Martyr’s Day.

Increasing anti-imperial protests in Panama and the leadership of nationalist Gen. Omar Torrijos led to negotiations for a change in control of the canal, largely under Republican Presidents Nixon and Ford. The Carter administration completed a deal with Torrijos in 1977, under which the U.S. would cede the canal to Panama in 1999.

The way Trump talks about the Panama Canal, and his ambition to reclaim it, betrays what he really means when he says he wants to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” It means he wants to ignore America’s inconvenient legacy of Jim Crow and colonialism. By erasing the racial disparities at the center of the Panama Canal construction, Trump gives justification to his expansionist policy while ignoring the cost of the U.S. empire and its perceived “triumphs.”

Every year, descendants of Black Caribbean workers who remain in Panama cross the canal to commemorate the deaths of their ancestors, throwing flowers into the water and singing mourning songs. They have not forgotten the cost. Neither should we.

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Joan Flores-Villalobos, an assistant professor of history at USC, is the author of “The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal.”

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