University Hall in Brown University. Providence, Rhode Island, December 27th 2003.
Americans tend to think that only the South or only slave traders and slave owners benefited from slavery.
But it was not that simple. Slaves and land were the main forms of wealth in the US before 1860. Therefore slaves figured in insurance policies and bank loans. Therefore universities turned to slave owners and slave traders to raise money. Industry in the North and in Britain made money processing slave-grown tobacco, cotton and sugar from the South and the Caribbean. Railway companies used slave labour. The most profitable activity on Wall Street was – the slave trade.
For example:
AIG – bought American General Financial which owns US Life Insurance Company. US Life used to insure the lives of slaves.
Aetna – insured the lives of slaves in the 1850s.
Bank of America – grew in part out of the Bank of Metropolis, which accepted slaves as collateral.
Brooks Brothers – got its start making clothes for slaves!
Brown Brothers Harriman – a Wall Street bank that owned hundreds of slaves and lent millions to Southern planters, merchants and cotton traders.
Brown University – named for the Brown brothers who gave money to the university. Two were slave traders, another ran a factory that used slave-grown cotton. University Hall was built in part by slave labour.
CSX – rented slaves to build rail lines.
Fleet Boston – grew out of Providence Bank, founded by one of the Brown brothers (see Brown University above), a slave trader who owned slave ships. The bank made money from the slave trade. Providence, Rhode Island was the home port for many slave ships.
Harvard Law School – endowed with money from Isaac Royall, an Antiguan slave owner and sugar grower.
JP Morgan Chase – made a fortune from the slave trade. Predecessor banks (Citizens Bank, Canal Bank in Louisiana) accepted slaves as collateral, taking possession of 1,250 slaves from owners who defaulted on loans.
New York Life – insured slaves. Of its first 1,000 insurance polices, 339 were policies on slaves.
Norfolk Southern – the Mobile & Girard, now part of Norfolk Southern, rented slaves to work on the railroad. Central of Georgia, also now part of the company, owned slaves.
Princeton – raised money and recruited students from rich, slave-owning families in the South and the Caribbean. Princeton was not alone in hitting up slave owners and traders for money and students. So did:
- Harvard,
- Yale,
- Penn,
- Columbia,
- Rutgers,
- Brown,
- Dartmouth and the
- University of Delaware.
By the middle 1700s, most Princeton students were the sons of slave owners. Many of Columbia’s students were sons of slave traders.
Tiffany’s – founded with profits from a cotton mill in Connecticut that processed slave-grown cotton.
USA Today – its parent company, Gannett, had links to slavery.
Wells Fargo – Georgia Railroad & Banking Company and the Bank of Charleston owned or accepted slaves as collateral. They later became part of Wells Fargo by way of Wachovia. (In the 2000s Wells Fargo targeted blacks for predatory lending.)
Yale University – money from slave trading went to its first endowed scholarships, professorship and library.
Universities not only sought and accepted money from slave owners and traders, they helped to create scientific racism.
Sources: Craig Steven Wilder, “Ebony & Ivy” (2013), Atlanta Black Star (2013), Nell Irvin Painter, “Creating Black Americans” (2006), The Harvard Crimson (2006), New York Times (2001).
See also:
Abagond 
Many companies and things we use have its origins in hatred and oppression of human beings.
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Today:
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/video/2014/jun/10/slavery-supermarket-supply-trail-prawns-video
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Wow. Harvard! Columbia! Yale! PRINCETON! OMG! Those are BIG NAME COLLEGES! “Respectable” institutions of higher learning, prestigious institutions… and maybe they are today (or maybe not, I don’t know, never been there and am not black/”of color” so I don’t know what kind of “racial” stuff would go on there and might not know it even if I went to them), but I would hardly have guessed their dark past.
Very impressive list. AIG, geez. So many familiar names … so much odious history.
I can see even more why Mr. Coates made that long piece about reparations. A lot of history that this country has that it has to collectively own up to.
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WOW.
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Bank of America (Formerly the Bank of Italy) was founded in 1904 in San Francisco by an Italian immigrant Amadeo Giannini. So B of A didn’t benefit from slavery but possibly one of the banks it purchased did. If we are going down that route.. Wachovia no longer exists as a separate entity, it collapsed during the financial crises and was taken over by Wells Fargo. It would appear that much of the list of banks and insurance companies were not the original entities that profited from slavery. There used to be more banks and insurance companies in the US.. likely the list is derived from banks that were merged or taken over when the original bank collapsed.
That said another victim of the financial crisis, Lehman Brothers, did directly trace it’s beginnings to cotton trading in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1850s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman_Brothers#Under_the_Lehman_family_.281850.E2.80.931969.29 .
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Ok.. I saw the reference to the Bank of Metropolis in regards to B of A but Wikipedia says the Bank of Metropolis was founded in 1871:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_the_Metropolis
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So, maybe we should believe that the idea for Dead peasants insurance did not originate from strictly from Corporate-owned life insurance, but its origins trace back to the slavery days.
Corporations still benefit today from Modern Day Slavery. Is there any reason to believe that it will ever stop?
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jefe:
Corporations still benefit today from Modern Day Slavery. Is there any reason to believe that it will ever stop?
In the US..?
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Corporations still benefit today from Modern Day Slavery. Is there any reason to believe that it will ever stop?
Awareness: The supply chains need to be exposed on television at 5:00 or 6:00PM when the kids are still awake, so the parents can be made maximally uncomfortable.
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Politicians with shares in companies with slavery in the supply line ought to be outed as shareholders in such companies.
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When Steve Jobs passed it was really stomach churning to read all the sycophantic memorials of the man, and the Foxconn stuff had recently been exposed but scumbags wanted to quickly forget the inconvenient.
(http://youtu.be/Pn-BR0Y9bcg)
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Legion:
the Foxconn stuff had recently been exposed ..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Major_customers
Two (or more) wrongs don’t make a right… but a large percentage of the electronic items sold in the US use Foxconn….
Politicians with shares in companies with slavery in the supply line ought to be outed as shareholders in such companies…
Problematic labor conditions are some factories, but I don’t see Foxconn as the modern equivalent of chattel slavery in the US.
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@UM,
MOST DEFINITELY
Legion expanded on this. Slavery (or other types of forced involuntary or debt induced / bonded labour) is bigger today than it ever was throughout history, and it enters just about every supply chain in the USA.
@Legion
I just learned that I might need to audit Foxconn’s factory in China sometime down the road. I am sure they have cleaned up many of their labour conditions already.
Apple is one of the worst offending labour and environmental scumbags out there. But agreed, their offenses are not at the level of 19th century inheritable chattel slavery (not to say that some other places may be).
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@ Abagond
Is there a comprehensive database of who owned slaves before 1865?
It is not a simple task to compile one.
But there are a great many more fortunes that are attributable to slave ownership, and are traceable, even though the paper trail may be cold.
A university of London, UCL, has started up some of this kind not that long ago, first to collect:
“…the identity of all slave-owners in the British Caribbean at the time slavery ended. As the project unfolded, we amassed, analysed and incorporated information about the activities, affiliations and legacies of all the British slave-owners on the database, building the Encyclopedia of British Slave-Owners, which has now been made available online…”
The project also says to the public:
“We are also very interested to receive information about known or possible slave-owners in the British Empire. We know from experience that much material is in the hands of institutions, families and individuals which bears on the history of slave-ownership, and we are eager to hear from you if you have records or papers, especially journals, which are relevant to the aims of our project…”
So far, 4000+ slave owners names have come to light and more than 600 companies are known to have benefitted from the coerced labour of enslaved Africans.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/
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As a woman I know there are horrors aplenty in history–and today, throughout the world. My challenge is to figure out ways to move toward greaterhuman rights and basic dignity for everyone, everywhere. Doesn’t this “outing” of past wrongs, and reparations tend to reinforce the us vs. them thinking? What would justice look like? where woudl any reparations be managed, by whom and how would the payments be distributed?
Believe me, I understand the anger of being wronged and having no redress. Change has to start somewhere and maybe it will beo n the internet. But there is plenty of hate here, too.
I’m working on the racism in sports teams’ identities when they use Native American names and stereotypes. It is only one place yet I think it is an important one. If we can bring attention to something a whole lot of people thik is no big deal and simply “tradition” we might be able to expand from there. What would justice look like?
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I’ve always thought it amazingly transparent that de Mille’s racist movie glorifying the Klan was titled “The Birth of a Nation.” America was built on the enslavement of Africans and the theft of land and culture/technology from the Natives. The wealth generated by the tobacco cash crop is what enabled the colonists to revolt from England. Personally, I believe that thinking to still be at the core of American “values,” though it is deceiving the world with a show of ‘diversity’ all the while its ambitions to subjugate are no longer focused primarily on people of color, but on whatever country/culture in the world it wishes to destroy or digest to further its own ambitions.
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@ Uncle Milton
I updated Wachovia to Wells Fargo. Thanks.
I will look into the Bank of Metropolis thing. Thanks. Likely it bought up a bank that used slaves as collateral.
The thing is, using slaves as collateral was common, so any bank of any size which has bought up older banks is going to be the same as Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Citibank is probably no better, for example.
I did not put Lehman Brothers on the list since it is no longer with us.
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@ Bulanik
As far as I know there is no database of American slave owners, but I would not be surprised if someone is working on that.
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The list is only a hint of scale and extent of wealth created from black slavery.
An exerpt from “Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery”, by Anne Farrow.
It takes the examples of cotton and New York:
“As much as it is linked to the barbaric system of slave labor that raised it, cotton created New York.
By the eve of the war, hundreds of businesses in New York, and countless more throughout the North, were connected to, and dependent upon, cotton. As New York became the fulcrum of the U.S. cotton trade, merchants, shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers, and thousands of others were drawn to the burgeoning urban center…
In those prewar decades, hundreds of shrewd merchants and smart businessmen made their fortunes in ventures directly or indirectly tied to cotton. The names of some of them reverberate today….
…Real estate and shipping magnate John Jacob Astor—one of America’s first millionaires and namesake of the Waldorf-Astoria and whole neighborhoods in New York City—made his fortune in furs and the China trade. But Astor’s ships, like those of many successful merchant-shippers, also carried tons of cotton…
As cotton was becoming a staple in the transatlantic trade, Scotsman Archibald Gracie immigrated to New York after training in Liverpool, Great Britain’s great cotton port. Gracie became an international shipping magnate, a merchant prince, building a summer home on the East River before losing much of his wealth. His son and grandson left the city to become cotton brokers in Mobile, Alabama, but their family’s summer home, today called Gracie Mansion, is the official residence of the mayor of New York.
…it’s vital to understand the economic climate—the vast opportunities for wealth that the cotton trade created, and that linked New York City so tightly to the South. Before the Civil War, the city’s fortunes, its very future, were considered by many to be inseparable from those of the cotton-producing states.
…For years, members of New York’s business community had mused privately, and occasionally in the pages of journals, that the city would be better off as a “free port,” independent of tariff-levying politicians in Albany and Washington. As America unraveled over the issue of slavery, many Northern politicians and businessmen became frantic to reach out to their most important constituency: Southern planters….
By 1860, New England was home to 472 cotton mills, built on rivers and streams throughout the region. The town of Thompson, Connecticut, alone, for example, had seven mills within its nine-square-mile area. Hundreds of other textile mills were scattered in New York State, New Jersey, and elsewhere in the North. Just between 1830 and 1840, Northern mills consumed more than 100 million pounds of Southern cotton. With shipping and manufacturing included, the economy of much of New England was connected to textiles.
… By the 1850s, their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads…
As the nation lurched toward war and the certainty of economic disruption, these industrialists and allied politicians wanted to convince the South that at least some in the North were eager to compromise on slavery. A compromise was critical, for the good of the Union and business….
…On the cusp of the Civil War, the 10 major cotton states were producing 66 percent of the world’s cotton, and raw cotton accounted for more than half of all U.S. exports. The numbers are almost impossible to grasp: in the season that ended on August 31, 1860, the United States produced close to 5 million bales of cotton, or roughly 2.3 billion pounds. Of that amount, it exported about half—or more than 1 billion pounds—to Great Britain’s 2,650 cotton factories…
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@ Milton
Two (or more) wrongs don’t make a right… but a large percentage of the electronic items sold in the US use Foxconn….
Yes, the spotlight of the ‘talking machine’ pointed to Apple but Foxconn is a large supplier as you say. This is mentioned in the Ratigan piece too.
Problematic labor conditions are some factories, but I don’t see Foxconn as the modern equivalent of chattel slavery in the US.
Milton, we (universal “we”) should tread carefully here, shouldn’t we? We shouldn’t turn a real issue of apparent great suffering, into fodder to be sliced and diced by pedantic quibbles. It’s sort of trivial to point out that these people are not chattel slaves. So, Foxconn did not buy these people outright, so what? I would think that one of the lessons of learning about any chattel slave system in history would be: humans ought not to be slaves, of any kind. You don’t want to call these people “chattel” slaves? You want to label the reports out of Foxconn as “problematic”? Fine, these people could well be called ‘industrial slaves’. Thirty-five hour shifts and work so joyful it induces suicidal mindsets in the workers is not what I call “problematic”.
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I did not put Lehman Brothers on the list since it is no longer with us.
Lehman was a major firm. Their history is real enough, they are worth listing. You just add a “now defunct” to the end of the caption.
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@uncle milton, abagond
“Bank of the Metropolis” should be distinguished from “Bank of Metropolis of Washington, D.C.” which opened in March 1814.
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@ Jefe
I just learned that I might need to audit Foxconn’s factory in China sometime down the road.
What sort of audit, if you can say? Health and safety of workers or something else entirely?
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@Legion, client social & ethical requirements, which include labour, health & safety conditions & environment.
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^ It’s a problem when companies know ahead of time that an audit is coming, particularly for such things as ethics requirements.
Anyway, I do hope your audit will be substantive. Thanks for mentioning it, at all
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If corporations are people, and in many legal respects they are, then at what point is the corporate gene pool so diluted through mergers, acquisitions and restructurings that its past is disconnected from its present?
Shortly before the start of the Great Depression, there were over 30,000 banks in the US. Today, there are about 8,000, and many of them were started from scratch after the Depression. Meanwhile, almost all US banks in operation today were founded after the Civil War.
Moreover, many bank takeovers were/are undertaken because the target bank had become weak, having lost much of its capital base due to economic changes, lending mistakes, etc. Thus, even if a bank’s predecessor was connected in some way to slavery, the equity accumulated from that involvement may well have been lost a long time ago, long before the existence of the FDIC and the Federal Reserve System.
However, it won’t surprise me if someone argues that the federal government became complicit — a successor in interest — in slavery by creating deposit insurance in the 1930s, thereby unwittingly providing some benefits to the few banks still around that had some ties to slavery.
Wealth is transitory and short-lived Thus, even if a few companies and universities benefited at some early point from commercial ties to slavery, that wealth alone would have supported its beneficiaries for only a short period. Then it would have been exhausted.
Without the constant creation and development of new sources of prosperity and the opening of new markets, the economy of the US would have ceased to function then just as it would stop functioning now if a similar stagnation or inaction were to overtake the population.
Thus, there is no way to determine if wealth accumulated when slavery was legal is part of the present day net worth of a business or other entity.
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My,my,my. Look at that list. And to think,this is the short version.lol And these people still say we don’t deserve reparations. What a joke! How sick can you get?!!
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Thanks
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“And to think,this is the short version.lol And these people still say we don’t deserve reparations. What a joke! How sick can you get?!!”
A more immediate question is, how complicit are each one of us in the current forms of slavery? Every time we buy something that’s being made dirt cheap because other people are being abused, we’re no less culpable than people living in past centuries sucking the life’s blood out of others, stealing their lives. Most of them felt like we do now, there’s not much we can do, and we need to buy stuff as cheap as we can get it. That’s all it takes and this stuff never ends.
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Ok, I will never buy another iphone.
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^Milton said: …but a large percentage of the electronic items sold in the US use Foxconn….
It’s not all about Apple or that one device the iphone.
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To Legion:
It’s not all about Apple or that one device the iphone.
Agree.. it is not.. Foxconn is huge.. I would guess that almost every electronic device sold in the US has some or most of it’s parts and/or assembly performed by Foxconn. Intel outsourced it’s motherboard manufacturing to Foxconn in 2001. Around the time the first major reporting in the US about Apple and Foxconn came to light I was tasked with stripping older IBM Pseries servers for parts (built circa 2002 – 2004) and noticed that many of the parts were produced by Foxconn.
I am aware of voluntary contracts with Taiwanese corporations wherein labor is imported from the Philippines and Thailand (I am sure elsewhere but I have talked with people from those two countries that entered into those contracts..). They were not overjoyed about the working in the factories but they were pleased with the money which was substantially higher than what they could make locally. Jefe may very well know of involuntary labor at Foxconn, if so I would like to see a report or article on the issue or hear his words on the subject.
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Jefe, Legion;
FWIW a report I found on South Asian debt servitude:
http://books.google.com/books?id=_DLTnRNgVHIC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
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That book suggests that the worker under debt induced servitude
– usually can never work off his debt
– is transferrable to succeeding generations
– is transferrable to another “contractor“ who assumes the debt and has control of the labourer while the debt is outstanding (which is often in perpetuity)
In this case, it is in practice no different from inheritable chattel slavery. The difference is that the worker is technically not property, but in every other way the employer has control over the person and his children.
We call this “modern day slavery”. There are more slaves today than there have ever been in history.
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[…] The Incomplete List of US Companies & Universities That Benefited From Black Slavery […]
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[…] The Incomplete List of US Companies & Universities That Benefited From Black Slavery […]
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nice list abagond, I knew about the railroads and some of the banks but did not know about these universities . emory university was built by slaves.
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And today, we have corporations that benefit from another form of contemporary slavery we call the prison industrial complex. No matter what, there seems to be ways to continue this inhuman practice on people of color for white institutional and economic power.
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Legion,
“It’s not all about Apple or that one device the iphone.”
So it doesn’t matter if I stick to iPhones and MacBooks? I love my iphone.
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To Jefe:
That book suggests that the worker under debt induced servitude
– usually can never work off his debt
– is transferrable to succeeding generations
– is transferrable to another “contractor“ who assumes the debt and has control of the labourer while the debt is outstanding (which is often in perpetuity)
The book centers on indentured servitude in South Asia. Does this have any bearing on Foxconn’s electronic assembly plants…?
Debt to the landlord from share cropping and debt to the company store (such was the case with many coal and timber companies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries..) in the US was not inheritable.
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^ I was referring to the modern indentured servitude in South Asia that formed the subject of the book you mentioned. It sounds as if it is *almost* like chattel slavery, as it has the characteristics that I mentioned above.
I was not referring to Foxconn’s assembly plants. That labour system is different from the ones in South Asia.
I would like to learn more about how the sharecropping system operated in the USA, how it was different from tenant farming, how it was different for whites and blacks. Abagond did posts on “Slavery by another name” in the post-reconstruction era, but has not mentioned much about sharecropping. We should have a post on plantation commissaries too. I don’t know enough at this point in time to write about it.
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Jefe:
It sounds as if it is *almost* like chattel slavery, as it has the characteristics that I mentioned above.
Yes it does sound like chattel slavery…given the high levels of corruption in India, Nepal, and Pakistan I can see it flourishing. China for all of it’s faults seems to accord more rights towards workers.
FWIW: Found this article about the convoluted nature of indenture servitude (well on mans story) as it applies to electronic assembly plants:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-07/an-iphone-tester-caught-in-apples-supply-chain#p1
“Slavery by another name” in the post-reconstruction era, but has not mentioned much about sharecropping.
That was abuse meted out through the prison system, highly problematic but from all I’ve read not hereditary. There are several older more academic books that cover the same subject such as “The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 by Pete Daniel” which also cover the issues faced by share croppers.
.
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@UM,
Thank you for sharing the article.
Recently I have been doing social compliance audits of factories, including electronic factories in China and other factories in Malaysia. Malaysia, with its insatiable demand for imported migrant labour, is much more disturbing to me.
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“No matter what, there seems to be ways to continue this inhuman practice on people of color for white institutional and economic power.”
It’s really wrong to see this as something that only pertains to white populations perpetrating on people of color. This is an issue of power, Those who have it are prone to exploit those who don’t irregardless of color. There’s an entire Second World currently being enslaved by the powerful and nobody is even noticing, quite content with being bamboozled. Just anybody here even know what the Second World is?
If you keep blinders on that keep you from seeing the whole picture it just lessens your effectiveness at doing anything about it, and increases the possibility that you “pass” into something you hate.
I’m seeing a resurgence of the ‘white devil’ thing of the Sixties that we supposedly evolved beyond, but I’m hearing more and more of it, and all it reminds me of is the state of mind that morphed into Aryan Supremacy. It’s ALWAYS a victim mind that slips into that great evil. ‘The Other is so evil, and is so likely to do us harm that we must do whatever is necessary to vanquish them and avenge ourselves.’ And next thing you know the victims become butchers, and if those butchers win, you have a culture riddled with evil lies like this one with no honor, and if they lose, then they are extinguished from history as monsters no one will ever care about again because they became what they hate and don’t deserve to be cared about anymore.
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“If corporations are people…at what point is the corporate gene pool so diluted through mergers”
If a corporation is a person and exists for 100+ years, then it is the same yet older person, not a different one…Harvard, Yale, CSX, etc. were never dissolved and are the same corporations as pre-1860.
“Thus, there is no way to determine if wealth accumulated when slavery was legal is part of the present day net worth of a business or other entity.”
It might be no way to accurately quantify it, but it’s obvious that wealth accumulated during slavery is part of present-day net wealth because slavery was such a big part of the US and world economy.
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@keress828
First you quote
then you say
At what point in time did anyone suggest that it pertains ONLY to *WHITE* populations? In fact we have just been discussing how it is still occurring in countries across South Asia and SE Asia today.
By misreading posts and comments as ONLY pertaining to white people, and thereby feeling a compulsion to point out how it was, and is, not only “white” people doing this sort of thing, you are invoking the broken record “The Arab trader argument”. No regular informed reader of this blog will accept or acknowledge this deflectionary tactic.
(https://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/the-arab-trader-argument/)
The fact that *OTHER* people do it in no way erases or deletes what one does.
Currently I am doing work in Corporate Social Responsibility, including inspecting factories for signs or signals of forced, compulsory or bonded labour (ie, modern slavery) entering into the supply chain. I am committed to uncovering it and reporting it, whether in “white” western countries or elsewhere in the world. I just reported a factory in Malaysia that I suspected of doing that. However, I do also suspect that Malaysia and South Asian Countries have also learned some of their habits and methods of forced compulsory (“coolie”) labour from their prior colonial masters – the British. They probably believe that they are not so bad as someone else also has done it before – the British.
If you keep blinders on how you are changing the narrative to be consistent with your own biases and beliefs, then readers will start to suspect that you lack reading comprehension skills. No one else said ONLY white people. You did.
Most people who read this into it typically feel *guilty* about something – ie, the child who took cookies from the cookie jar points to some other child with his hand in the jar.
If we do not feel guilty about it, then we should condemn (and potentially seek rectification from) any party that profits from slavery, white people or otherwise.
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“At what point in time did anyone suggest that it pertains ONLY to *WHITE* populations? In fact we have just been discussing how it is still occurring in countries across South Asia and SE Asia today”
I’ve heard that tone here quite a bit and as someone who’s lived on what the world considers the ‘wrong’ side of the color line all my adult life (45 years) being the only ‘white’ person in the room a good deal of that time. It’s there. I’m not making this up. And it’s getting worse of late. It personally hurts me, but beyond that, it terrifies me that some line will be crossed and things will get violently ugly. My real people are officially extinct now, culturally, because we were a 15% militarized minority. We are way left of black, so far left there’s nothing viable left of us. I attached myself to the people here most familiar to me, who persist in seeing me as different.
It’s not guilt, honey, it’s a big hot button that no one hears me or sees me because they’re too busy stereotyping me as white, with a long laundry list of assumptions as to what that means, and what they think is going on in my head. I’m so drastically different from what Americans expect white people to be that’s it’s blaring at me all the time, and if I mention it I’ll just get someone like you reading into what I’ve said and assuming it’s my ‘white guilt’ or some other stereotype that’s made me feel invisible most of my life.
You may not have heard it, but I have, not just here, but from people influencing my own bi-racial children, the argument that will append to a discussion about the neo-slave trades in Asia that they’re still really just serving the greed of white power mongers. Or the one I heard this weekend. If we folllow the logic that all Imperialists are a$$holes, and in 1491 the largest empire in the world was in South America, then hierarchical oppression existed in the Americas long before Contact with whites. But I know NDN theorists who counter that with the argument that there were white people in the Americas long before Columbus and it was they that contaminated the pure-minded Natives who lived in harmony.
I’ve surrounded myself with a lot of Indian people too, because they understand what it’s like to be stripped of your culture and your identity and assimilated as white, but there too I’m far too often the second class person at the back of the room no one applies the same logic or compassion to. I can’t tell you how many times in my lifetime I’ve experienced this and how incredibly isolated I feel.
You want to know what my real feelings are towards black people?
Unrequited.
Yes, I have ‘victim’ patterns. They’re always saying that about us, my real people.. But that’s all we’ve been for half a millennium, and it just won’t stop.
Who are my real people? You’ve never heard of us and you never will. We don’t exist anymore. And we were really something.
http://afraserbic.com
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resw77:
If a corporation is a person and exists for 100+ years, then it is the same yet older person, not a different one…
A corporation is a “person” because only a “person” can enter into contracts and consciously acknowledge, understand and obey laws. Try making a deal with a dog or a dolphin.
No, the life span of a corporation does not cement its identity in any way. General Electric is one of the few corporations that’s been around for more than a century. Most of its current products did not exist until relatively recently and only vastly improved versions of its early products are part of today’s mix. Moreover, it’s now many times larger than it was when Edison was around.
Furthermore, the laws under which it operates have changed
Harvard, Yale, CSX, etc. were never dissolved and are the same corporations as pre-1860.
Nope. A school is not quite the same as a corporation, though all, including Harvard, have evolved, expanded and metamorphosized into much more than they were pre-Civil War. Meanwhile, inasmuch as Harvard and Yale are private institutions, they can discriminate on the basis of race. Today, if those schools wanted to admit only blacks, no law would stop them.
That would be quite a scene. An all-black Harvard. Would that satisfy a portion of anyone’s urge for reparations?
“Thus, there is no way to determine if wealth accumulated when slavery was legal is part of the present day net worth of a business or other entity.”
It might be no way to accurately quantify it, but it’s obvious that wealth accumulated during slavery is part of present-day net wealth because slavery was such a big part of the US and world economy
It’s claimed that Timbuktu was a hugely successful commercial center where great wealth was accumulated. So. Where’s that wealth today?
Wealth is transitory. It’s never permanent, as nations, enterprises and individuals have proven repeatedly since the dawn of civilization.
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@sb
“A corporation is a “person” because…”
Who’s arguing that?
“No, the life span of a corporation does not cement its identity in any way.”
And besides your opinion, what’s your basis?
“A school is not quite the same as a corporation”
The Harvard Corporation is in fact a corporation, just like its name says. It was incorporated and has bylaws, a board, can enter contracts, be sued, etc.
“It’s claimed that Timbuktu was a hugely successful commercial center where great wealth was accumulated. So. Where’s that wealth today?”
If you knew anything about the history of Timbuktu, you’d see that it was conquered several times in its history and most recently fell under French rule until 1960. In that time period, some of its wealth was transferred to its conquerors. Just like the claimed-to-be great city of Sparta has been conquered. At least Timbuktu still exists as a city and has thousands of its prized books in tact. Not much is left of Sparta.
However, the transfer of wealth has little bearing on or relevance to the fact that companies that still exist today have in fact profited from the slave trade. But nice try.
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[…] Americans tend to think that only the South or only slave traders and slave owners benefited from slavery.But it was not that simple. Slaves and land were the main forms of wealth in the US before 1860. Therefore slaves figured in insurance policies and bank loans. Therefore universities turned to slave owners and slave traders to raise money. Industry in the North and in Britain made money processing slave-grown tobacco, cotton and sugar from the South and the Caribbean. Railway companies used slave labour. The most profitable activity on Wall Street was – the slave trade.For example:Click through for list […]
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resw77:
The Harvard Corporation is in fact a corporation, just like its name says. It was incorporated and has bylaws, a board, can enter contracts, be sued, etc.
The Harvard Corporation is a handful of people who govern Harvard University. The corporation itself is not the school.
Meanwhile, as I said, a school is not quite the same as a corporation. If a graduate of Harvard commits a crime, even if he uses knowledge acquired at Harvard to harm someone, the victim of the crime can’t sue Harvard for producing a defective product.
The Unabomer, for example. One of Harvard’s infamous graduates.
However, you can sue GM for producing a car with a faulty ignition switch, even years later. As long as its on the road.
“No, the life span of a corporation does not cement its identity in any way.”
And besides your opinion, what’s your basis?
Oh, you know, like GE, getting its start in products such as light bulbs, phonographs and related stuff. Now it makes turbine engines, nuclear reactors and operates in the finance industry, but no longer makes the products it made in its early days. Like that. Over the last 130 years it’s changed a lot.
How about IBM? It started out over 100 years ago making filing cabinets, got into typewriters and other office equipment. In the 1950s it switched to computers. IBM stopped making typewriters a long time ago. Once again, its current business model is a long way from its original plan. Different company.
Timbuktu. You made my point. Little remains. As for the famed library? You gotta be kidding. Guess who’s in there destroying those documents whenever possible? You guessed it. Those pesky muslims. They can’t stand much, even documents of some historical value.
I suppose some collectors would pay a good buck to purchase them. But they have no particular intrinsic value.
However, the transfer of wealth has little bearing on or relevance to the fact that companies that still exist today have in fact profited from the slave trade. But nice try.
No company operating today that was operating before the Civil War retains a single dollar of equity derived from slavery. The most obvious exploiters of slavery — the southern plantations — are gone, but the land on which they once operated is still there and something is growing in it, perhaps even cotton. But none of today’s owners are sitting back on wealth generated before the Civil War.
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@ Solesearch
So it doesn’t matter if I stick to iPhones and MacBooks? I love my iphone.
Well, I suppose that is a way of putting it. No matter what brand you use, maybe some of the assembly was under slave like conditions, that is what Milton pointed to and I agreed with.
But what if Foxconn and other companies like it became models of humane factory work. Well, there is still a problem. I’ve always thought the problem was pretty well known, but maybe I’m wrong about that. Anyway, there is a crucial mineral used in the manufacture of modern electronics, it’s called Coltan. As is commonly known, Africa is basically a treasure chest. Coltan is another one of its abundant treasures. We know that the DRC has lots of Coltan. The DRC is also a violent, brutal hell of different warring groups. These different groups (or it might be a couple of primary warring groups) control various Coltan mines. They terrorize workers (mostly kids, as I understand) into working the mines. The Coltan is then sent out to market and the money from Coltan sales go into the treasury of the guerilla group that “owned” that particular mine or set of mines. It’s rational to want to gain control over as many mines as possible, you can imagine that a good deal of violence and horror will be a concomitant of rational “business” expansion.
You can’t tell if the electronics devices you use have DRC Coltan or not. But I would bet that I and you and the person reading my comment probably do own devices with DRC Coltan. The point is that most Coltan comes from the DRC. You have to sit and think quietly for a few minutes about this, once you do, you can’t help but feel (at least) a deep ‘wrongness’ for lack of a better term.
I think there are consumer lobby groups pressuring companies to source Coltan from places that are not the DRC. Companies will keep doing what there doing for as long as the public remain silent about the issue.
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*they’re doing …
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Solesearch said: “I love my iphone.”
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Try something. Think about how Apple has, for years, delivered the slickest marketing they could to get people to say: “I love my [Apple product]” But does Apple talk about Foxconn? Do they talk about the DRC? To observe the entire process of how a good or service starts at ground zero and gets to the end user is not the stuff of sexy ad campaigns.
I’m not being Holier than thou with you. I own products that I know came to me in part through fear or pain. I’m thinking about clothing. I still quite like the particular items but have a bit of unease too, along with the enjoyment.
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Legion:
Tantalum from coltan is used to manufacture tantalum capacitors, used in electronic products.
Tantalum minerals are mined in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Ethiopia, and Mozambique.Tantalum is also produced in Thailand and Malaysia as a by-product of tin mining and smelting.
Potential future mines, in descending order of magnitude, are being explored in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Uganda, Greenland, China, Mozambique, Canada, Australia, the United States, Finland, Afghanistan, and Brazil.
A significant reserve of coltan was discovered in 2009 in western Venezuela. In 2009 the Colombian government announced coltan reserves had been found in Colombia’s eastern provinces.
About 40-45 percent of the world’s supply comes from Africa.
Is it better for the makers of tantalum capacitors to buy tantalum from non-African sources? Or should the African purchases continue? Is the money flowing into the DRC good or bad?
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Please, why are people responding to commenters who post such eloquently stated yet utter nonsense such as the following:
The student graduate is the CUSTOMER and the knowledge is the PRODUCT.
Can someone sue a store for legally selling a product to a customer who uses that product for an illegal purpose?
For example, can someone sue, say, K-mart, for selling bullets to a customer who later used them to commit a mass shooting, killing dozens? Michael Moore was not successful in trying that idea in Bowling for Columbine.
He is trying to be a “civil troll” (https://abagond.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/my-philosophy-on-trolls/)
but is derailing discussion all the same.
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jefe:
The student graduate is the CUSTOMER and the knowledge is the PRODUCT.
Says you. The graduate is the finished product. The conferring of a diploma is evidence of the transformative experience of school.
Can someone sue a store for legally selling a product to a customer who uses that product for an illegal purpose?
Yes, says the Supreme Court in the Abramski v. US decision rendered this week, in which the 5-4 majority found that a “straw purchaser” cannot buy a gun for another person, even if both are legally eligible to own a gun.
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NONSENSE
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Is it better for the makers of tantalum capacitors to buy tantalum from non-African sources? Or should the African purchases continue? Is the money flowing into the DRC good or bad?
sb,
A number of your comments paint you as a market fundamentalist. “The market will always work things out.” “We have democracy and capitalism to thank for our current material enjoyments.” “Governments should not interfere in markets.” Etc. Your dying to tell me that the money flowing into the DRC should continue, until it flows somewhere else. So, don’t hold back, make your case.
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@ Solesearch
The point is that most Coltan comes from the DRC.
^An error. I checked the wiki article on Coltan. The major mining nation of Coltan is Australia. The violent Coltan racket in DRC is a problem though.
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Jefe, your problem is you’re quaint! Don’t you know everything is a commodity now a days. 😛
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Legion,
Your dying to tell me that the money flowing into the DRC should continue, until it flows somewhere else. So, don’t hold back, make your case.
Not really. It’s impossible to know if it’s better for money to flow into that miserable nation or if it’s better to cut off the flow. Obviously the country needs a functional government that allows for the operation of real markets rather than a corrupt thugocracy that allows whatever they have going today.
Recently, several nations have issued bonds: Ecuador, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Rwanda. All were given “B” ratings by Standard & Poor’s. A “B” rating is low-quality junk.
Most of the countries were able to borrow $2 billion. Rwanda raised $400 million. Will these countries maintain their bond payments and principal repayments? Hard to say, which is why they all have “B” ratings. There’s a big chance they’ll default.
But given the abundance of resources in these countries, there should be no danger of default. However, due to the inability of the nations to govern themselves effectively, the risks are high, as your DRC example confirms.
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Jefe,
The graduate is the finished product
NONSENSE
If you want to become an accountant, you have to learn accounting. You can’t “buy” an accounting degree like you buy a car. You must absorb the knowledge and know how to use it, and demonstrate that understanding on qualifying exams before you can leave the academy and identify yourself as an accountant. You, as a graduate of an accounting program, are the product.
Hey, how about that Supreme Court case that took on the very topic about guns that you raised?
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sb32199
“The Harvard Corporation is a handful of people who govern Harvard University. The corporation itself is not the school.”
The Harvard Corporation today is the same one incorporated in 1650, and it is the same corporation that enters into agreements on behalf of the institution it governs. So, yes, for all legal purposes the Harvard Corporation is itself the school, since “Harvard University” is not a legal entity, and the Harvard Corporation enters into contracts on its behalf.
“If a graduate of Harvard commits a crime, even if he uses knowledge acquired at Harvard to harm someone, the victim of the crime can’t sue Harvard for producing a defective product.”
First, anyone can sue anyone. Second, yes, universities can be held liable for student actions, just as any employer may be held liable for its employees’ actions in certain circumstances.
“The Unabomer, for example. One of Harvard’s infamous graduates.”
Outrageous analogy since the “Unabomber” was not a Harvard student at the time he committed any crime, and thus no longer under any implied contract with Harvard.
“Oh, you know, like GE, getting its start in products such as light bulbs, phonographs and related stuff. Now it makes turbine engines, nuclear reactors”
Since corporations are people, then if you worked as an attorney and switched careers to being a CEO, does that make you a different “person”? Are you given a new social security number and no longer responsible for any crimes you committed while you were an attorney? Of course not.
“Timbuktu. You made my point. Little remains. As for the famed library? You gotta be kidding. ”
Not really. Timbuktu still exists as a city, and there are over 700,000 medieval manuscripts that have been found, many of which digitised. Its ancient mosque still exists, its ancient university still exists. But yes, it has also been plundered by foreigners, including the Christian invaders past and present.
But your silly point is just like saying if you were robbed or pickpocketed, that would make you become a different “person.” If not, what point are you trying to make?
“No company operating today that was operating before the Civil War retains a single dollar of equity derived from slavery.”
That is your opinion, as unfounded as it is. That’s like saying that Apple does not retain a single dollar of equity derived from Steve Jobs/Wozniak’s efforts or their venture capitalists.
Companies founded with money made from the slave trade (seed capital), like many listed above, at least owe their very existence to the slave trade, just like Apple owes its existence to Jobs/Wozniak and their venture capitalists.
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We condemn slavery. I watched 12 Years a Slave and there is nothing as disgusting as feeding off other mens labour then you turn and show scorn. Shame you slavists!
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https://radio.azpm.org/s/303-traces-of-the-trade/
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What are the reasons for American affluence?
If you look deeper, you will find that many of today’s companies and institutions got the start they needed and accumulated wealth from the slave business (selling slave insurance, cotton, railroads, and universities that educated the slave owner clas…
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So, basically, corporate America. Reparations now!
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UNC Chapel Hill has an Unsung Founders “monument” for the slaves who built the university (and were subsequently buried in unmarked graves on campus — but an effort is underway to identify and properly mark the graves). The monument looks like a table, with stone seats around it, and students use it as a table for lunch, studying, or to dance upon because nothing says privilege like a bunch of entitled white kids walking all over a monument dedicated to slaves.
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[…] entertain. You live in a country built upon on the genocide of one race and enslavement of another, with multinational businesses and places of higher education that have been established due to the suffering and exploitation of the aforementioned races, this is common knowledge and it […]
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[…] entertain. You live in a country built upon on the genocide of one race and enslavement of another, with multinational businesses and places of higher education that have been established12 due to the suffering and exploitation of the aforementioned races, this is common knowledge and […]
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This is all the reason why Blacks should receive reparations.
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These are both shocking and damnable heresies that were committed by disho orable corporations who now hold prominent places of honor. These universities who are also deemed as prominate and prestigious within our society have been worshipped and admired for the wrong reasons. They should both be made to pay reparations to all of the sons and daughters of former slaves! Period!
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Quick question. If receiving stolen property is a fairly serious crime punishable by fines, incarceration or both. Has amerikkka committed the above mentioned crime by allowing stolen african slaves to enter it’s borders?
Also, should those responsible for said crimes be made to pay reparations and restitution to all injured parties? We must be made whole if indeed a crime was in fact committed right? amerikkka was built on the backs of slave labor and the big banks (the co-conspirators) have become rich off of our ancestors misfortune to this day. Punk-ass amerikkka, I’m making a citizens arrest, the charge: Over 100 million counts of receiving stolen property. I need a lawyer. Sign the petition and share if you agree.
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Wow! A nice compilation. Here’s a prophecy: The Lord God will still indemnify the Black race for they’ve suffered and still suffering from the racists and supremacists of North America and Europe. It will happen in Jesus’ name. Amen!
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Check out this morning message from Pastor James T. Meeks ,Why are We Still Singing .do you know who you are, or where you came from? Google U.S. Companies that profited from slavery and why Queen B” make’s the statements she does and why she’s unapologetic let’s go deeper M.L. k. or even deeper Jesus. We will never move forward if we don’t know how we started . #1love
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Reblogged this on mark jacobs lives!.
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We still have slaves: loyal Democrat voters who vote for people like Hillary who call them “super predators”.
Vote Real Change for Good. Vote Trump-Pence
You REALLY want everything to stay the same???
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Voting Trump-Pence is change how? Trump was the man behind the ad that demonized the Central Park five. http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/donald-trump-and-the-central-park-five.
US elections always bring out liars and fantasists like you. There’s no difference between Clinton and Trump when it comes to Blacks, except in style. Clinton will entertain the usual Black political class types, and maybe, throw a few crumbs their way. Trump, like Giuliani, will do all he can to insult them. Some change!
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TRUMP IS A POS A**HOLE, ANY BLACK PERSON DEFENDING HIM OR CALLING FOR BLACKS TO VOTE FOR HIM SHOULD BE CONSIGNED TO THE LOWEST DEPTH OF HELL!
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@gro jo
I’m shocked, shocked, I say! Real passion and authentic animus.
A real departure from your carefully cultivated detachment…and a real breath of fresh air. Love it!
I concur with your emphatic sentiment!
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I hate Hillary just as much. Trump is just a cruder version of her.
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If you want to get around the comments policy use the biological terminology such as a festering anal aperture, a festered armpit, a piece of fecal matter and so on. POS for short! We just got rid of a bunghole who was replaced by this:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/shirtless-justin-trudeau-accidentally-photo-bombs-b-c-beach-wedding-1.3710479
You really can’t take politics seriously with such cartoon characters abounding. With that being said:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCyzdD0vYOw)
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[…] corporation [and institution] that exists today was either founded by racists, employed racists, built their business on anti-Blackness and slavery, or all of the […]
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I heard about this back in June, the whole scope of it saddened me greatly. I laid back on my bed and stared at the ceiling for a good while after CBC’s segment was over.
The straightforward, no-nonsense, honest incite at approx. 4:33 by Green’s descendent was very refreshing to hear. Too many Black Americans speak in folksy, stupid or childish terms on political and economic matters, but she called Jack Daniels’ “revelation” for what it really is.
I’m sorry about the abrupt beginning of this clip. The original broadcast piece was longer but this is all CBC has up now, months later.
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.3656271/whiskey-company-reveals-that-slave-not-preacher-gave-jack-daniel-his-recipe-1.3656273
A little more on the same topic (it’s not an impressive piece, I was simply curious about what would come up on youtube on the matter):
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuJnLknYY9o)
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Practicalities
The company that owns Jack Daniels is called Brown-Forman. If you wish to abstain from buying any and all of their brands (as I have been doing and will continue to do) you can see all their brands at their website. so that you know what to avoid the next time you are at a bar or restaurant, etc.:
https://www.brown-forman.com/
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(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmqgKuMlsGs)
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Speaking of slavery,and our government many correctional institutions if not all benefit from modern day slavery the Bush family and former vice president Chaney were the largest shareholders of Unocor.
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Lehman Brothers, Hugo Boss, KFC, N M Rothschild & Sons Bank, Wachovia Corporation and Jack Daniels
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[…] the historical aspects of slavery, racism and their connection to American business? A startling list is available of companies that have deep roots and not so deep roots to slavery. Does Mr. Henry take them to […]
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All these companies need to put monies aside to reimburse Black Americans for the free labor they did, Not to mention the rape, torture, kidnapping, depriving education, thievery, family displacement, lynchings and murder…ect… all crimes against humanity! The US knows slavery impacted every corner of the world, every fortune 500 company.This is why they don’t talk about reparations for Blacks, but gave reparations to the Jews for the Holocaust, This is what MLK talked about before he was murdered by the US…Black Slaves built the White House…WOW seems like everything that’s worth talking about in US history leds to “you guessed it” SLAVERY! Whit that being said, Yes these companies need to pay if the company is worth 10 billion, then that company should pay 40% of that 10 billion and the US government should match every dime from each company!
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I recently read an article on Artsy.net that explored the paintings and sculpture of Titus Kaphar. Kaphar is a Black creative that contributed works to the newly opened Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, AL. Kaphar’s work has long been focused on Black bondage by this country’s founders and early institutions.
One of his paintings Behind the Myth of Benevolence (2014) is particularly powerful. The painting features, “…a portrait of Thomas Jefferson that is drawn back to reveal an image of a nude, enslaved black woman. The picture takes aim at the idea that our founding fathers should be absolved of having enslaved people.”
The painting illustrates how behind the high flying words about liberty written by Jefferson and his contemporaries was the sordid reality of slavery, abuse and exploitation. According to Princeton professor of history, Martha Sandweiss:
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-princeton-titus-kaphar-reckons-universitys-history-slavery
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The article further zeroed in on Princeton’s deep history to slavery prior to 1860. Sandweiss and her colleagues note the connections to slaveholders and slaves:
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https://d7hftxdivxxvm.cloudfront.net/?resize_to=width&src=https%3A%2F%2Fartsy-media-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2FW8vkmmdcYXhrk2aPASmtzg%252FBehind%2Bthe%2Bmyth%2Bof%2Bbenevolence.jpg&width=1200&quality=80
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REPARATIONS IS $500 TRILLION.
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Reblogged this on Ewosa Village.
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Message to danika ali
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Real talk
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[…] The Incomplete List of US Companies & Universities That Benefited From Black Slavery https://www.internationalbusinessguide.org/corporations/ […]
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[…] The Incomplete List of US Companies & Universities That Benefited From Black Slavery […]
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[…] Many universities and investment/banking/insurance firms have admitted to profiting from slave-backed-capital dealing publicly. They have wealth in the billions if not […]
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[…] (List of companies that profited from slavery) […]
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I do not directly benefit from black slavery. However, as much as people whine and cry about it these days, I’d like to see it come back. If you are going to claim we are all racist slave owners, I’d at least like to get the benefits of people doing everything for me as I am accused of owning. As it is, I work for and earn every dollar I make on my own with the help and grace of God.
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Thank you this is very enlightening. I would like to know an try to understand the College System for Graduating students they work really hard an they still end up working a job that is still run by previous slave holders, but they don’t know this, until they read about it,so you go to School become a lawyer , Doctor or Nurse your still working for Corporate company’s, so how can we start our own business. Looking forward to hearing your reply,thank you.
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