The profits of slavery continue
Black labor and the fight for reparations
By Bill Cecil
"Probably every slave imported represented, on the
average, five corpses in Africa or on the high seas. The
American slave trade meant, therefore, the elimination of 60
million Africans."
--Armet Francis,
The Black Triangle
"As valuable a family as was ever offered for sale,
consisting of a cook about 35 years of age, and her daughter
about 14, and son about 8. The whole will be sold together or a
part of them, as may suit a purchaser."
--Ad in
The Charleston
(South Carolina) Courier
April 12, 1828
The bones of enslaved Africans lie in unmarked graves on
both sides of the Atlantic and beneath its gray waters. But the
wealth slave labor created is not gone with the wind. It lives
on as capital in the huge fortunes of "great" capitalist
families--Rockefellers, Morgans, Mellons, DuPonts and
others--who have invested it again and again. It is in the
skyscrapers of Manhattan and New England's Ivy League
universities. It is in railroads, airlines, steel mills, auto
plants, oilfields, hotels, dotcoms and telecoms. It lies in
bank vaults beneath Wall Street and is traded on the New York
Stock Exchange.
Those who "own" this wealth have power over those whose
ancestors created it--and over working people in every country.
When bankers "red line" a Black community, they exercise that
power. So does a corporation when it shuts a plant in South
Carolina or the South Bronx to seek still cheaper labor in
Haiti or Mexico. It is on display when plant shutdowns
devastate Black and other working-class communities. It is in
action when the World Bank forces an African country to "open"
its public sector to Western investors in order to eventually
privatize it.
Profits from the slave trade "provided one of the main
streams of capital accumulation in England that financed the
Industrial Revolution," wrote Eric Williams, the first prime
minister of Trinidad and Tobago.
Malachi Postlethwayt, an 18th-century slavery apologist,
called the British Empire a "magnificent superstructure of
American commerce and naval power built on an African
foundation." Britain's North American colonies that rose on
that foundation became the United States. Ports like Boston,
New York City, Baltimore and Charleston were built on the
"triangular trade" that brought enslaved Africans to Caribbean
sugar plantations. The New York Stock Exchange now stands on
what was once an auction block for slaves.
For much of the 19th century, cotton grown by slaves made up
60 to 80 percent of U.S. exports. Slave-grown tobacco and rice
comprised much of the rest. Slave-grown cotton also fed New
England's textile mills, which gave birth to U.S. industrial
production.
The wealth of many top U.S. corporations can be traced
directly to slavery. FleetBoston Bank, once Providence Bank,
was founded by Rhode Island slave merchant James Brown, who
also endowed Brown University.
Yale and the University of Virginia are also among the
universities endowed by slave merchants and slave owners. Yet
in the United States today there are more Black men in prison
than in college.
Slave owners who got rich in the cotton trade started Lehman
Brothers investment bank. Alex Brown and Sons, which merged
with the German giant Deutsche Bank in 1999, financed the
cotton trade.
Brown Brothers Harriman made a fortune loaning plantation
owners money to buy slaves. When the planters could not meet
their debt, Brown seized and worked their assets, including the
slaves. A one-time partner was Prescott Walker Bush, whose
grandson lives in the slave-built White House, thanks to an
electoral-college system created to give slave owners political
power. Prescott Bush continued the firm's tradition by doing
business with the Nazis.
The second-largest banking group in the United States is
J.P. Morgan Chase. In 2001 it made $15 billion in profits on
assets of $600 billion. Among the banks now merged into it are
two that insured slave ships in the 1850s. J.P. Morgan Chase is
now deep in financial scandal. It poured money into Enron,
WorldCom and other fraudulent schemes. Have any of these banks
been as generous putting money into Black communities?
The slave trade could not survive without insurance due to
slave rebellions and escapes. Lloyds of London, the giant
shipping broker, made a fortune insuring slave ships. U.S.
insurance giants Aetna, New York Life and AIG acquired
companies that insured slaves as "property." Today these same
insurance firms are pushing doctors and employers to cut health
costs while millions of African Americans are without health
insurance.
Before the Civil War, "the backbone of the South's railway
labor force of track repairmen, station helpers, brakemen,
firemen and sometimes even engineers" was slaves, wrote
University of Pennsylvania historian Walter Licht in "Working
on the Railroad." After emancipation, the rail bosses forced
Black workers out of most of these jobs. It wasn't until the
1960s that Black railroad employment rose again.
Slaves, usually "rented" from their owners, built 94 rail
lines in the Old South. Today Norfolk Southern, CSX, Union
Pacific and Canadian National own these lines. The big railroad
companies have eliminated nearly 800,000 jobs over the past
four decades, striking hard at Black communities.
The Capitol was also built by slave labor. A freed Black
architect designed much of Washington. George Washington, a
wealthy slave owner, had the city built between Virginia and
Maryland to take advantage of slave labor.
Today you will find many descendants of slave owners in the
millionaires' club called the U.S. Senate, but you will not
find a single descendant of slaves. And every occupant of the
White House has been white and male. The majority of
Washington's population is of African descent, however. To this
day they are denied congressional representation.
Today these corporations still benefit from the legacy of
slavery, lynch law and "Jim Crow." Witness the lucrative modern
slavery of the prison-industrial complex, the lower average
wages paid to Black workers and the union organizing drives
broken by racist division.
Ever since 1865, when President Andrew Johnson revoked Gen.
William Tecumseh Sherman's Order 1815 that promised freed slave
families 40 acres and a mule, the fight for reparations has
been part of the Black freedom movement. In the 1890s, after
bloody massacres overturned Reconstruction in the South, the
Mutual Ex-Slaves Relief Bounty and Pension Association was
formed to fight for it. Between 1890 and 1910 at least five
bills for reparations were introduced in Congress.
This year Daedra Farmer-Paelman, whose research has
uncovered many corporate ties to slavery, launched a
class-action suit against Aetna Life Insurance, FleetBoston
Bank and CSX Railroads on behalf of all the descendants of
slaves.
Millions for Reparations, a coalition of Black activists,
has called for a rally in Washington on Aug. 17, the
anniversary of the birth of Black leader Marcus Garvey. A
multinational group of labor activists has formed Labor for
Reparations to support the rally.
Andre Powell is an executive board member of AFSCME Local
112 who attended the United Nations World Conference against
Racism in Durban, South Africa, last August, where reparations
gained worldwide attention. Powell told WW: "The fight to be
paid for work performed is a basic trade union demand. But it
goes beyond that. It exposes the fact that profits are nothing
but unpaid labor and that idea terrifies Corporate America.
"Karl Marx said that 'capital is dead labor that lives anew
by the hand of the living.' Corporate America owes its wealth
and power over us to the dead labor of generations of Black
people who were literally worked to death. The fight for
reparations can turn this whole country around."
Sources for this article include Daedra Farmer-Paelman,
"Capitalism and Slavery" by Eric Williams and "How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa" by Walter Rodney.
Reprinted from the Aug. 1, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
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