List of companies that profited from the black American slave trade:
1. AIG – bought American General Financial which owns US Life Insurance Company. US Life used to insure the lives of slaves.
2.Aetna – insured the lives of slaves in the 1850s.
3. Bank of America – grew in part out of the Bank of Metropolis, which accepted slaves as collateral.
4.Brooks Brothers – got its start making clothes for slaves
5. 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.
6. CSX – rented slaves to build rail lines.
7.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.
8.Harvard Law School – endowed with money from Isaac Royall, an Antiguan slave owner and sugar grower.
9.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.
10. New York Life – insured slaves. Of its first 1,000 insurance polices, 339 were policies on slaves.
11.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.
12.Tiffany’s – founded with profits from a cotton mill in Connecticut that processed slave-grown cotton.
13.USA Today – its parent company, Gannett, had links to slavery.
14.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.)
15.Lehman Brothers-traced it’s beginnings to cotton trading in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1850s
(to be continued)