Bank of America will stand trial over role in slave trade

Kam Williams

In a press conference held outside Bank of America in Princeton on the morning of Monday, September 25, public interest attorneys Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran introduced plaintiff Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the Jersey City lawyer and executive director of the Restitution Study Group which has pioneered the corporate restitution movement. The trio called for a boycott of Bank of America for its admitted role in enslaving tens of thousands of African-Americans during the 19th century. They stated that Bank of America, a corporation operating in New Jersey, a state with one of the largest African American communities in the country, has a duty to own up to their participation in American slavery.

Mayer and Afran will argue this historic class action suit in federal court in Chicago on Wednesday, when they plan to demand that New Jersey and the nation’s largest banks and insurers disgorge themselves of profits reaped from the slave trade. The lawyers will argue before the U.S. Court of Appeals that Bank of America, Aetna and JP Morgan Chase must surrender millions made at the expense of the free labor of African Americans.

As for the defendants, all three companies have acknowledged playing a role in enslaving Africans, yet they refuse to share a penny of profits from this most shameful chapter of American history. Both Chase and Bank of America even admit that they owned thousands of slaves, but remain adamant in their stand.

“My great-grandparents lost their life’s wages to slavery in the South Carolina rice farms,” the plaintiff said. “Meanwhile, these banks still hold the profits they earned financing my ancestors’ enslavement.“ Ms. Farmer-Paellman sparked the nationwide class action three years ago after exposing the role several major corporations played in slavery.

She also made a poignant discovery about her great-grandfather, Abel Hines, when she uncovered evidence that Aetna had held an insurance policy on a slave his age in South Carolina with the same named. “Finding that insurance policy with my great-grandfather’s name on it brought to my mind the magnitude of the profits this company earned by way of the suffering of the enslaved,” she said.

“This is not ancient history,” Attorney Mayer remarked, “but a living case involving corporations still in existence that have been holding slave profits for 150 years without giving anything back to the people they took it from.” The attorneys added that they were shocked to learn that banks and insurance companies still doing business today, like Chase, Bank of America and Aetna, once took mortgages and issued life insurance policies to slave owners on their slaves.

“Despite my legal training, I never imagined that a bank would lend money and take a lien on human beings as if they were selling car loans,” attorney Afran continued. “Basic human decency demands that such profits be given back to the aggrieved community.”

“No plaintiff will personally receive any money from this case,” Mayer said. Instead, the suit demands that the banks create a slave-era profits trust fund for the benefit of the descendants of enslaved Africans.