In March, the nation's second-largest insurance company made a startling confession. Aetna admitted that shortly after its founding in 1853, it had insured Southern farmers against the death of their slaves. The corporate mea culpa was forced by Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a New York lawyer who stumbled upon the practice while researching her own family history. "It was right there in a book on black genealogy," she says, "listing Aetna as a source for finding your ancestors based on old insurance policies."

Outraged that the company might have profited from slave insurance, Farmer-Paellmann asked Aetna to make restitution by establishing a multimillion-dollar trust for minority education and businesses. Instead, Aetna issued a quick apology. "We express our deep regret over any participation at all in this deplorable practice," the company said in a press release. Further research has revealed that Aetna is not the only company currently in business that owes at least part of its fortune to trafficking in human lives. Farmer-Paellmann says that she has compiled a list of dozens of other companies that she believes benefited from slavery - in industries ranging from railroads and coal to textiles and tobacco.

Her findings have energized a movement that has long existed on the political fringe. For decades, many black nationalists have argued that the federal government should pay reparations to African Americans for the suffering of their ancestors and the generational aftereffects of slavery. But calls for modern-day taxpayers to fund reparations have generally been dismissed out of hand. "I never owned a slave," Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) once scoffed to the Washington Post. "I don't know why I should pay for someone who died generations before I was born." (Rep. Hyde now qualifies for the Bonehead Award, for making such a stupid statement. No one asked Mr. Hyde if he had ever owned a slave, and when he was asked about the Federal Government making reparations, there obviously was no reference to him as a private citizen, or his duties or obligations as a private individual. By making such a stupid and insensitive comment, it shows that Mr. Hyde has confused his personal responsibilities, with his official position in an institution which in fact was responsible for the perpetuation of the institution of slavery, which would have been impossible without the complicity of the Federal Government.

Of course, the Federal Government was not the direct beneficiary of slavery, the direct beneficiaries of the republic's police-duty of pursuing and returning fugitive slaves was private interests, like plantation owners and their families, as well as industrial and commercial interests, the successors of many of which still exist, and are still in business. Unfortunately for Mr. Hyde, and his cohorts in crime, the rest of the world does seem to embrace the ethic that slaves and their heirs are due some form of reparation; in Germany in July, 2000, a $5 billion fund was established to compensate the slaves the Nazi German government facilitated the enslavement of, for the exploitation of name-brand corporate interests like Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, now Daimler-Chrysler, and many more. The idea that it would be too complicated to calculate reparations for American slaves is pure fiction. The owners of slaves, being competent businessmen, usually kept precise and detailed accounts of their slave holdings, what services they performed, and the financial return that was realized. Furthermore, American slavery did not happen in antiquity; the first slave arrived in 1619, well after the origins of modern bookkeeping. The refusal to pay off the descendants of slaves, whose ancestors were often deliberately kept illiterate, is a blatant act that is meant to pit white people against black people by a republic that was designed to exploit the social tensions of class, race and gender for political purposes from the day of its inception. WFI Editor)

With the acknowledgment by Aetna, the reparations movement can focus instead on corporations that owned slaves or profited from them. Survivors of the Holocaust have used a similar approach in Germany, where major companies - including Volkswagen, Siemens, Deutsche Bank, and DaimlerChrysler - agreed last year to pay more than $4 billion in reparations to their Nazi-era slave laborers. Restitution is now a "more mainstream issue," says Adjoa Aiyetoro, an attorney with the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. Farmer-Paellmann agrees. "Normally when you start talking about reparations, it's perceived as a black-and-white issue," she says. "This way the issue is not about race, but about companies who benefited from slavery and who owe restitution." One of the companies that Farmer-Paellmann believes profited from slavery is Fleet Boston Financial Corporation. According to her research, the founder of the bank that later became Fleet made much of his fortune in the slave trade. A Fleet spokeswoman says the company can neither confirm or deny that assertion. (As for institutions that profited from the slave trade, the Federal Government operated on revenues derived from a tax on slaves until 1808. And, of course, there were private families that benefited from the work of slaves, wealth that was subsequently invested in the stock market, in a form of modern money-laundering that dwarfs the proceeds of contemporary illicit activities, largely as a result of the inflated currency, which is worth a fraction of what it was valued at several centuries ago. WFI Editor)

Farmer-Paellmann won't reveal other companies on her list until she's had a chance to approach them herself. But Mother Jones Magazine has uncovered documents that indicate Norfolk Southern, a Virginia-based railroad giant with $5.2 billion in revenues, is descended from a firm that profited from slavery. As detailed in a turn-of-the-century history of the Cotton Belt, the South Carolina Canal Railroad Company - which became part of Norfolk Southern through a series of mergers - owned dozens of slaves. "We were marginally aware of it," says Frank Brown, vice president of public relations at Norfolk Southern. "But no one has come to us with anything. If they raised the issue, we would try to give them an appropriate answer." What constitutes an appropriate response remains the subject of vigorous debate. Despite entreaties to make financial restitution, Aetna maintains that an apology is sufficient. "Our commitment to diversity speaks for itself," says company spokesman David Carter. "We give to the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund, the NAACP Earl Graves Scholarship Fund, and the Arthur Ashe Foundation. Arthur Ashe was even on our board. We don't think we need to do anything beyond this." (Try researching your company's actual slave holdings, and making a search by due diligence for the heirs of those immorally subjugated human beings your company's policies ruthlessly exploited, and try to make actual MONETARY amends with their living descendants. If Aetna has not even tried to do this, or even contemplated doing this, then Aetna has not fulfilled its duties as a civilized member of society, and there is no moral justification for the continuation of it as a legal entity. WFI Editor)

Aetna may have the law on its side: The statute of limitations could derail any class-action claims. But Farmer-Paellmann hopes that by exposing the historical practices of corporations on her list, they will feel morally obligated to make restitution. "These companies made money off the blood and sweat of black people," she says. "Just because slavery ended over 100 years ago doesn't excuse them." (If the republic were a moral institution, it is within the power of Congress to pass legislation making responsibility of interests that inherited wealth created through slave labor, survive the operation of the statute of limitations. Prosecution for murder, for example, is not limited by the statute of limitations. Slavery is a crime against humanity, not just a crime against the individuals who were slaves, because the perpetuation of slavery degrades everyone associated with it. The very reluctance of the republic to compensate the slaves it guaranteed slavemasters it would assist in holding in bondage, is indicative not only of the republic's amoral nature, but of its outright immoral constitution. WFI Editor)

SOURCE: Excerpted from the July/August 2000 issue of Mother Jones magazine, from an article entitled "Peculiar Profits," by Ron Nixon. Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.