Wall Street is the world’s most dominant financial district,
but most people know very little about its history. In order to truly
understand how Wall Street functions today, it is important to know how it all
began — and how influential a factor Black people were in its creation. Wall
Street was founded on slavery and, to this day, Wall Street remains a key
pillar in upholding racial inequality and economic oppression across the globe.
New York City was a Dutch settlement known as New Amsterdam
in the Dutch colonial province called New Netherland during much of the 17th
century. Through the Dutch West India Company, the Dutch utilized the labor of
enslaved Africans who were first brought to the colony around 1627.
The enslaved Africans built the wall that gives Wall Street
its name, forming the northern boundary of the colony that warded off resisting
natives who wanted their land back. So from its creation, the wall was a hedge
ensuring the survival of whites and white supremacy.
Slavery became the backbone of New York’s economic prosperity in the 1700s. To normalize this massive trade in human beings, in 1711 New York officials established a slave market on Wall Street. Slave auctions were held at Wall Street selling enslaved Africans as property to traders wanting to buy them. Wall Street was also the marketplace where owners could hire out their enslaved by the day or week.
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, as Phyllis Eckhaus points out, New York had “the largest urban slave population in mainland North America.” Therefore, New York was a crucial location in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which soon established New York as the world’s financial capital.
Many well-known companies and financial institutions
benefitted from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, including Lehman Brothers
(which went bankrupt in 2008), J.P. Morgan Chase, Wachovia Bank of North
Carolina, Aetna Insurance, Bank of America and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Banks,
such as Wachovia’s predecessors Bank of Charleston, South Carolina, and the
Bank of North America, and J.P. Morgan Chase’s predecessor banks, made loans to
slave owners and accepted the enslaved as “collateral.” When the slave owners
defaulted on their loans, the banks became the new owners.
Aetna sold insurance to slave owners who wanted to protect
their investments in enslaved people aboard slave ships in case one of them
died (this was a very common occurrence as millions of enslaved Africans died
on ships carrying them from Africa to the Americas). The insurance company’s
policies compensated slave owners for the loss of people who were considered
“property.” To this day, there are lawsuits against these corporations to seek
reparations for their participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade built the foundation for
modern global capitalism. Millions of Africans were ripped away from their
homes in Africa to work in European colonies in North and South America and the
Caribbean. Across Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, white families and
companies built their fortunes from the slave trade — fortunes that became the
basis for economies across the world.
Unlike Native Americans and other white Europeans, free African
labor was plentiful (if one died, that person could be replaced with another
from Africa), Africans had no connections to American lands, and they knew how
to grow essential cash crops like cotton and sugar that grew in Africa, the
Caribbean and the southeastern United States. These factors made Africans the
perfect slave labor force for European colonial powers. (Source:ABS)
(bobbeethehater.blogspot.com)
