IS KNOWLEDGE POWER?
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX

A few weeks ago, the California Department of Insurance, at the behest of the California General Assembly (then-Sen. Tom Hayden is largely responsible for the legislation that requires all insurance companies doing business in California to publicly release information about policies they or their predecessor firms wrote insuring slave owners for losses of slaves who died or ran away) publicly identified half a dozen insurance companies that issued slavery-era policies by name of policyholder and slave. Companies like New York Life, Aetna, AIG, Royal and Sun Alliance, Manhattan Life and Ace USA were named in the report that is still featured on the Department of Insurance’s web site. The State of California has given us the names of slaves and slaveowners as well as the insurer and type of insurance policy that covered potential runaways and inevitable deaths.

Now we know.

Just around the corner is Juneteenth, the celebration of emancipation for Texas’ slaves in 1865. Unbeknownst to the slaves of the Lone Star state, slavery had “officially” ended two years earlier. Supposedly due to the strong Confederate presence, Union soldiers were unable to penetrate the Texas border to spread the word. (It should be noted that years after Juneteenth, explanations for why it took two years to inform Texas slaves of their freedom ranged from the theory that the messenger sent to the state with the news was murdered en route to the idea that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before enforcing Lincoln’s executive order).

For two years, they didn’t know.

For two years following the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation, the slaves of Texas had no knowledge of their lawful freedom. How much power would have been gained by said knowledge? Immediately following the end of slavery – in the states where it had indeed been outlawed -- the cruel but not unusual practice known as sharecropping posed as a legitimate system of honest work but in reality was nothing more than slavery once removed.

How much power is to be gained by this knowledge of slavery-era insurance policies? Will African Americans be able to leverage this incredible wealth of information into momentum for reparations, whether publicly or privately funded? Will this information be used to shed light on our nation’s dark past? Will we use it constructively? Will we use it at all? Those questions remain to be answered. One thing is certain, however: in this case, knowledge is indeed power.