PUTTING FACE AND NAME TO REPARATIONS DEBATE
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
New York Life Insurance wrote a policy on Edmund, a slave whose last name
they never bothered to record. Edmund was owned by Adam Hopkins and Company,
of Augusta, Georgia. New York Life also wrote a policy on Henry
Brokenborough, owned by George Aler of Spotsylvania, Virginia. They insured
Abby Anderson, the “general house servant” of Phoebe Beaumont, a Natchez
Mississippi policyholder. And they insured Nat and Allen for Robert Bell and
Monroe Quarrier. New York Life isn’t the only culprit. Aetna insured Betty
for Nelson Alley, a Frankfurt, Kentucky owner, and a host of other slaves.
The American International Group sometimes recorded slaves by last name and
sometimes not. But they insured them, and they recorded their deeds and the
profits they made.
Thanks to former California Senator Tom Hayden, we have more details
about the role insurance companies played in the salve trade than we ever
had. Hayden introduced a law that required all insurance companies doing
business in California to release information about the policies they or
their predecessor firms wrote insuring slave owners for losses they incurred
when slaves ran away or died. Though the report provides scant information,
the 60 pages of charts and lists shows more than 600 slaves by name. They
were owned by more than 400 people. There is hardly more detail.
Occasionally a slave’s occupation is mentioned – cabin boy, house servant,
washer. But there is enough information to begin to place features on their
faces, to envision them in dialogue with their owners. There is enough
information here to begin to humanize the slave experience, to move beyond
the macro notion of “slavery” to the micro notion of Nelson owning Betty.
And there is enough information here for us to begin to envision these
insurance companies and their shareholders benefiting from other people’s
misery. Those who oppose reparations often assert that slavery happened so
long ago, and their ancestors didn’t benefit, but the fact is that if Nelson
owned Betty who ran away, then Nelson paid an annual premium and Aetna made a
profit. Aetna is a vital, vibrant insurance company that still posts profits
in the United States. They have millions of shareholders, all beneficiaries
of slavery’s ties. Many who say they abhor slavery benefited from it.
Thanks to Tom Hayden, they can now be called on it.
New York Life released a statement saying they “abhor” the practice of
slavery and “regret” any involvement in it. Abhor and regret are one thing,
repayment is another. Companies like New York Life need to be willing to
compute the cost of their involvement. They need to make amends, to do
something about it. The reparations movement has so grown in maturity that
it might be able to hold the New York Lifes and Aetnas of the world
responsible for the harm they have done, to make black folks as whole as
others have been made whole for historical wrongs.
For the record, though, the reparations movement does not seek to simply
make an unspecified group of black folks whole. The movement has honed in on
faces and names, on the Edmunds and Jacobs and Sams and Sallys, the Sands and
Sabrinas and Bettys and Abbys, the people who were so individually
insignificant to their owners and to the insurance companies that now do
business in California that their last names are unrecorded. Had they been
paid their own worth, or simply the fruit of their labor, how might the lives
of their descendants be different? Descendants might have come into the
world with a little more money, access, and wherewithal. Some may have
squandered it, but others would have used their small inheritance to leapfrog
their way into economic success. Financial planners frequently peddle their
wares by discussing the “miracle of compound interest”. Those who fight the
reparations battle can best demonstrate the miracle by looking at the
fortunes that sons and daughters of Betty and Abby and Jacob are due. Their
worth is documented in the insurance files.
It is not clear whether the Slave Era Insurance Policies Registry moves the
reparations discussion forward, but it certainly casts the conversation in a
different light. On one hand, it illustrates the corporate culpability and
involvement in slavery. It forces folks to take some responsibility,
prevents them from hiding, in ignorance, from willing actions that their
organizations took. More importantly, it offers African American youngsters
and opportunity to have a rare glimpse at the venal behavior of some profit
making organizations, to understand the chattel relationship they once had
with insurance companies. We’ve come a long way, baby, but for some
corporations, black folks are still little more than chattel. They market to
our communities, but eschew involvement, pursue our dollars but not our
presence as board or senior staff. We are as separate from their decisions
as Abby and Jacob once were, as much a pawn in their profit making game as
was any slave.
Dr. Martin Luther King once spoke of the “uncashed check” that America
owed black folks. The Slave Era Insurance Policies Registry provides more
documentation for the invoice.