Looking to the Past to Create the Future
HAMISH ROBERTSON: In a case set to test the bounds of the legal definition of "pain and suffering", the American descendents of Africans forced into slavery have launched a legal action against the British insurance company, Lloyds of London. The multi-billion dollar claim in the US courts alleges that Lloyds conspired with the American tobacco …
Continue reading "ABC: The World Today – Slave Descendants sue British Insurance Company"
J.P. Morgan Chase & Company's recent apology for ties to slavery and a corresponding $5 million scholarship program it set up for black students was a "step in the right direction for a tainted corporation," but the nation's no. 2 bank has a long way to go before it has fully paid its debt to …
NEW YORK — Forty acres and a mule. We were supposed to get 40 acres and a mule. It always sounded like a myth to Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a kind of urban legend black people told one another. Like when her grandfather would occasionally complain about some sort of government injustice and invariably end his grumbling by saying …
Continue reading "LA TIMES – Seeking Justice for Slavery’s Sins"
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Attorneys for a former law student, who discovered evidence linking U.S. corporations to the slave trade, filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday that could seek billions of dollars in reparations for the descendants of slaves in America. The lawsuit filed in federal court in Brooklyn names FleetBoston Financial, the railroad firm CSX and …
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By Todd Plitt, USA TODAY Deadria Farmer-Paellmann has spent five years digging for evidence that ties Corporate America to pre-Civil War slavery. She confronted Aetna in 2000. . . NEW YORK — Her husband, who's German and white, didn't believe her. So they played a game. They'd go to a store and each make a …
Continue reading "USA TODAY – Farmer-Paellmann not afraid of huge corporations"
When Alderman Dorothy Tillman proposed an ordinance to begin hearings on reparations for the descendents of enslaved Africans, critics dismissed it as just another eccentric gesture by the voluble city legislator. But this was no random gesture. Tillman's ordinance was the product of serious research and resembles similar measures that have passed in the cities …
Continue reading "CHICAGO TRIBUNE – Paying Back the Slavery Debt"
Aetna Inc., the nation’s largest health insurer, apologized for selling policies in the 1850s that reimbursed slave owners for financial losses when those they enslaved died. “Aetna has long acknowledged that for several years shortly after its founding in 1853 that the company may have insured the lives of slaves,” Aetna spokesman Fred Laberge said …
Continue reading "LA TIMES – Aetna Apologizes for Slave Insurance"
