New York/ Class Action Complaint:American Slavery Case

New York/ Class Action Complaint
American Slavery Case - March 26, 2002
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UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
For The
EASTERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
-----------------------------------------------------------------------X
: CIVIL ACTION #
DEADRIA FARMER-PAELLMANN, :
:
On behalf of herself :
and all other persons : CLASS ACTION
similarly situated, :
:
PLAINTIFF, :
: COMPLAINT
vs. : AND JURY TRIAL DEMAND
:
:
FLEETBOSTON FINANCIAL CORPORATION, AETNA:
INC., CSX, and Their predecessors, successors :
and/or assigns, and CORPORATE DOES NOS. 1-1000, :
:
DEFENDANTS. :
:
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Plaintiffs, on behalf of themselves and all other persons similarly situated, state, upon
information and belief, as follows:
INTRODUCTION, JURISDICTION AND VENUE
Introduction
1. Over 8,000,000 Africans and their descendants were enslaved in the United States
from 1619 to 1865. The practice of slavery constituted an “immoral and inhumane deprivation
of Africans’ life, liberty, African citizenship rights, cultural heritage” and it further deprived
them of the fruits of their own labor.ഊNew York/ Class Action Complaint
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2. The first slave ship that sailed into Jamestown Harbor in Virginia in 1619
contained a handful of captive Africans, but by the end of the Atlantic slave trade, more than two
centuries later, somewhere between 8 million and 12 million Africans had arrived in the New
World in chains.1
3. Historians estimate that one slave perished for every one who survived capture in
the African interior and made it alive to the New World, meaning as many as 12 million perished
along the way.2
4. Although, it is a common perception that the South alone received the enslaved
Africans, many of them arrived in the Dutch colonial city of New Amsterdam that later became
New York City. Integral to the colony from the start, slaves helped build Trinity Church, the
streets of the city and the wall, from which Wall Street takes its name, that protected the colony
from military strikes.3
5. These slaves in New York lived in attics, hallways and beneath porches, cheek to
jowl with their master and mistresses. In death, these same slaves were banished to the Negro
Burial Ground, which lay a mile outside the city limits and contained between 10,000 and 20,000
bodies by the time it was closed in 1794. Id.
6. Further research conducted by Howard University of 400 skeletons of these
buried slaves revealed that 40 percent were children under the age of 15 and the most common
cause of death was malnutrition. Most of the children had rickets, scurvy, anemia or related
diseases. The adult skeletons show that many people died of unrelenting hard labor. Strain on
1 Brent Staples, African Holocaust, The Lessons of a Graveyard.
2 Ira Berlin, “Many Thousands Gone”.
3 Brent Staples, African Holocaust, The Lessons of a Graveyard.ഊNew York/ Class Action Complaint
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the muscles and ligaments was so extreme that muscle attachments were commonly ripped away
from the skeleton taking chunks of bone with them-leaving the body in perpetual pain. The
highest mortality rate is found among women ages 15 to 20. Investigators have concluded that
some died of illnesses acquired in the holds of slave ships or from a first exposure to the cold or
from the trauma of being torn from their families and shipped in chains halfway around the
globe. Moreover, the research has concluded that these women were worked to death by owners
who could simply go out and buy a new slave.4
7. But New Yorkers were not alone in the utilization of slaves, in fact, more recent
research has revealed that many of our esteemed and celebrated institutions of learning had their
origins in the profits derived from the slave trade. For instance, money from the slave trade
financed Yale University’s first endowed professorship, its first endowed scholarships and its
first endowed library fund. Moreover, in the 1830’s, Yale officials led the opposition that
prevented the building of the first African American college, on the grounds that such an
institution would have been “incompatible with the existence of Yale”. Nicholas and John
Brown, two of the founders of what became Brown University were slave traders. Likewise,
Harvard Law School was endowed by money its founder earned selling slaves in Antigua’s cane
fields.5
8. Many early American industries were based on the cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco,
and other products African labor produced. Railroads and shipping companies, the banking
4 Brent Staples, African Holocaust, Lessons from a Graveyard, quoting in part form Dr. Michael Blakey, Howard
University.
5 Kate Zernike, “Slave Trader’s in Yale’s Past Fuel Debate on Restitution”, New York Times (August 13, 2001)ഊNew York/ Class Action Complaint
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industry and many other businesses made huge profits from the commerce generated by the
output of enslaved labor.
9. Slaves built the U.S. Capitol, cast and hoisted the statue of freedom on top of its
dome, and cleared the forest between the Capitol and the White House.6
10. Slavery fueled the prosperity of the young nation. From 1790 to 1860 alone, the
U.S. economy reaped the benefits of as much as $40 million in unpaid labor.7 Some estimate the
current value of this unpaid labor at 1.4 trillion dollars.8
11. Not only did the institution of slavery result in the extinguishment of millions of
Africans, it eviscerated whole cultures: languages, religions, mores, and customs, it
psychologically destroyed its victims. It wrenched from them their history, their memories, and
their families on a scale never previously witnessed.
12. When the institution finally ended, the vestiges, racial inequalities and cultural
psychic scars left a disproportionate number of American slave descendants injured and
heretofore without remedy.
13. Although the institution of slavery in the United States was officially outlawed in
1865, it continued, de facto, until as recently as the 1950’s. National archive records reveal that
in the 1920’s and 1930’s, the NAACP still received letters from African-Americans claiming to
still be on plantations and forced to work without pay. Several claims were investigated and
6 Randall Robinson, Compensate the Forgotten Victims of America’s Slavery Holocaust.
7 Tim Wise, “Breaking the Cycle of White Dependency” (5/22/02).
8 Tamara Audi, “Payback for Slavery: Growing Push for Reparations Tries to Fulfill Broken Promise”, quoting
Randall Robinson (9/18/00).ഊNew York/ Class Action Complaint
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were found to be legitimate. Moreover, as late as 1954, the Justice Department prosecuted the
Dial brothers in Sumpter County, Alabama because they held blacks in involuntary servitude.9
14. Even for those who were “freed”, their lives remained locked in quasi-servitude,
due to legal, economic and psychic restraints that effectively blocked their economic, political
and social advancement. Id.
15. Hence, new measures called “Black Codes” guaranteed control of Blacks by
white employers. As John Hope Franklin noted in From Slavery to Freedom:
the control of blacks by white employers was about as great as that
which slaveholders had exercised. Blacks who quit their job could
be arrested and imprisoned for breach of contract. They were not
allowed to testify in court except in cases involving members of
their own race; numerous fines were imposed for seditious
speeches, insulting gestures or acts, absence from work, violating
curfews and the possession of firearms. There was of course no
enfranchisement of blacks and no indication that in the future they
could look forward to full citizenship and participation in
democracy.10
16. The post-Reconstruction Southern practices of peonage and sharecropping which
continued well into the twentieth century were direct outgrowths of slavery that continued a
system of complete control by the dominant culture. Peonage was a complex system where a
black man would be arrested for “vagrancy”, ordered to pay a fine that he could not afford, and
then incarcerated. A plantation owner would then pay the fine and then hire him until he could
9 Alistair Highet, “Will America Pay for the Sins of the Past, Slavery’s Past”. (February 14, 2002). The Hartford
Adovate, quoting, Dr. Ronald Waters.
10 Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom, New York; Knof (1947).ഊNew York/ Class Action Complaint
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afford to pay off the fine. The peon was forced to work, locked up at night and if he escaped,
was chased by bloodhounds until recaptured.11
17. Likewise, during the 1920’s, fortunate African-Americans became sharecroppers
on land leased from whites whose grandparents had owned their forebearers. These African
Americans were not allowed to vote, and were socially and economically relegated to the left-overs
in education, earnings, and freedoms.
18. More recently, a 1998 census report shows that 26 percent of African American
people in the United States live in poverty compared to 8 percent of whites. It also showed that
14.7 percent of African Americans have four-year college degrees, compared with 25 percent of
whites. The same year, African American infant-mortality rates were more than twice as high as
those among whites. Federal figures also show that a Black person born in 1996 can expect to
live, on average, 6.6 fewer years than a white person born the same year.
19. African-Americans are more likely to go to jail, to be there longer, and if their
crime is eligible, to receive the death penalty. They lag behind whites according to every social
yardstick: literacy, life expectancy, income and education. They are more likely to be murdered
and less likely to have a father at home.