New York City’s famous Wall Street has a 300-year-old dark secret.
A green wooden commemorative plaque between Water and Pearl streets details how, three centuries ago, lower Manhattan’s financial district opened up the first official slave market. Not many people know about it.
Dec. 13, 2011 was the 300th anniversary of a law passed by the New York City Common Council that made Wall Street the city’s official slave market for the sale and rental of enslaved Africans.
The slave trade was so big in New York City between 1711 and 1762 that an estimated 40 percent-plus households owned a slave by the turn of the century. Slaves are credited with building the wall after which Wall Street is named.
Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond said there’s a connection between the U.S. slavery and today’s massive global market for bonds backed by everything from mortgages to lottery tickets, Forbes reported.
“Enslaved people were used as collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became the defining characteristic of middle America,” Desmond wrote in the New York Times. “In colonial times, when land was not worth much and banks didn’t exist, most lending was based on human property.”
“Africans were considered to be chattel because while they sold cattle (and) other things they also sold Black folk. So basically, ‘stocks and bonds’ come from ‘livestock and bondage’,” @Blac1st shared on Twitter in a video.
In 1711, the New York City Common Council passed a law that made Wall Street the city’s official slave market. The law stated that slaves must be hired at the Market House on Wall Street. This would mean everyone knew where to go to hire slaves.
Forming a slave market at Wall Street helped human traffickers organize better while giving slave masters the power of life and death over their slaves.
New York city at large benefitted from the slave trade both in taxes and cheap labor in cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations, helping the city become an economic and cultural powerhouse it is today.
Later in the 19th Century, U.S. banks and Southern states would sell securities at the Wall Street-based New York Stock Exchange that helped fund the expansion of slave-run plantations.
Insurance products were developed with policies covering the risk of boats sinking and of losing individual slaves once they made it to America.
Some of the largest insurance firms in the U.S. — New York Life, AIG and Aetna — sold policies that insured slave owners would be compensated if the slaves they owned were injured or killed.
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