7 Eye-Opening Facts on How Wall Street Was Built and Created Via Slavery

Wall Street is the world's most dominant financial district, but most people know very little about its history. In order to truly understand how Wall Street functions today, it is important to know how it all began — and how influential a factor Black people were in its creation. Wall Street was founded on slavery and, to this day, Wall Street remains a key pillar in upholding racial inequality and economic oppression across the globe. Depiction of wall at Wall Street subway stop Enslaved Africans Actually Built the Wall That Gave Wall Street Its Name New York City was a Dutch settlement known as New Amsterdam in the Dutch colonial province called New Netherland during much of the 17th century. Through the Dutch West India Company, the Dutch utilized the labor of enslaved Africans who were first brought to the colony around 1627. The enslaved Africans built the wall that gives Wall Street its name, forming the northern boundary of the colony that warded off resisting natives who wanted their land back. So from its creation, the wall was a hedge ensuring the survival of whites and white supremacy. Wall Street 1860s Wall Street Initially Was the Site of Slave Auctions Slavery became the backbone of New York’s economic prosperity in the 1700s. To normalize this massive trade in human beings, in 1711 New York officials established a slave market on Wall Street. Slave auctions were held at Wall Street selling enslaved Africans as property to traders wanting to buy them. Wall Street was also the marketplace where owners could hire out their enslaved by the day or week. New York Became the World Financial Center Because of Slavery Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, as Phyllis Eckhaus points out, New York had “the largest urban slave population in mainland North America.” Therefore, New York was a crucial location in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which soon established New York as the world’s financial capital. New York Stock Exchange Big Wall Street-Connected Companies Got Their Start from the Slave Trade Many well-known companies and financial institutions benefitted from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, including Lehman Brothers (which went bankrupt in 2008), J.P. Morgan Chase, Wachovia Bank of North Carolina, Aetna Insurance, Bank of America and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Banks, such as Wachovia’s predecessors Bank of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Bank of North America, and J.P. Morgan Chase’s predecessor banks, made loans to slave owners and accepted the enslaved as “collateral.” When the slave owners defaulted on their loans, the banks became the new owners. Cashing in on Fear of Dead Enslaved People Aetna sold insurance to slave owners who wanted to protect their investments in enslaved people aboard slave ships in case one of them died (this was a very common occurrence as millions of enslaved Africans died on ships carrying them from Africa to the Americas). The insurance company’s policies compensated slave owners for the loss of people who were considered “property.” To this day, there are lawsuits against these corporations to seek reparations for their participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Slave Trade Built Foundation for Global Capitalism The trans-Atlantic slave trade built the foundation for modern global capitalism. Millions of Africans were ripped away from their homes in Africa to work in European colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean. Across Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, white families and companies built their fortunes from the slave trade — fortunes that became the basis for economies across the world. Unlike Native Americans and other white Europeans, free African labor was plentiful (if one died, that person could be replaced with another from Africa), Africans had no connections to American lands, and they knew how to grow essential cash crops like cotton and sugar that grew in Africa, the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. These factors made Africans the perfect slave labor force for European colonial powers. The Enslaved Produced Products That Created International Markets The enslaved, along with performing many other services, were used to produce commodities that were sold in international markets for a profit (a characteristic of modern capitalism). In addition, the enslaved themselves were considered property and sold on markets. The benefits of this went to slave owners and investors — not the enslaved. As a result, wealth was transferred from Black African enslaved people (and their descendants) to white European slave owners and other whites who benefitted from this system. This laid the foundation for current wealth inequality between whites and Blacks and ensured that Blacks would remain socioeconomically subordinate to whites for generations to come.

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