Follow the Money
Stolen labor built American wealth. Here is where it went.
If greed is the root, this is the ledger. Trace the labor systems — slavery, convict leasing, sharecropping, debt peonage, and prison labor — to the banks, universities, companies, and governments that were built and enriched by them.
The labor
Successive systems for extracting Black labor — “slavery by another name.”
Where the wealth went
20 institutions with documented ties — each links to its money trail.
Government
Universities
Harvard's own 2022 report found its leaders enslaved people and that the university profited from slavery-derived wealth.
Yale's 2024 report documented that its early leaders enslaved people and that it benefited from the slave economy.
Princeton's first nine presidents owned enslaved people, who lived and worked on campus.
Brown's landmark 2006 report documented that its founders and benefactors profited from the transatlantic slave trade.
In 1838 the Jesuits who ran Georgetown sold 272 enslaved people to rescue the college's finances.
Roughly 100 to 150 enslaved people built and operated Thomas Jefferson's university until 1865.
Finance & insurance
Predecessor banks accepted ~13,000 enslaved people as loan collateral and came to own about 1,250.
Lloyd's was the global center for insuring Britain's slave-trading ships; it apologized in 2020.
Its predecessor insured about 520 enslaved people in the 1840s, paying death benefits to enslavers.
Aetna apologized in 2000 for selling policies that paid slaveholders when the people they enslaved died.
The Wall Street firm began as an Alabama cotton brokerage built on slave-grown cotton.
A 1711 city law created a Wall Street market where enslaved people were bought, sold, and rented for half a century.
Industry
The clothier profited by supplying cheap "plantation clothing" and livery for the enslaved.
New England's great textile mills ran on slave-grown cotton and clothed the enslaved.
The Havemeyer sugar-refining empire behind Domino was built on slave-grown cane.
Before the Civil War, the South's railroads were built largely by enslaved labor.
The flow
Every documented link between a labor system and who profited. Click a node to follow it.
66 nodes · 75 connectionsSee the whole web