Stolen labor built American wealth. Here is where it went.

The President's House was built largely by enslaved laborers hired from area slaveholders in the 1790s.

The seat of Congress was quarried and built in large part by enslaved laborers hired from nearby slaveholders.

After the Civil War, Alabama ran convict leasing as a state business, by 1898 the lease of its mostly Black prisoners is estimated to have supplied around 70% of state revenue.

The largest domestic slave-trading firm in the country, it shipped roughly a thousand or more people a year from its Alexandria pen to the Deep South.

Predecessor banks accepted ~13,000 enslaved people as loan collateral and came to own about 1,250.

The Wall Street merchant bank grew as a cotton financier, and after the Panic of 1837 foreclosed on Southern cotton plantations and the enslaved people on them.

Two Wachovia predecessor banks owned and took enslaved people as collateral; Wells Fargo, which later absorbed Wachovia, paid $175M in 2012 for steering Black borrowers into subprime loans.

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.

A 1763 Virginia land-speculation venture, investors included George Washington, that used enslaved labor to drain and canal the Great Dismal Swamp for profit.

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.

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.

Founded as King's College with slave-trade wealth, Columbia's early presidents, trustees, and professors enslaved hundreds of people.

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.

In 2020 the university disclosed census records listing its founder as a slaveholder, upending a long-told story that he was an abolitionist.

The Episcopal seminary's campus was built and run by enslaved people; in 2019 it created a $1.7M reparations endowment and began paying descendants.

The largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. was founded in 1845 so that slaveholders could serve as missionaries, a church organized to defend slavery.

Founded as Corrections Corporation of America, it launched the modern for-profit prison industry.

The other major for-profit prison and detention operator in the convict-leasing-to-private-prison line.