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.
“But only a few people owned slaves.”
It’s a common deflection — and it’s misleading. About one in four Southern households owned enslaved people (closer to half in the Deep South), and the whole economy, North and South, ran on their labor. More to the point, the twentieth century’s great wealth-building programs — the New Deal, the FHA, and the GI Bill — were built for white families and largely shut Black families out. The racial wealth gap is, at its root, an ownership gap.
Who actually benefitedThe labor
Successive systems for extracting Black labor — “slavery by another name.”
Where the wealth went
21 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
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.
The flow
Every documented link between a labor system and who profited. Click a node to follow it.
81 nodes · 101 connectionsSee the whole web