Seeking Justice for Slavery’s Sins

Forty acres and a mule. We were supposed to get 40 acres and a mule. It always sounded like a myth to Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a kind of urban legend black people told one another. Like when her grandfather would occasionally complain about some sort of government injustice and invariably end his grumbling by saying “ ... and they still owe us our 40 acres and a mule.”

Yet Farmer-Paellmann eventually learned that what her grandfather was talking about wasn’t folklore. He was referring to an 1865 field order issued by Civil War Gen. William T. Sherman, which granted freed slaves a piece of land and the means to work it--a promise that was broken and has come to symbolize a debt owed to the descendants of slaves by an indifferent government.

Once Farmer-Paellmann learned the truth about the “40 acres and a mule” mantra, she wanted to learn more. Driven by what she calls an “Afrocentric consciousness,” Farmer-Paellmann began to research slavery and to learn all she could about the businesses that played a prominent role in the slave trade.

Her work took her to musty state historical archives, where she dug around for insurance policies written on slave lives and other documentation of corporate culpability. The search also took her to law school, where Farmer-Paellmann tailored a curriculum that would help her devise a strategy to get reparations for the descendants of millions of enslaved Africans.

Last month, five years after beginning her research, Farmer-Paellmann’s efforts bore fruit. A class-action lawsuit, the first of its kind, was filed in Brooklyn federal court seeking compensation from three American companies that allegedly profited from the slave trade.

The lawsuit singles out FleetBoston Financial Corp., Aetna Inc. and CSX Corp., alleging that they or their predecessor companies profited from slave labor. The lawsuit seeks to link these companies--involved in banking, insurance and transportation--in a conspiracy to deprive Africans of their human rights through enslavement.

It is one of several similar lawsuits to be filed in the coming weeks and months, including at least one to be filed before the end of May in Los Angeles involving an insurance company, a bank and a tobacco firm. And although the lawsuit does not ask for any specific amount in damages, the plaintiffs plan to seek to hold settlement talks with a number of companies, several of which are not named in the Brooklyn suit. Ultimately, the plaintiffs would like to set up a trust fund to be used to address pressing issues in the African American community, such as education and health care.

“The perpetrators of the crimes committed against Africans are still here,” says Farmer-Paellmann, who is the lead plaintiff in the suit, and whose research is at the core of its allegations. “They profited from stealing people and labor, torturing and raping women to breed children. Why on earth should they be able to keep profits they made committing those crimes?”

The New York woman’s legal action is the latest example of a grass-roots campaign that dates to the 1890s, when an organization called the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Assn. pushed for legislation granting pensions to ex-slaves.

In recent years the issue has been discussed fervently among lawyers, historians and activists and, since 1989, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has introduced a bill each year that would establish a national commission to study the issue (the bill has never gotten out of committee). But the concept of slave reparations has especially gained momentum following the awarding of compensation to Holocaust survivors by profiting firms, and, by the U.S. government to Japanese Americans interned during World War II.

The slave reparations case, says Ed Fagan, one of Farmer-Paellmann’s lawyers and a prominent player in the recent Holocaust settlements involving German companies and Swiss banks, “is about companies being held accountable for what they did. They should not be entitled to retain the illegal profit they made.” Fagan says the Holocaust settlements amounted to $8 billion to $10 billion in claims owed about 1 million people.

Some see the slave reparations lawsuits as seriously flawed, though. Richard H. Middleton Jr., a specialist in class-action lawsuits and past president of the Assn. of Trial Lawyers of America, says: “There’s a huge problem [with the lawsuit] in justification in terms of the public perception of what this lawsuit is about. Because of the long time period that has elapsed, it will be hard to identify proper beneficiaries, and it might be hard for the parties being sued to defend themselves.”

Farmer-Paellmann is not worried about how the courts will view the legal issues raised in her lawsuit. And she is no wild-eyed radical filing what she knows is a ridiculous claim solely to make a political point.

Showing up for an interview at the trendy W Hotel in Union Square, Farmer-Paellmann, 36, is stylishly dressed, well-spoken and low key. She is a graduate of Boston’s New England School of Law, but has not yet qualified for the bar.

She and her husband, a German national who heads up investor relations for a foreign company, have a 20-month-old daughter.

Farmer-Paellmann’s commitment to the reparations issue developed over a long period of time. She grew up in low-income neighborhoods, both black and white. Her interest was piqued because of her grandfather’s comments, then gained momentum after reading a Malcolm X interview that referred to the debt owed African Americans.

But it was while she was working to help save a slave burial ground that had been uncovered in lower Manhattan that the subject took on real immediacy.

“There was something really particular about being at the site and seeing the burials, the skeletal remains,” she says. “And some of the faces looked like they were screaming when they died. That was really moving to me.”

Farmer-Paellmann had always had a political bent; she majored in political science at Brooklyn College and briefly attended George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management. Always interested in the law, she decided to pursue a law degree in order to further the reparations cause.

So while attending law school, she deliberately chose several courses that could help with her objective: modern remedies, dealing with the area of law known as restitution; constitutional law; contract law; international law, focusing on human rights law; and race and the law.

It was in the race-and-law class that Farmer-Paellmann first studied Cato vs. U.S., a 1995 case in which the plaintiffs tried to sue the U.S. government for reparations but were shot down by the courts. Farmer-Paellmann recognized the inherent difficulty of suing the government so she began to wonder “who else owes reparations besides the government, and that’s when I started looking at corporations and private estates.”

The research began. A book on black genealogy mentioned slave insurance policies, which led Farmer-Paellmann to Aetna and other companies. Using computer databases, she found out which antebellum companies involved in the slave trade survived into this era; she discovered at least 60.

Further digging revealed Rhode Island to be a treasure trove of information since some of the country’s biggest slave traders came from that state. So Farmer-Paellmann started digging among the papers of the Rhode Island and New England historical societies.

Finally, in January 2000, Farmer-Paellmann wrote to Aetna asking for copies of its slave policies. The company complied, and Farmer-Paellmann asked Aetna for an apology and restitution.

“They were enthusiastic. They had no reason to not be,” she says. “I did not approach them in an adversarial way. I said to them this is a great opportunity for you to do something really positive. There was no negativity in it.”

Aetna did apologize for past business practices, but the company retracted its restitution offer, which was, says Farmer-Paellmann, to be in the form of college scholarships. It was around this time that Farmer-Paellmann decided to pursue litigation, a course she was not really keen on.

“I thought this could be dealt with through a grass-roots approach,” she says. “But I was approached by lawyers who said these companies are not really forthcoming on things like this. They said very often these companies might want to pay, but they’re more willing to pay in the context of litigation, because there’s finality.”

(Responding to the recent lawsuit, Aetna released a statement saying: “We do not believe a court would permit a lawsuit over events which--however regrettable--occurred hundreds of years ago. These issues in no way reflect Aetna today.”)

Farmer-Paellmann knows she’s fighting an uphill battle, but she’s confident about the course she’s taken and has quick responses for all of her critics. Some claim the case is dead in the water because the statute of limitations has passed; she says there is no statute of limitations for human-rights violations.

Others say the case is bogus because you can’t sue for actions that were legal at the time; well, says Farmer-Paellmann, the Japanese internment was legal in its time. Then there are those who rail that “slavery was abolished 137 years ago. Get over it.” Or the folks who tell her that “you people” are always trying to get money out of the government, and if African Americans can sue over slavery, why can’t Armenians sue Turks, and Irish the English, ad infinitum, ad nauseum?

“The Constitution allows everyone their day in court,” Farmer-Paellmann says. “Just because other people may have claims against other groups of people doesn’t mean I should not vindicate the rights of my ancestors.”

Farmer-Paellmann and her lawyers are also emphatic about one other point. These lawsuits are not a public relations gesture meant to create some sort of national soul-searching about the slavery issue. The object is twofold: to get an apology and some measure of compensation.

“I think it is important for the dialogue to take place,” says Farmer-Paellmann, “but I think it is also important for the atonement to take place.”