Wachovia, the big North Carolina bank, is likely to lose out on its limited role in a Chicago affordable housing project, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. The Chicago City Council smells blood and is moving in for the kill.
From that article:
That was all the opening they needed to vow to punish the bank for claiming in January that it had not profited from slavery, then admitting earlier this week that its predecessor institutions owned at least 162 slaves and accepted hundreds more as collateral on loans.
In apologizing to "all Americans and especially to African-Americans and people of African descent," the bank also revealed that Revolutionary War financier Robert Morris -- a founder of a forerunner institution, Bank of North America -- started the bank with profits from the slave trade, according to a study performed for Wachovia by corporate researcher The History Factory.
Also, according to that article, J.P. Morgan Chase and Lehman Brothers have been "outed" by the Chicago City Council.
Of course, slavery was a terrible thing, and 140 years after the abolition of slavery, the negative social ramifications of this sin against humanity are still with all of us. But a witch hunt against companies that had--generations ago--investments in or profited from slavery achieves nothing, unless it's the ultimate goal of those identifying such companies to initiate reparations collections.
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