Today an article in the Washington Post offered a range of connections to issues we have been exploring in class. Here are some excerpts from that article. You can see the whole thing online too.Md. Bill Looks at Business Of People as Property By Lisa Rein/Washington Post Staff Writer/Saturday, April 5, 2008; B01
An unsettling legacy of slavery hidden in the corporate archives of insurance companies that do business in Maryland would be unearthed by a bill moving through the General Assembly.
Property insurers that issued policies to protect slaveholders from the death, injury or even escape of their slaves would be required to disclose the names of the slaves, their owners and anything else their records reveal.
The policies, which are likely to have covered slaves on ships and on land once they were put to work on the tobacco farms of Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore, would have to be posted on the Web site of the state's insurance agency.
The slave-insurance bill passed the Senate unanimously last week, sponsored by a Baltimore Democrat who calls herself an amateur genealogist of her own family's slave ancestry....
Maryland would not punish insurance companies by requiring them to offer legal compensation to slave descendants. But scholars and lawmakers say the records that are likely to turn up, as spare as they may be, will further clarify how slavery figured in Maryland's economy before the Civil War.
"The question is, what's the value in knowing this," said Sen. Lisa A. Gladden (D-Baltimore), the bill's lead sponsor. An ancestor on her mother's side was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1857 and served three terms in that state's legislature.
Gladden called the effort to mine insurance records "non-confrontational" and a "natural progression" from the legislature's apology for slavery. "It's filling in the blanks of histories that have been neglected for centuries." She said that learning who owned the slaves is less important than who the slaves were.
In 1860, Maryland was home to 87,189 slaves, roughly 15 percent of the state's population, although free blacks may have been more numerous. The tobacco industry was declining and moving to more southern states, but slaves labored in shipyards, factories, on dairy and wheat farms and on plantations doing domestic work....
Slave insurance may have originated with merchants and traders in Europe who sought to protect themselves from the risks of transporting thousands of African slaves at once across the Atlantic Ocean -- including death or insurrection of the slaves aboard....
When California's insurance reporting law passed in 2000, activists in the fledgling black reparations movement hailed it as a tool that could create potential targets of lawsuits against industries that profited indirectly from slavery. The reparations movement has been largely unsuccessful since then, with courts across the country dismissing claims by slave descendants against corporations.
But many see the slave insurance bill as a form of reparation. Sherilynn Ifill, a University of Maryland law professor who has been teaching her students about reparations and restorative justice for many years, said activists should think of reparations more broadly.
"There are many forms of repairing damage," Ifill said. "Providing information, acknowledging your past and owning up to that responsibility is a form of reparation."
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PICTURE: "Insurance in the 19th century protected slaveholders from financial loss."
Photo Credit: Courtesy of New York Life
Related Article: Md. Bill Looks at Business of People as Property. page B01.
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