Slave Descendant Pushes Aetna Boycott

In 1858, a 12-year-old slave, Abe Hines, sawed off his shackles, fled the snake-infested rice paddies of South Carolina's Low Country, and spent the next several years in hiding. Despite his successful escape, his master collected on the insurance policy taken out on young Abe and used the money to buy a new slave to replace him in the paddies.

A New York lawyer, Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, can point to many cases where slaveholder policies, underwritten by well-known Northern companies, helped enable the slave trade through the Civil War. Now Mrs. Farmer-Paellmann, a great-granddaughter of Abe Hines, is holding those insurance companies accountable for their little-known role in an ugly chapter of American history.

Mrs. Farmer-Paellmann has filed a class action lawsuit against many large American corporations with ties to slaveholder policies in the mid-19th century. Although the court dismissed her lawsuit earlier this year, she is appealing and hoping to gain momentum for her Restitution Study Group movement by marching on the Capitol in Washington, D.C., today.

At the top of her list is Aetna of Hartford, Conn., a city, ironically, that was one of the hotbeds of the Abolitionist movement and the hometown of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and sister of the Brooklyn-based abolitionist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher.

"A lot of this country's wealth was built with slave labor, and I intend to do something about it," Mrs. Farmer-Paellmann said.

She said her Restitution Study Group has rallied the organization Blacks in Government to help her stage a boycott of Aetna until the insurance company offers to settle out of court with her or begin making restitutions for the life insurance policies on slaves it wrote for beneficiary slave owners.

Mrs. Farmer-Paellmann is quick to produce several old policies that slave owners took out on what was, in the antebellum South, their property. A $2,750 policy covering six slaves of a St. Louis man cost a $68.75 premium in 1857, no small amount for the time. The slaves covered under the policy included a 19-year-old farmhand, Sunford, and an 18-year-old wet nurse, Polly, each with a market value of $900.

Mrs. Farmer-Paellmann claimed that such insurance policies allowed slave owners to subject their slaves to more dangerous conditions and tasks and, ultimately, led to the untimely deaths of many such slaves.

She has been successful in getting California's state insurance department to establish a slavery-era insurance registry on hundreds of policies that name slave owners as beneficiaries of life insurance policies on their slaves.

"An insurance company that provided a policy for slave owners was essentially leaving no doubt that slaves were property and could be placed in hazardous situations," she said.

A spokeswoman for Aetna, Cynthia Michener, said the company has long acknowledged it wrote life insurance policies on slaves. Indeed, examples of these policies appeared in Aetna's centennial history, published in 1956.

"This boycott is divisive activity and misses the substance of the important work that Aetna has done for years to make positive change in the African-American community," Mrs. Michener said. "The boycott press release says it supports a resolution passed by Blacks in Government last summer. Yet it is our understanding that the organization does not support or sanction a boycott. Aetna has enjoyed a positive relationship with BIG, including sponsorship of national training conferences for the past three years and other regional chapter activities."

Mrs. Farmer-Paellmann, who is the lead plaintiff in her class action lawsuit, is appealing a Chicago judge's decision last July to dismiss the case. Her Restitution Study Group has been advertising the protest outside the Capitol all week in Washington, including during the dedication of the Martin Luther King monument on the Mall on Monday.

Although she names many companies that she claims had economic ties to the 19th-century American slave trade, she nonetheless singles out Aetna in her boycott effort, a distinction with which the Hartford insurance giant takes issue.

"We believe that, of all insurance companies, Aetna has the strongest record of supporting the African-American community," Mrs. Michener said. Among many examples she provided, Mrs. Michener said Aetna is the only health insurer actively involved in advocating legislation that seeks to reduce disparities in health care. Plus, she said, Aetna was the first national health insurance company to launch an integrated strategy to improve the quality of care for racial and ethnic minorities in 2003.

"The sum total of our efforts — voluntary health initiatives, contributions, and investments that we've made for decades — shows that Aetna has done all of it because we have a true commitment and desire to make a positive difference," Mrs. Michener said.

Mrs. Farmer-Paellmann grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, but her American ancestry — like 30% of American blacks — is tied to the Low Country of South Carolina around Charleston, a fertile area that produces the best rice crops in the New World.

Mrs. Farmer-Paellmann's current quest started when she went to law school and began researching how to sue the federal government for slavery reparations. What she eventually found led her to conclude that a more effective way to approach the topic was to scour corporate archives to track involvement by insurance and financial services companies that exist to this day.

She also pressured state governments to release similar data. She discovered that such slaveholder policies were widespread. Forbears of modernday companies like American International Group and New York Life underwrote hundreds of such policies for slave owners, she said.

"Maybe these companies will start to feel the financial pressure of a boycott," she said. "Maybe then we'll get results."