As a New York commission meets this year to address the state’s “legacy of slavery,” the next front of the reparations battle could be the extent to which the private sector — especially long-standing financial institutions in the state — will be held responsible for the lingering effects of slavery more than 150 years after it was outlawed. 

Governor Hochul appointed nine members to a state commission on reparations remedies in February, following California’s lead in creating a state-level task force to study the topic and create a report of recommendations. It comes as a slew of reparations efforts are taking place across the country, and as President Biden faces mounting pressure to take “action on reparations” during the election year. 

While no one knows exactly what New York’s reparations efforts will look like — the commission has a year to issue its report — some experts say that the state’s history of slavery and racism extends beyond the government’s role, and thus requires an “all-in” approach. 

Those responsible for the harms of slavery also include “private actors — which banks, financial institutions and corporations are complicit,” the founder of Reparations Equity Lab, Enith Williams, tells the Sun. 

“We certainly have evidence where we have been able to demonstrate adverse activities that were racially derived, a very clear example of that is redlining,” she says. “There was a policy of the FHA [Federal Housing Administration] but then it was the private banks and insurance companies and broker associations that ensured that black people did not have the ability to acquire housing in desirable neighborhoods and were kept out of acquiring houses and, therefore, denying them generational wealth.” 

For the commission to have a discussion without including the private sector is “to have an unbalanced conversation” and limits the discussion to blaming only the laws at the time slavery was allowed, she adds.

Even when slavery was legally allowed, she says, “who was it that actually went out and picked up the bodies? It wasn’t the state, it was private actors.” 

Reparations are about more than cutting a check and instead have several elements, including an apology, acknowledgment, compensation, and restitution, Ms. Williams adds. It will require an “honest, all-in conversation about all of the players and all of the responsibilities” to design a proper redress, she says. 

JP Morgan Chase in 2005 issued a formal apology for taking some 13,000 slaves as collateral and ultimately taking ownership of more than a thousand of them. More recently, Citibank disclosed in a historical review that it likely was enriched by slavery. 

Those types of apologies and acknowledgments are the “first place to begin,” Ms. Williams says, as banks recognized that these were “deliberate activities.” Because not all of today’s institutions are responsible or complicit in the harms, private sector accountability shouldn’t be a “broad brush approach,” she adds. 

Representatives of JP Morgan declined to comment, but they pointed the Sun to the bank’s $30 billion racial equity commitment. 

California’s reparations report could be an indication of where New York is headed. It includes an in-depth discussion of Wall Street’s role in helping to “finance the expansion of enslavement in the South,” noting that banks loaned money to enslavers and accepted enslaved people as security for loans. Insurance companies insured slaves and paid enslavers if they died, it notes, and some even insured shipments for slave traffickers. 

“Some of these companies were the early ancestors of today’s most important insurance companies, including New York Life, US Life, and Aetna,” California’s report reads. “New York City is a strong example of how northerners participated in and profited from enslavement.” 

The report notes that Wall Street itself was built by enslaved Africans and that the street later became the first slave market in the city. Even as slavery died out in northern states, it adds, “white New Yorkers were building strong economic ties to southern enslavement that brought millions of dollars in profit every year” and the city was the “main destination of southern cotton and the center of the transatlantic cotton trade.”

As reparations are pushed in New York, they are already facing public and legal backlash — several of the commission members have already had calls to resign over bias concerns.

“I will never pay a dollar in New York taxes to repent for injustices neither I, nor anyone alive on earth right now, has committed,” the New York City Council’s minority leader, Joseph Borelli, tells the Sun. “If the Reparations Committee is looking for restitution, they should start with the one institution still active today that was ideologically responsible for the continuity of slavery and the implementation of racist segregation policies throughout the American South. Of course, I am talking about the Democratic Party.”

And though for now the commission is only expected to make recommendations, some attorneys are prepared to fight any race-based legislation coming out of New York.

“Pacific Legal Foundation will challenge any racially discriminatory barrier that New York might impose stemming from its reparations efforts,” an attorney for the firm, Andrew Quinio, tells the Sun. 

“New York cannot violate the Constitution by advantaging or disadvantaging individuals based on race, whether it is to support reparations or any other interest beyond remedying specific instances of past discrimination,” he says. “We agree with the Supreme Court that ‘eliminating discrimination means eliminating all of it.’”