[Founding Father]

Gee whiz, fancy smancy politically correct IVY League Brown University was founded by a slave trader. Who'd a thunk it!

[martin_fierro]

Loopy stories lke this typically appear in late August, during summer vacations.

[muawiyah]

Must be where all that money is hidden, eh?

[PJammers]

Last time I checked over 250,000 "white boys" gave their lives during the civil war to insure the slaves were free. IMHO I would say they have been paid in full.

v/r

[Sgt_Schultze]

Tillman said research conducted by her daughter at some of the same places Bank of America looked -- the Rhode Island Historical Society and Brown University Library -- has already produced evidence that Providence Bank made loans used to purchase ships that transported slaves.

It is almost a certainty that the folding money in Ald. Tillman's purse is tainted by cocaine residue. Perhaps she should be arrested for her ties to the organized drug trade.

[canalabamian]

Yankee bankers denying that they profited from slave trade.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Second, there is no indication of the source of the funds used by Brown to purchase his 23 shares in the bank.

Well, if he had a profit making slave operation... funds ARE fungible.

[TexasCajun]

BofA should never have played their game!

We'll see if they answer the call from Jesse?

[fhayek]

In ten thousand years of human civilization, the only recorded instance of slavery was during the period of 1500- 1865 in the American south, by White Christian European men.

[cyborg]

Well Bank of America has lots of slaves today paying for their credit cards! :-)

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

"The Jewish community -- your community -- received reparations. What happened to them was wrong. And you were relentless in making sure that anybody and everybody who had anything to do with the Holocaust would be brought to justice . . . What we're saying is, we have a right to be repaid," Tillman said.

The holocaust entailed the systematic extermination of over six million Jews in industrialized Nazi deathcamps. My hisory may be fuzzy, but I don't remember any such death camps in the antebellum South, with millions of resulting slave deaths. Consequently, the comparison is simply false. The fact of the matter is that slavery, bad as it was, was a completely legal institution until the Civil War and the ultimate ratification of the 13th amendment in December 1865. As a legal institution, the whole antebellum American economy was entangled with slavery, and in fact, New York City, of all places, was the South's banking center. With that said, these banks and insurance companies did nothing illegal based upon the context of those times, and should not be forced to undergo this enforced self-flagellation for something that happened over 140 years ago. Moreover, the institution of slavery is not even remotely close to the horrors of the holocaust, and so the whole issue of reparations is nothing but a brazen shakedown, based upon the threat of bad publicity. Further, the idea of reparations based upon the idea of compensating SURVIVORS, and to my best knowledge, the last known former black American slave died in either the 1950s or early 1960s. Second, third, or even fourth generation descendents need not apply.

[cgbg]

The group reparations concept is fundamentally a Marxist one, that the "collective", race, is more important than the individual.

[xkaydet65]

I'd forgotten BoA had taken over Fleet. I wondered what the hell was going on here. BoA was started as Bank of Italy by Giannini in San Francisco around the time of the earthquake. I didn't know slaves were still kept in 1906.I am curious about one thing. Fleet Bank had been around for quite a while and this Chicago alderman made no effort to extort money. Only after it's taken over by BoA does he make his move. Bigger target??

BTW The equation of this with Holocaust reparations is spurious at best. Reparations are paid to survivors, not descendants of surviviors.

[F16Fighter]

[Bank of America] has hired a researcher to dig deeper but has so far has uncovered no evidence that a predecessor bank invested in or profited from the slave trade.

Has Jesse Jackson yet called a news conference to "boycott" the bank until his Swiss account is a few decimal points heavier?

[iconoclast]

Hasn't this silliness dried up and blown away yet?

[Liberty Valance]

I've really got to keep my eye out for a good set of encyclopedias from 1963. The rewriting of history continues unabated.

[expatguy]

Bank of America insists it can't find slave profits in its past

Well, someone is just going to have to look a little harder now aren't they??!!

[television is just wrong]

maybe there wasn't any?????

[kcar]

Reparations is a very important issue, so vital I think Democrats should make this the cornerstone of their thrust to retake the White House. And why is it still called the "White" House?

[T. Buzzard Trueblood]

I think the Democratic party should be compelled to pay reparations for all campaign contributions ever made by slaveowners.

[LibKill]

Who gives a flying gallop, one way or the other?

If anyone can find a living ex-slave, then that person is owed reparations. Anyone who was born free is not owed anything not listed in the constitution.