Wachovia Bank's website encourages people to "dare to dream" and offers its own full menu of financial services to "help find the best way to finance it."
At one point in the bank's history, that help apparently included accepting slaves as collateral for loans. Thus, just as the bank "owns" the house you call yours until the mortgage is paid off, two of this bank's predecessor institutions "owned" humans.
Now available online is a statement by the bank and reports from the History Factory (a very interesting outfit the company hired to conduct the research):
...Due to incomplete records, we cannot determine precisely how many slaves either the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company or the Bank of Charleston owned. Through specific transactional records, researchers determined that the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company owned at least 162 slaves, and the Bank of Charleston accepted at least 529 slaves as collateral on mortgaged properties or loans, and acquired an undetermined number of these individuals when customers defaulted on their loans...
(Via Afro-Netizen. See here for complete statement and links to reports. For a related story, see the California Slavery Era Insurance Registry.)
Posted by perry032 at June 9, 2005 09:30 AM | TrackBackI can't believe they would use slaves as colateral thats aweful! Can you imagine if things today where as they were in the past?
Posted by: Ken Cornell at June 9, 2005 09:41 PM