Descendants of slaves accuse companies of genocide

• Originally published in the USA Today on 3/30/2004 [here]
  

Descendants of slaves accuse companies of genocide

Descendants of slaves, frustrated that courts have blocked their claims for reparations, are using a novel legal argument in a lawsuit filed Monday against companies they say profited from slavery. The eight plaintiffs accuse Lloyd's of London, FleetBoston (FBF) and R.J. Reynolds (RJR) of committing genocide against their ancestors and obliterating the ethnic identity of African-Americans descended from slaves.

The lawsuit, which asks for $1 billion in damages, attempts to sidestep some of the legal obstacles cited by a federal judge who dismissed a high-profile reparations case in January.

U.S. District Judge Charles Norgle dismissed reparations claims against 18 banks, insurers, railroads and tobacco companies. He said the plaintiffs failed to prove they had been injured by slavery and were "trying to assert the legal rights of their ancestors." The statute of limitations has run out on slavery-era crimes, and Congress, not the courts, should deal with the reparations issue, Norgle said.

The case filed Monday in New York is the first to use DNA to link the plaintiffs to African tribes who were enslaved and abused. One plaintiff, reparations activist Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, said DNA testing connected her to the Mende tribe of Sierra Leone. Tribe members were "kidnapped, tortured and shipped in chains to the United States," the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit says genetic tests connect other plaintiffs to tribes in Niger and Gambia. The plaintiffs hope the genocide argument will convince a court that slavery's effects are ongoing and have modern-day victims. "Black people today can only identify with Africa, a continent. That's because our ethnic and national groups were deliberately destroyed to enslave us. We can prove this injury," Farmer-Paellmann said.

Members of Lloyd's, the British insurance market, are believed to have insured and financed voyages that brought slaves from west Africa to the USA and Caribbean. In an interview with USA TODAY in 2002, Lloyd's said the extent of any "potential involvement" it had in slavery was "impossible to determine," because key records were destroyed by fire in 1838, and surviving records are incomplete.

Monday, Lloyd's spokeswoman Louise Shield said: "We haven't seen this claim, so we are not in a position to comment. Previous claims regarding slavery (and) involving Lloyd's have been dismissed."

One plaintiff in the case claims he is the descendant of a slave owned by a member of the family that founded tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds. Attempts to reach R.J. Reynolds were unsuccessful.

FleetBoston, which is being acquired by Bank of America, declined comment. Fleet traces its roots to a Rhode Island bank chartered by slave trader John Brown in 1791.

Brown and his brothers were benefactors and founders of Brown University in Providence. The Ivy League school recently formed a Committee on Slavery and Justice to conduct a two-year investigation into its ties to the Brown family and slavery.

The committee is to recommend whether Brown should make reparations or find other ways to address its historic ties to slavery. Brown President Ruth Simmons is a great-granddaughter of slaves.