American slave descendants sue for compensation

A controversial campaign by black Americans to win compensation for the enslavement of their forefathers has taken a new twist following a pair of lawsuits in which the plaintiffs are the elderly sons of men pressed into slavery just before its abolition in 1865.

In San Francisco, 83-year-old Timothy Hurdle and his brother Chester, 75, claim to be the last surviving progeny of Andrew Jackson Hurdle, who was enslaved at the age of eight and went on to father children well into his twilight years. In Mississippi, the plaintiff in a separate lawsuit is a 119-year-old man, Edlee Bankhead, who says both of his parents were slaves.

These men, campaign advocates say, provide the closest biological link to the era of slavery and can best argue that their lives were directly affected by it.

In each case, the defendants are a group of companies, including Lloyds of London, which have been accused of profiting from insurance policies taken out by slaveholders. The other defendants are blue-chip financial companies including JP Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers and Brown Brothers Harriman; the railway companies Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific; a textile company, WestPoint Stevens; and tobacco companies, including RJ Reynolds and Brown and Williamson.

The lawsuits are being coordinated by a single activist based in New York, Deadria Farmer-Paellman. Her actions have been controversial even in the African American community, with some arguing in favour of righting a great historical wrong and others standing against black Americans continuing to play the role of eternal victim.

Legal experts say the suits have little chance of success because so much time has passed and because the tangible damage done by slavery to living African Americans is so hard to measure.

Interviewed recently, the Hurdle brothers said they had not filed the suit for themselves. "I don't want a penny out of anything," Chester said. "What I'd like to see is something done to help the future generations of our race."

The reparations movement has gathered some steam. A suit against the insurance giant Aetna did not result in any damages, but it did prompt a formal apology from the company. In California, a new state law requires companies to make records pertaining to slavery available to the public.

Aside from the suits against private companies, there are also plans to take action against longstanding institutions such as universities, and also against the federal government. A new flurry of forthcoming lawsuits is being co-ordinated by a high-level panel of academics and lawyers including Alexander Pires, who recently won a $1bn (£638m) discrimination suit against the Department of Agriculture; the writer and thinker Cornel West; and Johnnie Cochran, the lawyer who used racial discrimination arguments to acquit his most famous client, O J Simpson.

There have also been efforts in Congress to set up a reparations committee to investigate the issue. One liberal representative, John Conyers of Michigan, has proposed such a committee every year since 1989, without success.