Companies sued over American slave trade

Three companies are to be sued for compensation on behalf of all Americans descended from slaves, as part of a campaign to resolve the divisive issue, if not in the courts, then in Congress.

The companies cited in the suit, due to be filed in a federal court in New York, are the insurance company Aetna, the CSX railroad, and FleetBoston, a financial services concern. No specific sum was being sought, but up to 100 companies could eventually be targeted, said Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the black legal researcher and civil rights activist who is behind the case.

CSX, Aetna and FleetBoston were "unjustly enriched" by slavery, her lawsuit claims. She argues that black Americans are still paying the price of an evil system "that enslaved, tortured, starved and exploited human beings". Aetna is accused of insuring the lives of slaves for their owners, while some track operated by CSX is said to have been laid by slaves.

In the past, American courts have not been receptive to such claims, often based on tenuous historical links between the modern company and a forebear which made money from slavery. The cases also fall outside even the most elastic statute of limitations. The case of FleetBoston, the product of a 1999 merger, is typical: the accusations stem from the fact that among the founders of Providence bank, one of FleetBoston's many corporate ancestors, was the 18th century slave trader John Brown of Rhode Island.

The parallel often cited by reparation seekers is the $8bn-plus (£5.6bn) of compensation for Holocaust victims secured from German, Swiss and other companies in the courts. But while some Holocaust survivors are still alive, slavery was abolished 137 years ago after the American civil war – meaning that the last of those who suffered directly from it probably died at least half a century ago.

Instead, the courts have argued that the reparations cannot be resolved through the legal system but by Congress. To this end, a new coalition is emerging of which Ms Farmer-Paellmann is the least well known part, to push the issue back into public consciousness.

Leading the campaign are the veteran civil rights campaigner and former presidential candidate the Rev Jesse Jackson, and an umbrella group, the Reparations Co-ordinating Committee, headed by the Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree.

Johnnie Cochran, the celebrated criminal lawyer who successfully defended OJ Simpson, is also working with the committee, and has recently opened an office to press the reparation cause. But, he says, referring to America's 36 million blacks, most of whom are descended from slaves, "our goal is not for everybody to collect a cheque". Instead, the committee wants to secure more government money for predominantly black communities, to boost schools, job prospects and other amenities, and to tackle the subtler but enduring legacy of disadvantage for those Americans whose ancestors were slaves.

Advocates of reparations believe that embarrassing individual companies with high-profile – even ultimately unsuccessful – lawsuits is the best way of doing this. Aetna, for example, made a public apology two years ago after being confronted with evidence it had made money insuring slaves.