Chicago – JPMorgan Chase & Co., Aetna Inc. and CSX Corp. are among the U.S. corporations that should pay for their involvement in the nation’s 19th-century slave trade, three lawyers told a federal appeals court Wednesday.
The attorneys asked a three- judge 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel to reinstate nine lawsuits seeking reparations from the companies, which are accused of either bankrolling slave owners, insuring the slaves or owning them outright.
A lower court judge threw out the suits last year, ruling that nobody alive today had been injured by the defendants.
“We are here today seeking some measure of redress for the victims of a crime against humanity,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Roger Wareham of Brooklyn told the judges.
Wareham first asked the all- white, all-male panel to disqualify itself, asking why a black female judge who heard three earlier cases was no longer on the panel.
He was told to file a formal motion within 10 days.
The first reparations cases were filed four years ago by a black female attorney from New Jersey, Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, who was in the courtroom Wednesday.
She says her great-great grandfather was a South Carolina slave whose life was insured by Aetna.
Her suit and the others were brought in the wake of successful efforts to obtain reparations for Holocaust victims and for Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.
“The importance of the issue does not excuse standing requirements,” defense attorney Alan Madans of Chicago told the court.
Madans and co-defense counsel Owen Pell argued that the plaintiffs can’t show they suffer today for acts that may or may not have been perpetrated against their ancestors by the defendants more than 100 years ago.
“There’s no linkage,” Madans said.
