We Got Receipts: What Black People Are Owed

If America is in the mood to hand out money to insurrectionists, then it’s time for reparations because Black bodies were the collateral that built this country.

(Photo by Envato)

Editor’s Note: When we talk about slavery, we tend to talk about stolen labor. But that is only the beginning of what was taken. This series, We Got Receipts, will lay out the fuller truth. Part one starts where the system began: with our bodies. In future stories, we will explore the impact of stolen land and the theft and monetization of Black ingenuity.

The audacity of it all.

As you may know, the Trump administration proposed a slush fund of nearly $1.8 billion that could possibly compensate the people who tried to destroy the U.S. Capitol. Sit with the irony of that. The ones who stormed it, beat officers and tried to tear down the seat of our democracy could be in line to get paid (the courts have suspended the fund, with hearings this week). And the people who actually built that Capitol (enslaved Black people, forced labor, never paid a single cent) got nothing.

So let me say it plainly: If money is going to anyone, it should go to us. They are paying people for trying to destroy what we were forced to build for free. That is not a glitch. It is the whole story of this country in a single frame, and it is why I am starting this series. Because when the conversation is who America actually owes, we are, alongside Native Americans, at the very top of the list. And everyone in this country knows it.

So I am going to spend the next few weeks, leading up to the Fourth of July, laying out the bill. Receipt by receipt. And I am going to start at the foundation, with the receipt that every other one rests on.

Let me be clear: When we talk about what was stolen from Black people, most folks think about labor. The unpaid work that built the plantations and the ports. And that is true, and it is enormous. But it is only half the theft, and not even the deepest half.

Because America did not just steal the work of our bodies. It monetized the bodies themselves, and then leveraged them. It turned Black human beings into the foundational financial asset of the entire nation, then issued debt, credit, mortgages and bonds secured by that asset, the way a modern economy issues debt backed by Treasury bonds. Our ancestors were not just workers in the economy. They were the capital. They were the collateral the whole system was borrowed against.

This nation did not let that value sit still. It put our bodies to work twice: once in the field, and again on the balance sheet. We were used for our labor and leveraged for our worth, at the same time, our whole lives.

We were Black gold to a racist, gold-digging country. The treasure it built its fortune on, and the people it never intended to pay.

Let me show you the numbers, because the numbers do not lie.

We were the single most valuable asset in America

By 1860, there were roughly four million enslaved Black people in the United States. And according to economic historians, their collective value as “property” was approximately $3 billion to $3.5 billion.

Now sit with what that number meant in that economy. The National Park Service, citing the economic record, states it plainly: in 1860, the value of enslaved people exceeded the combined value of all the nation’s railroads, factories, and banks.

Read that again. Our bodies were worth more than all the railroads, all the factories, and all the banks in America, combined. Enslaved people represented nearly 20% of the entire wealth of the United States. We were the largest single financial asset in the entire American economy.

Black bodies were America’s greatest asset and its earliest financial securities instrument. The law assigned a trade value to our heads, wrote mortgages against our flesh and bundled those mortgages into bonds sold to investors across Europe. Our bodies helped build the American economy and Wall Street itself, and the value of our flesh and stolen labor bought America its seat in the global economy.

And the government knew it, because the government ran on it. This nation filled its coffers two ways: taxes on the trade our cotton powered and the sales of the land our bodies made valuable. Across the South, state governments went further still, taxing our bodies directly as property. Every level of American government, federal, state and local, drew revenue from our flesh. The debt is not a metaphor. The newly formed American government was the primary beneficiary of the institution of slavery.

Here is the part that makes it leverage, not just value

It is one thing to say enslaved people were valuable. It is another to understand what this country did with that value, because this is where “our bodies were the security of this nation” stops being a metaphor and becomes documented financial fact.

Slaveholders did not just own human beings and sit on them as stored wealth. They took the people they enslaved to the bank, pledged them as collateral, and pulled out loans, exactly the way you would mortgage a house today, then used that money to buy more land and more human beings, who could then be mortgaged again. Historians call these slave mortgages, and they were the hidden engine of American credit. In many cases, the same enslaved people were used as collateral on multiple loans at once, a single body leveraged again and again to manufacture credit out of thin air.

It went further. The value locked in Black bodies was turned into mortgages, securities and bonds, instruments bought and sold to investors in New York and London. People who would never see a plantation drew profit from paper backed by our flesh. This is what scholars mean when they say slavery built modern finance. In multiple Southern states, more than eight in 10 mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral. Eighty percent. The credit system of the American South did not run on land. It ran on leveraged Black bodies.

This is not theory. The banks have admitted it.

In 2005, JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, completed an internal investigation into its own history and admitted that two of its predecessor banks in Louisiana, Citizens Bank and Canal Bank, had accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans between 1831 and 1865, and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted.

Think about what that confession means. When white planters could not pay their debts, the bank foreclosed on human beings, the way a bank today repossesses a car. Thirteen thousand people, used as security for white men’s loans, by institutions whose names still sit on bank cards in your wallet right now. JPMorgan is one of the few that looked and admitted it. The same story runs through the foundations of banks, insurance companies and universities across this country.

Our bodies were on the books. We were assets, collateral and securities, and when the debt came due, we were repossessed. But never let that cold word hide what it actually meant. To be repossessed was to be torn from your mother, your children, your husband, your wife and sold down the river to settle a white man’s debt. It meant families ripped apart on auction blocks, babies pulled from arms, a lifetime of grief and trauma carried in the body of every person treated as a line item. These were not assets. They were human beings, with names and souls and people they loved, and the violence done to them when the “collateral” was seized is a wound this country has never accounted for. That, too, is on the bill.

Now, here is the cruelest turn of all. When white men’s bets went bad, it was Black bodies that paid for it. The whole system was a speculative bubble (cheap credit, land fever, planters borrowing against enslaved people to buy more land and more enslaved people), and when it burst in the Panic of 1837, the banks did not eat the loss. They came for us. Southern banks “willingly seized and sold enslaved people as part of foreclosure proceedings,” sending families to settle the debts of the very men who had gambled and lost. White speculators chased their fortunes, the economy collapsed under the weight of their greed, and the price was paid in Black flesh, in mothers and children sold off to make the bankers whole. We were not just the collateral that built the wealth. We were the safety net that absorbed the losses. We paid for their success, and then we paid again for their failure.

Here is what America owes, and why this receipt comes first

The wealth of America was not built beside us. It was borrowed against us. We were the mortgage that built the house, the bond the nation issued to raise its own capital, and we were never paid back, not the principal, not the interest, not one cent. When a nation builds its entire economy by leveraging your body as collateral, foreclosing on you when it suits them, and then frees you with nothing while keeping every dollar it extracted, that is not a tragedy of history. That is an unpaid debt with a paper trail.

So when you hear someone ask why Black folks would be owed anything, remember this: When this country decides someone is owed, it can find nearly $1.8 billion in a matter of weeks. The money has never been the obstacle. The will has. For generations, the people who built the reparations movement (from Callie House, the formerly enslaved woman who organized freedpeople to demand pensions, to Queen Mother Audley Moore, to the activists carrying H.R. 40 in Congress right now) were told the debt to Black America was too complicated, too expensive, too far in the past to pay. That was never true. The only real question has always been who this country decides to pay, and who it decides to make wait.

So let us talk about what we are owed. This receipt, the bodies leveraged to build the nation’s fortune, is the foundation of the debt. But it is only the foundation. Over the next few weeks, leading up to the Fourth of July, I am going to lay out the rest, receipt by receipt: the land that was taken, the genius that was stolen, the wealth that was burned, the promises that were broken. Because the bill is real, it is itemized, and it is long past due.

Here is what I need from you: Do not just read this and nod. Support reparations, out loud and on the record. This administration has decided to make race and racial harm the basis for who gets paid from the public treasury. Fine. If America wants to lead with the question of who has endured racial harm, then that is our cue to remind it of the real culprit and the real debt owed. They have taken this fight to a new level. So must we. The time for politely waiting on a study is over.

This is already happening. On Thursday at 9 a.m., U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley is holding a reparations press conference on Capitol Hill, and I am proud to be joining her, alongside members of the Congressional Black Caucus and advocates from the Why We Can’t Wait Reparations Network, to hold the line on what real federal reparations require, and to call out any attempt to co-opt the reparations framework and redirect what is owed to Black America. We are doing this ahead of Juneteenth and America’s 250th birthday on purpose, because the country is about to throw itself a party, and somebody has to read the bill out loud.

And let me say this, so it is never mistaken: Every dollar figure I have laid out here does not even begin to add up to what is truly owed. You can count the money. You cannot count the pain. There is no figure for a mother who watched her child sold away, no calculation that holds the weight of the suffering carried in Black bodies for four hundred years. The financial debt is staggering, and it is still only the part we can measure. The human debt, the cost in blood and sorrow and stolen lives, is beyond any sum this country could ever name. We will hold America to the bill it can count. But let no one pretend that paying it would ever make us even.

We got receipts. And we are just getting started.