As Cara Maines reported
in a Feb. 7, 2017 Columbia Daily
Spectator article, research done by
Columbia University Professor of History Eric Foner and his students, as
part of the Columbia University and Slavery Project, “found that most of the
early presidents and trustees owned slaves, some donors profited from slave
trade in the West Indies, and most students came from slave-owning families;”
and “at least one student, the stepson of George Washington, brought a slave to
what was then King's College.”
But
what perhaps should also be mentioned is that the 26 acres of Upper Manhattan
land upon which Columbia University’s Baker Athletics Complex stands was
purchased in 1921 by a U.S. Steel Corporation director and major stockholder
named George F. Baker--whose firm’s Tennessee Coal and Iron [TCI] subsidiary
apparently profited in Alabama from the exploitation of forced African-American
convict labor in the early 20th century. As labor and human rights
lawyer Daniel Kovalik noted in a July 4, 2008 Pittsburgh Post- Gazette article:
“What came to many
of us as a revelation this year, presented by the Wall Street Journal's Douglas A. Blackmon in his book, Slavery by Another Name, is that the
enslavement of tens of thousands of black Americans in the South did not end in
1865…As Mr. Blackmon explains..., southern political and industrial leaders…began
to arrest blacks en masse on baseless charges, including the overly broad `"crime’
of vagrancy (i.e., standing around unoccupied), `offensive conduct,’ talking to
white women or any other trumped-up offense…
“The targeted black
citizen was then hauled before a judge or justice of the peace, pressured by
implied threats of violence into confessing to a crime, and fined for both the
crime and the "costs" incurred by the arresting officer, the judge
and witnesses. The accused was then offered to an industrialist or farmer who
offered to pay the exorbitant fines and costs in return for the accused signing
a contract of indentured servitude…One of the largest users of forced labor was
Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel, which purchased a coal mine -- indeed, a slave
mine -- from the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. at the beginning of
the 20th century. U.S. Steel signed a lease with the state of Alabama to
acquire hundreds of prisoners, almost all black and almost all arrested on
absurd charges, who it put to work in its Alabama mine No. 12. The many
laborers who died during their periods of servitude either were buried in
unmarked graves or burned inside the mines.
“As Mr. Blackmon
notes in his book, U.S. Steel, unlike some companies that had used prison/slave
labor during the late 19th and early 20th century, has never…paid compensation
to the families of victims….”
According to an
Apr. 19, 2012 TomDispatch.com
article by Steve Fraser and Joshua Freeman, “convicts were leased to…Tennessee
Coal and Iron (TC&I), a major producer across the South, especially in the
booming region around Birmingham, Alabama, “more than a quarter of the coal
coming out of Birmingham’s pits was then mined by prisoners” and “by the turn
of the century, TC&I had been folded into J.P. Morgan’s United States Steel
complex, which also relied heavily on prison laborers.”
Owning $5,965,000
(equivalent to around $83,245,000 in 2017 dollars) of U.S. Steel stock in the
early 1920’s, George F. Baker was the largest individual owner of stock in
TC&I’s parent company, according to a May 4, 1924 Time magazine article. And, coincidentally, as Columbia
University’s website notes, “the tract of land on which the Baker Athletics
Complex stands was purchased for the University on December 30, 1921 by
financier George F. Baker” as a $700,000 (equivalent to around $8,711,000 in
2017 dollars gift); and “the 26-acre area was dedicated in April, 1922 and
hosted spring football practice that same year.”
A long-time
president of the First National Bank of New York (which eventually merged with
Citicorp’s Citibank in 1955), Baker was “closely associated with” the late 19th-century
and early 20th-century U.S. robber-baron, monopolist and Wall Street
banker J.P. Morgan “in his manifold enterprises,” according to Richard Boyer
and Herbert Morais’s 1955 book, Labor’s
Untold Story. The same book also noted that “Morgan and associates
organized super-trusts in steel (U.S. Steel), shipping (International
Mercantile Marine), and agricultural machinery (International Harvester);” and
it also “had its hands in other fields—the railroads (where…some 30,000 miles
of railway were controlled), anthracite coal (where from two-thirds to
three-quarters of the entire shipment was in Morgan hands).” In addition, other
Morgan monopolies included electrical machinery (General Electric),
communications (AT &T, Western Union), traction companies (IRT in New York,
Hudson & Manhattan), and insurance (Equitable Life).”
