Columbia U., Race, Class and the Gentrification of Harlem

Columbia's Role in Gentrifying Harlem (Columbia Tuition Strike Teach-In)

On A Highway In Bel Air

 

Simon Legree Killed Tom

 

In Hibbing and Minneapolis

 

Michael Brown Was Gunned Down--Bob A. Feldman

Canada Lee -- Bob A. Feldman

Dhoruba--Bob A. Feldman

Law School--Bob A. Feldman

Destroyed by a Rising Flood--Bob A. Feldman

Community Control Of All Police

Who Profits From Columbia University's Teachers College?

"Non-Profit" Teachers College of Columbia University's 525 W. 120th St. building. (photo by Bohao Zhao (wikicommons))

 Since January 22, 2021, thousands of Columbia University students of the Upper West Side "non-profit" university have been withholding their tuition payments for the Spring 2021 semester, in support of the following 5 demands:

"1) Columbia must alleviate the economic burden on students by reducing the cost of attendance and increasing financial aid.

- Reduce the cost of attendance (including tuition, fees, and room & board) by at least 10%.

- Increase financial aid by at least 10%.

- Replace the "student responsibility" with grants.

- Offer financial aid for summer classes for all schools at Columbia

- Forgive all late fees and other forms of retaliation for unpaid bills for the duration of the pandemic.

- We also demand that this reduction and increased aid should not come at the expense of instructor or worker pay, but rather at the expense of bloated administrative salaries, expansion projects, and other expenses that don't benefit students and workers.

"2) Columbia must fulfill its responsibilities to the people of West Harlem by committing to provide employment, education & affordable housing, and to end expansion.

" 3) Columbia must defund Public Safety and invest in community safety solutions that prioritize the safety of Black students and West Harlem residents, and repair harm caused by prior racist practices of Public Safety.

" 4) Columbia must commit to complete transparency about the University's investments and respect the democratic votes of the student body regarding investment and divestment decisions. This includes respecting the referendums at Barnard and Columbia College to divest from companies involved in human rights violations, divesting fully from fossil fuels, and respecting the results of future referendums relating to investment decisions; and

"5) Columbia must bargain in good faith with unions on campus around their key demands for improved compensation, benefits, and protections. This includes guaranteeing protections to international students and granting union recognition for MA and undergrad student-workers."

According to the Columbia University students who initiated the 2021 tuition strike:, "these issues are united by a shared root cause: a flagrant disregard for initiatives democratically supported within the community" and the administration of Columbia University President Lee Bollinger's "unilateral decision-making process" which "has perpetuated the existence of these injustices in our community despite possessing ample resources to confront them with structural solutions."

In response to either the threat of a tuition strike or the tuition strike itself, Columbia University's Bollinger "administration announced it would freeze tuition, suspend fees on late payments, increase spring financial aid and provide a limited amount of summer grants to students," according to a Jan. 26, 2021 In These Times article, titled "Columbia Students Wage the Largest Tuition Strike in Nearly 50 Years," by Indigo Olivier. But "students who" were "withholding tuition were surprised when they learned of multiple cases in which $150 late fees appeared in students' accounts last weekend, though they have not been able to confirm whether they are expected to pay this fee," according to the same article.

In These Times also noted that, on Jan. 22, 2021, Columbia's Board of Trustees "finally formalized its commitment to divest from publicly traded oil and gas companies;" but on Jan. 20, 2021, "the Board of Trustees also quietly announced it was lifting its 2006 to 2020 policy of divestment and non-investment in `companies operating in Sudan.'"

Despite calling their Upper West Side-based private schools "non-profit" institutions, some of the administrators and professors of both Columbia University and Teachers College of Columbia University have, in recent years, apparently been pocketing total annual monetary compensations much higher than what most New York City workers who are still employed are paid; or what most Columbia students are likely to earn annually during the current decade.

According to the 2017 Form 990 financial filing of Teachers College of Columbia University (on whose board of trustees Columbia University President Bollinger has sat next to Rockefeller Brothers Fund Chair of the Board of Trustees and former "confidential assistant" to Secretary Richard Riley at the U.S. Department of Education during the first Clinton administration, Valerie Rockefeller, in recent years), for example, between Sept. 1, 2017 and Aug. 31, 2018, "non-profit" Columbia's Teachers College paid total annual compensations that exceeded $198,000 to the following folks:

1. Teachers College President and later President Emerita Susan Fuhrman's total annual compensation was $1,059,181;

2. Teachers College VP Suzanne Murphy's total annual compensation was $533,206;

3. Teachers College's then-newly-installed President Thomas Bailey's total annual compensation was $468,469;

4. Teachers College VP Harvey Spector's total annual compensation was $465,600;

5. Teachers College Provost & Dean Thomas James's total annual compensation was $465,250;

6. Teachers College Professor Sharon Kagan's total annual compensation was $423,098;

7. Teachers College Enid & Lesk Morse Chair Ruth Vinz's total annual compensation was $373,390;

8. Teachers College Professor Andrew Gordon's total annual compensation was $362,407;

9. Teachers College Professor Jeanne Brooks-Gunn's total annual compensation was $356,392;

10. Teachers College VP Janice Robinson's total annual compensation was $350,941;

11. Teachers College's former Vice-Provost William Baldwin's total annual compensation was $334,607;

12. Teachers College Professor Anne Lin Goodwin's total annual compensation was $330,646;

13. Teachers College Assoc. VP Nancy Streim's total annual compensation was $318,679;

14. Teachers College Vice Provost Catherine Embree's total annual compensation was $279,550;

15. Teachers College Chief of Staff Katharine Conway's total annual compensation was $230,181;

16. Teachers College Vice Provost Steven Goss's total annual compensation was $225,955; and

17. Teachers College's former General Counsel Lori Fox's total annual compensation was $198,594.

In 2018 the "non-profit" Teachers College of Columbia University also had over $149 million invested in "non-public equity funds" and over $28 million invested in "private equity and real estate funds," according to its 2017 Form 990 financial filing.

Between Sept. 1, 2017 and Aug. 31, 2018, the total revenues of Columbia University's Teachers College exceeded $241 million, which included over $47 million that came from "contributions and grants" and over $4 million that came from its investment income. In addition, Teachers College of Columbia University spent $1 million on "lobbying" between Sept. 2017 and August 2018.

So, not surprisingly, in July 2020,the privately-controlled Teachers College of Columbia University was awarded $6.3 million in two publicly-funded U.S. federal government grants from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Science for a "study of the Federal Work-Study program." And in October and November 2020, Multi-Billionaire U.S. Oligarch Bill Gates's Gates Foundation also gave four "charitable" grants, totaling over $1.2 million, to the Teachers College of institutionally racist Columbia University; including, ironically, a $499,000 tax-exempt "charitable" grant "to advance knowledge of which advising reforms disproportionately benefit students of color and students experiencing poverty" and a $100,000 "charitable" grant "to support reporting on racial inequities in education."

1968 Columbia Student Occupation and Columbia Students' Afro-American Society Leader Bill Sales: A 1995 Interview By Meg Starr

May 1968  issue of  RAT underground newspaper's front page 

In its August/September issue of 1995, the anti-imperialist Love & Rage newspaper published the following interview with former Columbia Students' Afro-American Society [SAS] Leader Bill Sales by long-time anti-imperialist and anti-racist prisoner solidarity activist Meg Starr. 

During the 1960s Bill Sales was a radical student activist. His experiences show how the Black student movement was shaped by the overall Black liberation movement, and how Black students in turn helped shape the white student movement.

It is interesting to compare Bill’s version of the early stages of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and the Columbia Strike (an important occupation of buildings at New York City’s Columbia University by Black and white students in 1968) with more mainstream and white-centered accounts of the same period. His stories also bring to life the incredible radical diversity and power of the Black Liberation movement. Readers interested in learning more should read Bill’s latest book, From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (South End Press, Boston, 1994).

U of Penn and the NAACP

Meg Star [MS]: How did you become an activist as a student?


Bill Sales: “I was involved with the student chapter of the NAACP at the University of Pennsylvania in 1962. I had first come in contact with the movement on that campus through some people who were members of RAM. [The Revolutionary Action movement was a semi-clandestine organization that, beginning in 1963, attempted to combine mass direct action with the tactics of self-defense to push the movement towards revolutionary politics.] Two members in particular were friends of mine: Max Stanford [Muhamed Ahmed] and Stanley Davis. I knew Max from high school, and Stanley was a student at Penn before we became active. We all ran track together, believe it or not.”

MS: In 1962 the Penn Chapter of the NAACP invited Malcolm X to speak on campus, and they picketed Democratic Party Headquarters in Philadelphia to support Robert Williams. Williams had been the president of the NAACP in Monroe County, NC until 1959, when he called for armed defense in the face of growing KKK violence. During the next several years James Farmer, the Rev. Leon Sullivan, and many other Civil Rights leaders also spoke on campus.

Sales: “Then I went to the march on Washington and was very impressed by all the goings on. I wanted to come back and assume the leadership of the NAACP on campus; I wasn’t satisfied with its level of activism.”

MS: In the meantime, during the summer of ‘63, CORE [The Congress of Racial Equality was a direct-action-oriented civil-rights group that emphasized community based actions in Northern cities.] and the NAACP were confronting de facto segregation of construction sites in Philadelphia. Bill’s two radical friends were arrested after being beaten by the police at one site. U of Penn was undergoing major renovation, so the students confronted the university’s own hiring practices.

Sales:  “Now all during the four years at Penn I was being exposed to different ideological currents, both in the Civil Rights Movement and in what came to be the New Left. I didn’t have the slightest idea that that was what it was at the time. In my senior year, protesting segregation, I came in close contact with CORE and the NAACP. I can put it this way: I developed a greater appreciation for CORE and an utter disdain for the NAACP.”

Black Students Organize

MS: When Bill graduated from Penn he went to Columbia University to do graduate work. He arrived in the fall of 1964, the fall after African-American students organized on campus.

Sales:  “A year after I left Penn, Bob Brand, a white student from the NAACP, got in touch with me. He asked my permission to convert that chapter into an SDS chapter because at that point the only people left were white students who were very much interested in the anti-war situation. Many of those guys who became important in SDS got their first exposure in civil rights activity.”

MS: Bill arrived at Columbia in 1964, the same semester that the Students' Afro-American Society was founded. In the mid-’60s campuses that for centuries had been lily-white were opening the doors to Black students for the first time. Columbia, Harvard and Yale were a little ahead of the majority of campuses.

Sales:  “A whole lot of debate was going on about identity, about who we were as Black students, and what was our responsibility to the movement.”

MS: The numbers of Black students were increasing every semester and the class base of the students accepted by the college was becoming more working class, which affected the level of militancy.

Sales:  “There was a basis for effective group action. People sensed that potential, and also, no Black person at this time could get away without defining their lives at least in part in terms of the struggle that was going on in the larger society.”

MS:  While Bill studied Swahili and met African leaders in the internationalist community around Columbia, he also reunited with Max Stanford.

Sales:  “Max had been working with Malcolm in the OAAU period [the Organization of Afro-American Unity] and I ran into him shortly after Malcolm was assassinated. Max helped me get oriented to the scene in NY.”

“Gym” Crow & Early Alliances

MS:  In ‘68 the off-campus and on-campus movements were to come together. Columbia University had admitted Black students while continuing to be a smug and racist institution, completely out of touch with the neighboring Harlem community. The university occupies a small area of land, one side of which is a cliff overlooking the public Morningside Park, which is used primarily by the Harlem community. Columbia worked out an arrangement through its shady Board of Trustees’ ruling-class connections to lease public land for the site of a new gym. Originally the gym was intended to be in Morningside Park, and to be completely closed to community residents. When the community objected to that Columbia started construction of two gyms: a large one for Columbia students and a smaller one for the community residents. Protesting the “Jim Crow Gym” brought together many different insurgent communities.

Already alliances between SDS and the African American students organization had developed through two experiences. By 1967 the university had allowed the student athletes to be developed into a right-wing firing squad that attacked SDS demonstrations.

Sales:  “So one day Black students went out there. We had our own beef with these cats because they were racists. So we joined in to help the SDS guys because those people just didn’t know how to fight. Not that they weren’t game, they just didn’t know what to do in that kind of situation. So we went out and knocked heads with these jocks.”

MS:  CORE was trying to organize a union among the mostly African-American and Latino workers on campus. Black students and some of SDS became involved.

Sales:  “Ted Gold, one of the activists that got blown up in the townhouse [a member of Weatherman who was killed during an explosion at a safe house in NY on March 6, 1970], was very active in that. We all knew Gold long before we knew Rudd and those cats. The hell with them! They were off on some trip, but we knew the folks that were down. They were down long before it was fashionable to be down.

“One of the things that really got to me about Rudd was how you write a book confessing all the things you did were wrong. That’s bullshit! It wasn’t wrong just because you lost and it didn’t work. There’s a difference between winning and losing and being wrong.”

MS:  Alliances off-campus were also very important to the Black students. In ‘67 there was a Black Power Conference in Maryland that had a special meeting for student activists.

Sales:  “There were no more than 10 or 15 people in the place, but the following spring we were all involved in building takeovers on our different campuses. Herman Ferguson [an important Black activist and political prisoner, Ferguson was involved both in the Republic of New Afrika and the OAAU] was there that day; he was already on the lam.”

MS:  Bill became involved in an underground student group called “cadre.” The members were at different campuses. They took karate, studied, and made contact with various groups in Harlem.

MS: Why were you clandestine?

Sales: “This was an era when people got shot. H. Rap Brown was already underground. Some of the people we worked with were underground. It wasn’t as if we were planning to blow things up. But we felt that what we were doing was objectively revolutionary. And you just didn’t run around in a public organization. We assigned ourselves public organizations on campus to be in.”

The Columbia Strike

MS:  In April and May of 1968 Columbia University exploded into the famous strike and blockade. During those months over 1,000 students occupied four buildings on campus, fought the police, and held a dean hostage (briefly).

The role of the Black students in these events has been somewhat eclipsed in popular accounts. After describing the alliances on campus and off-campus that had been developed over the previous years, Bill described the day the decision was made to occupy the first building.

Sales:  “1968 in some ways appeared to be spontaneous. On the day the takeover occurred none of us had planned a takeover.”

MS:  Bill and his friends went down to an SDS demonstration at the sundial [a central location on the main part of the Columbia campus] to fight the jocks and to support the new president of the Afro-American Students Organization who was speaking.

Sales:  “When I got there I swear there were 5,000 people. It was a total shocker. I expected 200 people or so—the usual demonstration. The jocks were completely neutralized. The demonstration started by trying to take some demands into the president of Columbia University, but he closed his office building. The Black students wanted to storm the building, but Rudd said no. Someone in Progressive Labor said: ‘Let’s charge the gym site.’ So we all ran down.”

MS:  Community activists and campus activists had recently been arrested demonstrating at the site.

Sales:  “We ran down 1,000 strong and all hell broke loose. It’s the first and only time I ever got into actual combat with the police. We should have all been dead but there was a sergeant who pulled his forces back. At that time I was trying to break this cop’s thumb because I said “If he gets his gun out I’m a dead person.”

“I had only jumped him because one of his associates had started hitting one of our guys and then one of CADRE punched him out. This guy was facing me so I grabbed his wrist and twisted him around. I didn’t want to fight this cat and he didn’t want to fight me. I said I can take this guy; he’s scared of me. He’ll shoot me out of fear if he gets his gun out. People don’t realize how things escalate. Lethal confrontations that nobody means to happen—people were all fighting and this sergeant comes down and tells his men to back off and leave us alone. He recognized that it was Harlem and if they grabbed a bunch of Black students all hell would break loose.”

MS:  Bill stressed how many different people had their own organizations then and were prepared for confrontation. The Black women on campus, repulsed by the sexism of the African-American students group, had their own organization with their own community contacts.

Sales:  “They didn’t want to get everything through the guys. That meant that independently they had come to the same decisions we had come to, and they had a structure for functioning. When the shit hit the fan they weren’t tailing behind the men.”

MS:  After the confrontation at the gym site SDS and the Black students occupied the first building. While SDS leaders remained ambiguous about the decisions to occupy buildings for several days, the Black Students were firm from the beginning and influenced the actions of the rest of the campus.

The Movement Today [in 1995]?

When asked about the Black movement today [in 1995] Bill said:

Sales: “There is no Black movement today. There are a number of different people who are struggling as organizations or individuals, but a movement would imply a consensus on some very basic demands; a clear understanding of who the enemy is and some notion of what the future would look like. We don’t have that yet. I hope we’re building to it...

MS: Is there anything you’d like to say about white solidarity?

Sales: “I think there are some obvious errors that white leftists have made that they don’t need to make again! The arrogance and paternalism in relationship to the Black movement—to assume that you know what’s right for everyone because you have a revolutionary analysis of society, etc., etc. To see a certain kind of division of labor—you provide the intellectual muscle and the troops come from various Third World communities—that’s disastrous.

“A second thing that we really want is to build up a left inside of white working-class communities. We need to develop another pole in the communities that have been conceded to the fascists. That has been very difficult to do and very dangerous. That’s why it’s not done much! It’s actually easier for a white person to work in communities of color. Once they know you’re for real, people aren’t hostile to you, whereas in the white communities you can get murdered!

“A third point is not to get manipulated by feelings of guilt. There are a whole lot of opportunists in the Black and Latino communities who’ll try to manipulate you because you are white. You have to stand up for what you believe in.

“And then of course it’s important to study hard, be humble, and really listen. I know that as a 52-year-old one of the really frustrating things is trying to pass on your knowledge to the generation coming behind, because they think they know more than you already. But without an open mind you can screw up and repeat past `mistakes.’”

(Love&Rage newspaper, August/September 1995 issue)

Columbia University Students Make 12 Demands Of Columbia University Administration In 2017

On October 21, 2017, students at Columbia University who are involved with the Liberation Coalition issued the following statement in which 12 demands were made of the Columbia University Administration:

"Our Demands

"Columbia has a history of abusing its institutional power as a University by intimidating students, workers as well as the nearby Harlem community. We refuse to let this be another opportunity for them to do so behind closed doors. Furthermore, Columbia should hold CUCR accountable for fueling the fire of intolerance under the guise of free speech. At the same time, we recognize that Columbia's complicity in white supremacy goes much further than giving white supremacists a platform to speak on our campus. Consequently, we have compiled the following list of demands inspired by discourses centered on black radical feminism, decolonization, and social justice:

"1. We demand that the university drop its investigation into allegations of interrupting the CUCR event on October 10, 2017. We affirm the rights of students and community members to protest.

"2.  We demand that the university revise and replace its oppressive university rules. While we affirm the principle of free speech, we recognize that the invocation of free speech by the university obfuscates deeper underlying concerns about power, dominance, and violence. If we acknowledge that the principle of free speech has its roots in colonialism and violence and that the current political climate in the U.S. is complicit in perpetuating these acts of violence, then we must begin to problematize the university's fundamentalist support for the principle of free speech in its rules.

"3. "We demand that the university actively protect and provide sanctuary to all intersections of identities that suffer at the hands of white supremacist ideologies including but not limited to students and community members of the Queer and Trans' communities, people living with disabilities, human beings labeled undocumented immigrants, community members and students of the Muslim community, and indigent students and community members of all colors.

"4. We demand that the university recognize the formation and establishment of a Graduate Workers Union. Columbia's continuous obstruction of the unionization of student workers is an injustice that can no longer be allowed.

"5. We demand that the university provide free tuition for indigenous and Black people as compensation for its historic role in perpetuating violence against these communities. Restore balance and justice amongst the people who built and died for Columbia University to exist. Columbia recently made available historical documents of the role of wealthy slave merchants in the founding of the university. President Bollinger, in a New York Times article this year, said that addressing Columbia's `complicity' in the slave trade was a necessary step toward addressing current injustices.

"6. We demand that Columbia University stop over-policing the Harlem community but instead provide services that would mitigate systems of oppression that manifest in historic and contemporary forms of trauma.

"7. We demand that Columbia University utilize scholarships for residents of Harlem from disenfranchised communities. On May 18, 2009, Lee Bollinger signed the West Harlem Community Benefits Agreement. Some of the recitals and agreements of this contract include constructing about 6.8 million square feet of space over the next 25 and scholarships to 40 admitted students into Columbia College and FU School of Engineering per year (page 31 of contract).

"8. "We demand that the university decolonize curricula throughout Columbia University. Uplift the voices of marginalized people by utilizing literature, exercises, experiences, and professors from those communities.

"9. "We demand that the university decolonize this campus. We demand that the university rename buildings and replace statues of Thomas Jefferson, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Alexander Hamilton who were all enthusiasts of indigenous and Black genocide in addition to the capturing, raping, and enslaving of African people. Instead, we believe in a restorative justice approach to how history is depicted on our campus. We demand that the true American liberators such as Harriet Tubman, Langston Hughes, and representatives from the Nanticoke-Lenni Lenape Nation, have statues and portraits, have a presence and are celebrated on this campus.

"10. We demand that the university stop forcibly removing people with Black and Brown bodies from the Harlem community via the process of gentrification.

"11. We demand that Columbia divests from all prison labor. In 2015, Columbia University was the first university to divest from prisons, however, this is not inclusive of all companies that profit from us. 

"12. We demand that the voices of marginalized bodies be centered on this campus. We demand equity. We demand our right to protest be protected. We maintain our right to shut down White Supremacy on this campus and in this greater community. We demand liberation."

Columbia's Baker Athletic Complex Land: Donated By Exploiter of Black Convict Labor?

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 20^th 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 19^th-century and early 20^th-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).”