INTRODUCTION

On March 26, 2002, in a United States federal court in Brooklyn, New York, a city transit worker, a 72-year-old retired nurse, and a law school graduate, all descendants of enslaved African Americans, became the first to file corporate reparations lawsuits on behalf of themselves, their descendants and a putative class of approximately 21 million. Their targets: a bank, a railroad and an insurance company, all of which allegedly profited from the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Over the next year, in a coordinated, multi-state strategy, additional lawsuits were filed in federal courts in the cities of: Newark, Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. The list of corporate defendants grew to 17, including several banks, a textile company, a shipping company, finance houses and additional insurance and railroad companies. The lawsuits were consolidated for purposes of pre-trial procedures before a Federal District Court Judge, Charles R. Norgle, in the Northern District of Illinois.

As the filings grew, so did the number of new representative plaintiffs, which came to include the aged children and grandchildren of slaves who could recount the stories of their enslaved parents and grandparents. The New Jersey plaintiff, the son of a sharecropper and grandson of an enslaved master carpenter, vividly recalled the profound sadness of his Great-Aunt as she spoke of her emancipation at age 19. He shared his childhood memories of delivering newspapers and raking leaves for the white-occupants of stately homes built by his enslaved grandfather. Three California plaintiffs and one from Illinois are the children of Andrew Hurdle, who was born into slavery in 1845 and sired children well into his eighties. Ranging in age from 74 to 87, the children recalled the whipping scars on their father's back and his recounting of his devastating separation from his brother on the auction block. In the summer of 2003, eight members of a family from Louisiana, claiming to have been enslaved in remote areas of the South up until the 1960s, joined the litigation. The hundred-yearold father, born in the early 1900s, and seven of his living children retraced their family history of being born enslaved on a rural farm in the Mississippi delta where a poor, white landholding family had kept successive generations of his family enslaved through physical abuse and terror.