JPMorgan Says Predecessor Banks Owned Slaves

• Originally published by Reuters on January 20, 2005 [here]

By Chris Sanders

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Banks that later became part of JPMorgan Chase & Co. received thousands of slaves as collateral for 19th century loans, the No. 2 U.S. bank said on Thursday in an apology.

The bank made the revelation to the city of Chicago to comply with an ordinance requiring companies doing business with it to disclose any links to slavery.

JPMorgan also sent a letter to employees apologizing for its' predecessors involvement in a "brutal and unjust institution."

Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana served plantations from the 1830s until the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), Chairman William Harrison and President Jamie Dimon said in the letter. The banks sometimes took ownership of slaves when plantation owners defaulted on loans.

JPMorgan Chase, which became the second largest bank in the United States last year after buying Chicago-based Bank One Corp., estimated that between 1831 and 1865, Citizens Bank and Canal Bank accepted approximately 13,000 slaves as collateral. The banks eventually owned about 1,250 slaves.

"We apologize to the African-American community, particularly those who are descendants of slaves, and to the rest of the American public for the role that Citizens Bank and Canal Bank played," the letter said.

JPMorgan said in its disclosure to Chicago that Canal and Citizens merged in 1924, and appear to have been taken over by Chase in 1931. Canal failed and some of its deposits and loans were included with National Bank of Commerce in New Orleans when it was formed in 1933. In 1998, Bank One purchased the New Orleans bank.

JPMorgan's Bank One unit holds deposits for Chicago, underwrites the city's municipal bonds and helps finance affordable housing.

JPMorgan said it was establishing a $5 million college scholarship program for five years "to both acknowledge the past and improve the future," and to provide full-tuition undergraduate scholarships to black students from Louisiana to attend colleges there.

The bank has posted historical documents concerning this part of its history at www.bankone.com/ourapology.