While digging through the historical records of two predecessors – Citizens Bank and Canal Bank – JPMorgan Chase discovered the two institutions served as banks to plantations from the 1830s until the Civil War. The firm now wants to make amends for its past transgressions.
In a January 20, 2005 self-righteous declaration of moral purity, Bill Harrison and Jamie Diamond said the firm discovered the two predecessors accepted enslaved individuals as collateral on loans, and sometimes took ownership of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans.
With this new knowledge, the bank now apologizes “to the African-American community … for the role that Citizens Bank and Canal Bank played. The slavery era was a tragic time in U.S. history and in our company’s history,” the letter said.
Further, in a show of JPMorgan Chase’s supposed commitment “to creating opportunities for African Americans and to building communities through economic empowerment and education, as well as workforce diversity,” the firm announced a new philanthropic endeavor – Smart Start Louisiana.
Through this program, JPMorgan Chase will provide an initial $5 million over five years for tuition and scholarships to “African-American students from Louisiana to attend colleges in their home state,” while also providing internships to these students at the firm.
To arrive at this point, researchers traced the lineage to find Citizens Bank merged with Canal Bank to form Canal Commercial Trust & Savings Bank in 1924. In 1931, New York-based Chase Bank led a group of investors that provided capital to Canal Bank, and Chase Bank became a shareholder and took a controlling management interest in Canal Bank. Canal Commercial Trust & Savings Bank failed during the Great Depression and was placed into liquidation in March 1933 by order of the federal government. Later, the National Bank of Commerce in New Orleans was formed, which begat the First National Bank of Commerce in 1971, which was merged into Bank One Louisiana, N.A. in 1998. JPMorgan Chase and Bank One merged this past year.