Lehman Brothers’
Cotton Exchange: 1858
Lehman Brothers, a former Fortune 500 global financial services firm, was founded in 1850 in Montgomery, AL by Henry, Emanuel, and Mayer Lehman.
By offering mortgages on enslaved people, banks enabled enslavers to expand their workforce even when they had limited cash.
The business evolved into a cotton brokerage firm and opened an office in New York in 1858, later helping establish the Cotton Exchange.
When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, it held over $600 billion in assets.
The banking industry reaped massive profits from Southern plantations that had amassed wealth through the labor of enslaved Black people—and from other methods of exploitation after slavery was outlawed.
Lehman Brothers used this capital to diversify and expand over time. In partnership with Goldman and Sachs’ Henry Goldman, the company underwrote and funded, among other things, several department stores, including Woolworth’s, Sears, and Macy’s. [#22] Lehman Brothers later was at the center of the 2007 mortgage and 2008 banking and financial crises. When the business filed for bankruptcy in 2008, it marked one of the largest bankruptcies in history.
To what extent was our economy designed to be fair?
To what extent was our economy designed to be fair?
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Dispossession of Land
from Indigenous Peoples:
1607 – Present Day
Wall Street Established
as an Official Trading
Post of Enslaved Peoples:
1711
Invention of the Cotton
Gin Accelerates the
Expansion of Slavery:
1794
Choctaw Nation Forced
to Abandon Ancestral
Lands for “Indian
Territory”: 1831
Lehman Brothers’
Cotton Exchange: 1858
Sharecropping and Debt
Peonage: 1870s-1940s
Prison Labor:
1870s - Present Day
Railroads and Chinese
Laborers: 1880s-1890s
Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre: 1921
Stock Market Crashes, Ushering in the Great Depression: 1929
LA Police "Repatriate" Mexican Americans and Immigrants at La Placita Park: 1931
The Home Owners Loan Corporation Develops Redlining: 1933
Report on “Pinklining” Reveals How Wall Street Targets Women for Toxic Loans: 2016
