Major Northern institutions like Aetna and the Courant profited from slavery.

Evidence

An Associated Press photographer named Jessica Hill had taken that photo, which was published the next day in multiple newspapers. Rick Hartford from the Courant followed up and said, “We’d like to run a feature story on you—and your connection to Papa Renty.” … Two of the Hartford Courant’s best investigative reporters were assigned to my story and I learned through them the paper had done its own investigative piece on itself. As one of the oldest, longest-running newspapers in the United States, it had published ads for runaway slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also ran a story about how Aetna, the Hartford-based insurance company, had insured slaves for the people who owned them—in the 1850s, when enslavement was illegal in Connecticut. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 343

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s thesis that the North’s complicity in slavery is the hidden infrastructure behind institutions like Harvard.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the kind of institutional-behavior documentation that nourishes the reparations argument, supplementing the trees infrastructure piece’s theme of hidden systems.