State Street CEO Ron O’Hanley sat before the House Financial Services Committee in April 2019 as one of several banking executives grilled about their institution’s involvement in the slave trade.
When asked to raise their hands if their banks had benefited from slavery, O’Hanley kept his hands on the table in front of him — indicating that State Street had not.
But GBH News has obtained a report commissioned by State Street and completed this spring which tells a very different story.
A team of researchers at Rutgers University found that wealth accumulated from the slave trade served as the seed money to establish State Street’s oldest ancestor, Union Bank.
The Rutgers researchers discovered that many of the bank’s founders owned at least one Black enslaved person prior to the 1783 abolition of slavery in Massachusetts.
Moses Gill, the president of Union Bank and acting governor of Massachusetts for the year before his death, was a confirmed enslaver of at least six people. Three of those slaves have marked graves identifying Gill as their enslaver.
The report also says that Union Bank’s original office on State Street was a mansion that housed slaves for decades before it was turned into a bank.
Paul Francisco, chief diversity officer at State Street, confirmed that the company commissioned the historical analysis of its involvement in the slave trade. The historical report is a result of the company’s post-2020 efforts to address the social justice movement, Francisco said.
“The report does not conclusively say that State Street … today has benefited from slavery,” Francisco told GBH News.
What the report did find is that many of the company’s founders and early stakeholders, including its first president, benefited from slavery.
From those beginnings State Street has evolved into the 14th largest bank in the country and one of the largest banks in the world with $325 billion in total assets. Union Bank became the National Union Bank of Boston after receiving a national charter in 1865. State Street Deposit & Trust was founded in July 1891. The State Street of today was birthed from a merger of National Union and State Street in October 1925, maintaining the State Street name but operating under National Union’s charter.
Historians say that the founders’ level of involvement in the slave trade, especially in a port city, isn’t particularly surprising.
Margaret Newell, a history professor at Ohio State University, said that slavery and the slave trade weren’t something that only a few individuals participated in at the time.
“They were embedded in the New England economy from the beginning,” she said.
“Historians do know that a lot of these financial institutions in the early Republic had pretty deep ties to slavery, even in sort of abstract ways,” said author and historian Jared Ross Hardesty.
For example, the Rutgers report found Union Bank and Gill had close ties to the prominent Boylston family, a family that made a fortune through the transatlantic slave trade — owning several slaving ships and profiting from slave-produced goods.
Gill was married to a daughter of the Boylston family, and wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, Thomas Boylston in November 1792, urging him to become a stockholder as “stocks are held principally by Gentleman in Trade.” The Boylston brother and slave trader agreed to invest in Union Bank and months after that initial investment, Gill wrote to Thomas in March 1793, saying he would send a “statement of the Union Bank shares I have purchased for you when a Dividend of 8 percent will be made.”
Hardesty said these historic institutions are better off sharing this background with the public.
“Not acknowledging the history will do more damage to the brand than openly acknowledging it,” Hardesty said. “At some point, not acknowledging it when it is common knowledge becomes a bit of a liability.”
Francisco said that the Rutgers report was shared with all 40,000 of State Street’s employees this summer, and that the opinion of its employees overrides that of the public.
“The reason we haven’t released it public is because it’s not for public consumption yet. This is something that we want to manage and we want to handle internally with our employees,” Francisco said.
“We are proud of what we do at State Street. We have been proud of our journey in this space. We are one of the few companies that’s still very intensely committed to doing this work correctly and public opinion is not going to take us off course,” he added.
Since the report was completed in the spring, Francisco said the company has been in conversation with its employees, specifically Black employees, asking for their input and hosting listening sessions and open forums.
“It’d be very premature for us to release something publicly when we still don’t know what it is that we want to do (or) how we want to address the findings,” he said.
Since 2020, the company has internally addressed its involvement in slavery. State Street put together a Civil Rights audit, which outlined its plan to “become a leader” on racial equity. In February, the company also announced a $100 million investment to community lenders.
In June 2020, Hannah Grove, State Street’s then-chief marketing officer, told employees via the company’s messaging board Collaborate, “we have no reason to believe that State Street’s ancestor bank had anything to do with or funded the ships used by slave traders.”
A little more than two years later, in September 2022, O’Hanley said the company would be tasking an independent researcher to better understand State Street’s ties, “if any,” to slavery.
“We are committed to being transparent about our research, so that we can understand, heal and grow from our findings,” O’Hanley said in an internal statement at the time.
The Rutgers research team said the report “is meant to be illustrative rather than exhaustive in its coverage of the topic.”
The individual researchers and the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers did not respond to requests for comment.
Francisco said there is no timeline on when State Street plans to release the report publicly. The City of Boston is in the process of commissioning its own report on slavery and Francisco said there may be an opportunity for collaboration on that front.
“I have had a conversation with the City of Boston on their efforts and they’re aware of our efforts,” Francisco said.
