Exclusive: Independent presidential candidate Cornel West joined a group of protesters picketing outside the Wells Fargo Bank in downtown Washington, D.C., on Tuesday afternoon to press for reparations.
West, who initially ran under the People’s Party banner but then chose to run as an independent, spoke to Fox News Digital after stopping by to offer support to protesters.
West’s interactions with the assembled protesters indicated that he was planning to head to Harlem, New York, to participate in another event in the afternoon, suggesting that he joined the protests for a short period of time. .
West said reparations are a fundamental part of his lifelong “search for truth and justice.”
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Independent presidential candidate Professor Cornel West demands reparations at Wells Fargo in Washington, DC, Tuesday, May 21, 2024. (Charlie Crates/Fox News)
“It’s been like that for 40 years, and we’re going after every financial institution that played a role in profiting from that incredibly barbaric injustice,” he said of slavery. I had to,” he said.
“So this is a question of truth, a real condition of who is allowed to suffer,” West said, adding that demonstrations like the one at the Capitol “responsible for people to be responsible for their actions.” “It’s a matter of confirming that,” he added.
“This is a way to put pressure on all the institutions that have benefited from the barbaric institution of slavery. I am happy to be here with my dear brothers.”
West, a longtime professor of philosophy and other disciplines at Harvard and Princeton universities, argued that banks like Wells Fargo also benefited from post-Jim Crow fraud. Just before he was taken away by security, he mentioned the 2008 acquisition of Wachovia Bank.
The bank was founded in 1852 by Henry Wells and William Fargo as a middleman for trade in the New West during the California Gold Rush and has since grown nationally, acquiring other large companies such as Wachovia and Core States.
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Wachovia, which merged with Wells Fargo in 2008, discovered through an investigative project in 2005 that two of its predecessor financial institutions owned slaves. Then-chairman Ken Thompson said Wachovia was “deeply saddened” by the findings. NBC News reported At this time, the defunct Bank of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Georgia Railroad Banking Company were indicted.
Some of the protesters spoke to FOX News Digital but declined to be interviewed, but activist Truth Bey took a moment to talk about why she participated in the picketing.
“We’re trying to hold banks accountable for their involvement in chattel slavery. To put it bluntly, all banks were involved in chattel slavery,” Bey said.
Bay went on to argue that African Americans are the only racial and ethnic group that has been wronged and has yet to receive some form of reparation. She cited Holocaust survivors and their relatives in Germany and Japanese concentration camp prisoners in the United States as two groups the government is trying to compensate.
In 1942, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that forced the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans.
The Japanese Claims Act of 1948 then provided compensation for property loss, and in 1988, a 10-year unit within the Department of Justice was established to provide tax-free compensation of $20,000, according to the U.S. National Archives. Handled claims.
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Other demonstrators holding bullhorns at the protest said the legacy of big banks’ alleged collaboration and involvement in the slave trade remained “exactly the same as our lives today.”
Some held placards that read, “I’m here to pick up my check.” A witness, who declined to be identified, claimed to have seen someone waving a black supremacist flag in the crowd of protesters.
In 2012, the Obama Justice Department filed a $100 million lawsuit with a giant San Francisco-based bank over an investigation that found African-American and Hispanic borrowers were charged high fees and unfairly entered into subprime loans. An $84.3 million fair financing settlement was reached.
We reached out to Wells Fargo’s Washington, D.C., and corporate headquarters for comment, but did not receive a response by press time.
Fox News Digital’s Aubrie Spady and Andrew Murray contributed to this report.
