The legacy of slavery and the wealth it brought to a select few continue to echo over time into present-day politics, as a new study found that about one out of every five members of Congress were descendants of slaveholders, and many are far richer than colleagues whose ancestors did not enslave people.
“Our results, over 150 years after emancipation, provide further evidence for the durability of wealth across generations,” the authors write in the study, which was published in the journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday. “It is worth emphasizing that wealth from any source (whether slavery is involved or not) generally creates intergenerational benefits. Wealthy individuals accrue political power which they use to further enhance their wealth in a positive feedback loop.”
Neil K. R. Sehgal, a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and coauthor, hopes the results will inform current debates about inequality and reparations. But he also cautioned it does not necessarily mean the wealth of those members of Congress is directly linked to that of their ancestors.
Take for example Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was among the members of Congress from New England who Reuters found had a slaveholding ancestor in their family. The Reuters investigation found that in a will dated 1848, an ancestor named John Crawford in Maryland had enslaved 14 people, and stipulated that 12 of them be freed in their 30s, with the other two to remain slaves.
Warren has described her upbringing in Oklahoma as “on the ragged edge of the middle class” and recounted a pivotal moment in her family when her mother, at age 50, got her first paying job at a nearby Sears store after her father suffered a heart attack.
Today, the former college professor and author has a net worth of $10.2 million, much of which is from book royalties, investments, and her retirement accounts, according to disclosure reports. She and her husband own two homes, one in Cambridge, the second in Washington, D.C.
Warren has backed various efforts to reconcile the country’s slave-owning past, including supporting a congressional commission on reparations.
A spokesperson for Warren’s office referred to the senator’s previous statement on the Reuters findings: “The legacy of slavery still casts a long shadow over every facet of American life, including Congress. While we cannot change the past, I am fighting in the Senate to address systemic injustices — through word, deed, law and policy.”
Three other New England members of Congress were identified in the study as having slaveholder ancestors: Senators Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, both Democrats of New Hampshire, and Angus King, an independent from Maine.
Hassan, King, and Shaheen did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“The thing that we should take away is that there’s a significant number of members of Congress who ought to be advocates of reparations for Black Americans,” said William Darity, a professor of public policy and African and African American studies at Duke University, who was not involved in the study.
Darity said the country’s history of racist policies and practices ripples into the present landscape of wealth. He pointed to redistributive policies post-Civil War, such as General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 — known as 40 acres and a mule — and how the promise of that policy never came to fruition, as it was later overturned by President Andrew Johnson.
Former plantation lands were instead often restored to former slaveholders, “and that was the foundation for continued wealth building, even if they no longer held human beings as property.”
Sharecropping then continued alongside other discriminatory practices that led to cycles of debt and poverty for Black families.
Dolita Cathcart, associate professor emerita of history at Wheaton College, said slaves were not just laborers for slaveholders, “but were tokens within the financial system that allowed you to get capital to open up new businesses, to buy more land, to essentially buy more people to work the land.”
According to the study, 100 Congress members, most of them white men, are descendants of slaveholders. The states with the greatest number of members of Congress with a family history of slavery include Texas, South and North Carolina, and Georgia.
Nationally, the debate over reparations has yielded little concrete action. California has four state bills related to reparations, and officials in Tulsa, Okla., are also looking into reparations for the 1921 massacre, in which a white mob killed around 300 Black residents.
In New England, Boston has a reparations task force, but any recommendations issued by the group might not materialize for years to come. Cambridge, Amherst, and other cities around the region are also leading local efforts, though progress has been slow.
Support for reparations has not been widely popular in the United States. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 68 percent of US adults are not in favor of reparations for descendants of enslaved people, though there is greater support among Black Americans and Democrats.
Darity hypothesizes that part of the reason people push back on such efforts has to do with “the American attachment to meritocracy,” he said. “People want to maintain the view that what they have is a consequence of their personal accomplishments.”
A separate poll from Reuters/Ipsos, however, found that white Americans who say they learned their ancestors were slaveholders were more likely to support government reparations.
For her part, Cathcart thinks it’s time to push past that shame.
“We can’t keep burying the past simply because it makes us uncomfortable,” she said.
This story was produced by the Globe’s Money, Power, Inequality team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston. You can sign up for the newsletter here.
