I was focusing on the sale of one boy, a 13-year-old boy who was sold by the Jesuits who were slave owners and who also founded and ran Georgetown.

And he was sold off to Louisiana and I was following his footsteps.

That's Rachel Swarns, contributing writer to The New York Times.

In 2016, she brought national attention to the story about how Georgetown University used the profits of a slave sale to stay afloat.

It's great reporting and if you haven't read it, you should go check it out.

But that's not why she came by the studio to talk to us today.

She came to tell us a different story, something she stumbled upon while reading those old documents that mentioned this enslaved 13-year-old boy.

You've got this kid Cornelius, right? And he is listed on a shipping manifest for a ship called the Catherine Jackson.

I was looking at the ship, the journey and I realized that there were all these financial entanglements that I never really thought about before.

So there was a guy who was on the Virginia side who was involved with getting these folks on the ship and was paid for that.

There was a merchant on the other side who handled the slaves once they got there.

And that merchant not only helped the buyer with this shipment of human assets, but also provided financing for whatever kind of crop the guy had.

There were banks that some of these guys used and then that took slaves as collateral.

When I looked at this, I said, wow, there is a whole financial network that was involved with this one slave sale.

And once I started thinking about that, I started thinking about other institutions.

And one of these other institutions is still around today. In fact, it's not that far from Rachel's office at the New York Times.

It's called the New York Life Insurance Company.

The company was founded in 1845 and sales were slow at first. It wasn't until the following year when the company found a new line of business that things really took off.

That new line of business was slave insurance.

I'm Changerai Kumanyika. I'm Jack Hit. And this is Uncivil.

Where we ran sack America's history and learned that the past is only what we choose to remember.

Back in 1846, when New York Life was getting started, life insurance was an experimental new financial product.

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