Occupy Wall Street: Push To Commemorate Wall Street Slavery Market Site: Near the corner of Wall and Pearl streets, where businessmen and tourists plod below the towering office buildings and banks that loom over the East River, are the buried bones of one of the nation's most loathsome trades.
The American economy, a vast pool of unevenly distributed wealth, was built on the backs of enslaved Africans and hundreds of years of their forced labor. Few places benefited more directly from the awful business of slavery than Wall Street.
Tuesday marked the 300th anniversary of New York's first official slave market, which was established on Wall Street near Pearl and Water. But these days, little tangible evidence remains of Wall Street's slave-peddling past -- no plaques, no markers or statues, just grainy old maps in city archives and long-forgotten documents detailing who could be bought and sold.
But a small group of mostly white Occupy Wall Street protesters and a black city councilman from Brooklyn are working to change that.
