In a free fall that began on a weekend in mid-September, Lehman Brothers would go on to lose 93 percent of its stock value. A company born out of a system that treated black people as property died from self-inflicted wounds in the course of destroying the property of black people. Lehman’s fate provides no justice for the enslaved people whose misery the company enabled in the nineteenth century, nor for the dispossessed homeowners ruined by Lehman-owned mortgages in the twenty-first century, but it is a reminder that a society can be run as a zero-sum game for only so long.
