Presidential Candidate Cornel West Joins Reparations Protest at Capitol Hill Bank

Dr. Cornel West, an unaffiliated presidential candidate, joined a group of protesters picketing in front of Wells Fargo Bank in downtown Washington, D.C., on Tuesday afternoon, bolstering their demands for reparations.

Dr. Cornel West, an unaffiliated presidential candidate, joined a group of protesters picketing in front of Wells Fargo Bank in downtown Washington, D.C., on Tuesday afternoon, bolstering their demands for reparations.

West, who initially ran under the People's Party banner before becoming an Independent, spoke to Fox News Digital after stopping by to offer support for the protesters. He said reparations are a fundamental piece of his lifelong "quest for truth and justice."

"It's been that way for 40 years, and we've had to keep track of all the financial institutions that played a role in terms of benefiting from that unbelievable, barbaric injustice," he said of slavery.

West added that demonstrations like the one on Capitol Hill are a "matter of making sure that people are responsible for their actions."

"This is a way of putting pressure on any institution that benefited from that barbaric institution of slavery – and I'm blessed to be here with my precious brothers."

West, a longtime professor of philosophy and other disciplines at Harvard and Princeton universities, alleged banks like Wells Fargo also benefited from post-Jim Crow injustices. He mentioned the bank's takeover of Wachovia Bank in 2008 just before he was whisked away by security staff.

Wachovia, which integrated into Wells Fargo in 2008, found via a 2005 research project that two of its predecessor institutions owned slaves. Then-chairman Ken Thompson said Wachovia was "deeply saddened" by findings reported by NBC News at the time which indicted South Carolina's defunct Bank of Charleston and the Georgia Railroad & Banking Company.

When approached, several of the protesters declined to speak with Fox News Digital, but activist Truth Bey did take a moment to discuss why she joined the picketing.

"We are trying to hold the banks accountable for being part of chattel slavery – to be point-blank, all of them were involved in chattel slavery," Bey said.

Bey went on to claim African Americans are the only racial or ethnic group that faced injustice and have yet to receive reparatory compensation in some form. She cited Holocaust survivors and their kin in Germany, as well as Japanese internment camp prisoners in the U.S. as two groups to whom governments have attempted to make amends.

Other demonstrators who took the bullhorn said the remnants of big banks' alleged cooperation with or involvement in the slave trade remain "parallel to our very lives today." Several held signs reading, "We're coming to get our check."

In 2012, the Obama Justice Department reached a $184.3 million fair-lending settlement with the San Francisco-based banking behemoth, over findings that African American and Hispanic borrowers were charged higher fees or wrongfully entered into subprime loans.

Requests for comment from the Washington, D.C., branch and Wells Fargo's corporate office were not returned by press time.

Fox News Digital's Aubrie Spady and Andrew Murray contributed to this report.