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February 9, 2007
Barclays Bullies Brooklyn Paper?
Barclays to Brooklyn: No ‘Blood money’ here
Barclays Bank sent a letter to The Brooklyn Paper claiming that allegations of connections to the slave trade were "simply not true" and "asked that the newspapers 'immediately retract'" stories which made the claim. This letter was also sent to other journalists who covered the Barclays Bank naming-rights controversy.
Editor’s note: Our Barclays coverage
So an official letter copied to Barclays Bank's Gobal General Counsel probably would have The Brooklyn Paper running for the hills, right? NOT!
But we are not retracting our stories. Indeed, further research on our part confirmed the central truth of our coverage: Barclays profited handsomely from slavery and its business dealings with the Apartheid government of South Africa.
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This is not the debate we wanted to have, but it is the debate that Barclays has foisted upon us by sending a letter that tried to absolve itself from what historians say is a clear link to the so-called “Peculiar Institution” of slavery.We would much rather be analyzing the flaws of the Ratner project — the public subsidies that will allow the developer untold profits with very little risk, the huge environmental toll, the steamrolling of the established public review process — than debating the causes and villains of the horrific crime of human bondage.
Besides, our news stories about Barclays were not an examination of whether the bank had profited from slavery — all banks did, so to pretend otherwise is silly. Rather, our initial article — and its follow-up, “Black leaders rip Ratner’s $400M Barclays arena deal” — centered on the outrage that black leaders like Councilwoman Letitia James, Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, former Assemblyman Roger Green, and some church pastors — felt after hearing about the Ratner-Barclays contract.
We did not manufacture their outrage; we reported it, leaving our readers to decide for themselves if the bank’s past bothered them.
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Truell’s letter also took exception to our reference to the bank’s long-documented link to South Africa’s apartheid government, and its role in freezing the accounts of some French Jews during the Holocaust. RicoBut the letter did not substantively dispute the accuracy of our coverage so we stand by those parts of our stories, as well.
Posted by lumi at February 9, 2007 9:48 AM