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NARR:
In 2004, developer Bruce Ratner, of Forest City Ratner Companies, bought the New Jersey Nets for an estimated three-hundred-million dollars. Last week, Barclays, a British financial company, bought the rights to name the Nets' new home, for more than four-hundred-million dollars.
Many Brooklynites are upset about who bought those rights. They believe that Barclays, like many old financial companies, has ties to the transatlantic slave trade.
The Reverend Clinton Miller is the Pastor at Brown Memorial Baptist Church, on Washington Avenue, in Brooklyn. He wants Barclays to acknowledge that it sold slave insurance. And he wants the company to apologize.
ACT 1:
I think that the only way for us, as not only a community, but as a country, to progressively move forward, is to look at what happened in the past, and start and move forward together in the future. But if they don't admit it, then the healing can never take place, and the restoration can never take place.
NARR:
Gary Simon, who teaches business at N-Y-U, has studied slave insurance. He says it's hard to determine how active a role companies played in the slave trade. For one thing, records are incomplete.
ACT 2:
You know, it's a strange game. It's not clear whether these people are profiting from slavery, whether they're enabling slavery, or whether they're simply ameliorating the side conditions.
NARR:
He also says that the Barclays of today and the Barclays of, say, 1800, are totally different companies.
ACT 3:
Other participants in this went through mergers, acquisitions and takeovers, so that the identity got very muddled. So that means that when you find a business that, say, did bad things in the 1800s, it's pretty hard to identify what that business is now.
NARR:
Barclays has not acknowledged or apologized for its purported involvement in the slave trade. In an email, company spokesman Peter Truell called the allegations against Barclays "damaging" and "untrue."
Simon believes that Barclays should apologize.... The bank doesn't have to acknowledge any guilt. He says that, even if the allegations levied against the bank are untrue, gossip can damage its reputation.
ACT 4:
Once the issue gets out there and it gets too big, what the public believes may be a lot more important than what the truth is.
NARR:
The Reverend Miller wants to meet with Bruce Ratner and executives from Barclays. He says "all options should be on the table."
ACT 5:
We can talk about everything from a public apology to a termination of the agreement and if termination is not possible, i think we have to appropriately talk about substantive restitution and corporate responsibility.
NARR:
Rumors of the bank's dubious history have already spread through blogs and local newspapers. The Barclays Center will be at the center of controversy in Brooklyn, for a while longer.
SOC:
I'm David Gura, Columbia Radio News.