The Barclays Center: What's In a Name?

The deal to put the name of Barclays Bank on the Atlantic Yards Arena is stirring a bit of controversy. On Wednesday, Fans for Fair Play circulated an email digging into the bank's history. The new Brooklyn Paper's front-page headline is "Blood Money," which expands on the bank's historic connection to the slave trade, its role in World War II and its support for the apartheid government in South Africa, among other things.

Here's some of what Fans for Fair Play wrote in an email blast:

Ratner has just sealed a deal with a company that didn't just profit from, but was FOUNDED upon, slave-trade profits (1756). There are other disquieting machinations...apartheid funding, deals with French collaborators during WWII, current loans to exploitive mining operations in Congo, etc.

From the website itself, there is this about Barclays background:

* a major funder of South Africa's apartheid regime;
* a rotten place for women to work through the 1970s;
* sued by French Jewish holocaust survivors for working with French Nazi collaborators during World War II;
* funding exploitive mining operations in Congo;

The Brooklyn Paper reports that the company's senior archivist, Jessie Campbell, defended the bank’s link to slavery in a letter to the London paper, the Guardian, as something that must “be understood in the context of the times,” he wrote. “In the mid-18th century, trading in slaves was the norm.” During the Holocaust, the BP says, "Barclays’ French branches froze the accounts of their Jewish customers. After being sued by Hitler’s victims and their descendents, Barclays agreed in 1999 to pay $3.6 million in restitution. Nazi officials kept the proceeds from Jews’ forced property sales at Barclays, the suit charged."

Of course, one could criticize many financial institutions, especially ones whose history reaches back a century or more, on dealings 50 or 100 years ago. The same could be said of any number of multinational corporations. So, there will be many opinions around Brooklyn about this information and whether it is fair to bring it up. All that said, as information goes, the background on Barclays is fascinating.