Another prominent black leader is calling for Bruce Ratner to abandon his $400-million naming-rights deal with Barclays, the British banking firm that profited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and South Africa’s apartheid regime.
“I’m troubled and concerned with this project’s ties to this bank,” said Rev. Clinton Miller of Brown Baptist Memorial Church, who will lead a protest this Sunday.
Unlike other prominent blacks who have questioned Ratner’s partnership with Barclays — including former state Assemblyman Roger Green, his successor Hakeem Jeffries and the Rev. Herbert Daughtry — Miller is a strong critic of the $4-billion megadevelopment.
But like others who objected to the naming-rights deal, Miller has called on Ratner to either terminate the agreement or kick back more money to local residents.
The global investment firm has promised to give $2.5 million to renovate basketball courts in the borough, but Miller, like Green and Jeffries, said it wasn’t enough.
“Brooklynites and New Yorkers of every race and religion should be concerned about the presence [of Barclays] in our borough,” Jeffries told The Brooklyn Paper last week.
Daughtry — a prominent anti-apartheid activist who escorted Nelson Mandela to Brooklyn shortly after the South African freedom fighter was released from jail — also spoke out last week, calling the decision to pair with Barclays “troubling.”
Longtime critics of the project said that the Barclays deal showed Ratner’s true colors.
“This developer doesn’t even have respect for those blacks who support the project,” said Councilman Charles Barron (D-East New York).
Barron plans to attend Sunday’s protest.
Meanwhile, reporters on the rap beat have started to question hip-hop mogul Jay-Z’s continued relationship with Ratner, with such headlines as “Jay-Z’s Team Nets $400m from Ex-Slave-Trade Company” on the celebrity Web site, TMZ.
Jay-Z (a.k.a. Sean Carter) has a history of boycotting companies that offend him. Last year, the jiggaman stopped drinking Cristal champagne after a company executive made an apparently racially tinged comment about the luxe bubbly’s popularity in the rap world.
This time, a boycott looks unlikely for the one-percent Nets owner.
At a press conference on the naming deal two weeks ago, Carter snubbed reporters who questioned him about the slavery connection.
But this week, TMZ launched an online poll with the question: “Is Jay-Z a hypocrite?”
