Citigroup Says Its Predecessors Likely Benefited From Slavery

A brand new evaluate of historic paperwork has led Citigroup to acknowledge that slavery and slave labor almost certainly enriched the banks and different firms that finally shaped the present-day monetary big.

The advantages have been prone to have come to Citi’s predecessors “through financial transactions and relationships with individuals and entities located or operating in the United States before 1866,” the financial institution’s public affairs head, Edward Skyler, wrote in a weblog put up on Thursday.

Mr. Skyler mentioned the evaluate additionally “reaffirmed our previous research in that it did not identify any records showing that Citi or a predecessor institution directly purchased, sold or held enslaved persons.”

Citi employed an impartial historic analysis agency to hold out the evaluate as a part of a racial fairness pledge it made in 2020 after George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer. In the weeks after Mr. Floyd’s homicide, American firms and the general public grappled with a contemporary reminder of the huge injustices that Black Americans had been experiencing for the reason that United States started taking form as a rustic.

“Inequities resulting from the United States’ history of slavery have shaped barriers that Black communities continue to face more than 150 years after the abhorrent practice was abolished,” Mr. Skyler wrote on Thursday.

The evaluate checked out paperwork from Citi’s archives, in addition to information held by the New York Public Library and Cornell University, the Library of Congress, and municipal places of work and the historic society in Alabama. Not the entire information that Citi’s predecessor establishments had have been preserved, the financial institution acknowledged in a abstract of the evaluate.

Three focal factors emerged within the evaluate as doable sources of wealth and revenue from slavery: a predecessor financial institution’s dealings with a big Alabama landowner within the 1830s; the income earned by Lehman Brothers, which was based in 1850 and partly merged with Citi in 1998; and the private enterprise of a person who had a vital function in Citi’s early improvement, Moses Taylor.

The Alabama buyer led to a useless finish within the information, however connections to Lehman Brothers and Taylor led the historians to conclude that Citi did have historic monetary ties to slavery.

In Taylor’s case, the historians cited work printed by Princeton in 2016, in addition to books and articles by historians of Citi printed as early as 1974, highlighting the New York service provider’s involvement in importing sugar from Cuba that was produced by slave labor. His sugar imports earned Taylor a fortune, and he stored a lot of it on the City Bank of New York.

The financial institution, based in 1812, is what Citigroup executives typically level to when boasting about Citi’s 200-year historical past. Taylor used it “as a private treasury for his own enterprises and required his companies to keep their principal accounts” there, in line with Citi’s report.

“City Bank of New York likely profited indirectly from enslaved labor in Cuba by engaging in transactions with Taylor and his businesses,” the report mentioned.

The report is the primary time the financial institution has acknowledged Taylor’s ties to the slave commerce in materials displayed on its web site. Earlier descriptions of Taylor printed by Citi referred to him as a “commodities trader.”

“We applaud the truth today, but truth is not enough,” Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the manager director of the Restitution Study Group, which researches firms’ ties to slavery, mentioned in an e-mail to The New York Times on Thursday. “We urge Citigroup to reach out to us to discuss an appropriate form of restitution.”

A consultant for the financial institution declined to remark.

The newest analysis is just not the primary investigation Citi has made into its connections to slavery. In the early 2000s, states and cities, together with California, Milwaukee and Chicago, handed measures requiring firms doing enterprise with them to analysis and disclose their ties to slavery.

Some of Citi’s friends have mentioned they turned up cases of predecessor establishments having owned enslaved folks, written insurance coverage contracts on them or accepted them as collateral for loans, however Citi mentioned it had discovered no direct involvement.