By Donna Lamb

Clive Campbell, leader of the Brooklyn youth group Da Black Defense League, has filed a slavery genocide lawsuit in State Court in Kings County, Brooklyn demanding compensation for Barclays Bank’s alleged role in enslaving his Jamaican ancestors and the resulting destruction of his African ethnic and national identity.

Campbell alleges that Barclays engaged in acts of genocide with "the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, my national and ethnic group.  In particular, my ancestors were forced out of Africa into Jamaica."  He further alleges, "It was foreseeable and intended that my African ancestors enslaved by Barclay's Bank would have descendants." These descendants were intended to "live under the same conditions as the originally enslaved – forever removed from their ethnic and national group."

Campbell is demanding a total of $5 billion in genocide compensation and punitive damages for himself and the Black community.

The lawsuit, which was removed to the Eastern District Federal Court in Brooklyn by defendants earlier this month, presents details of Barclay's role in enslaving Africans as reported by the Restitution Study Group (RSG) in 2007 in a document it issued recognizing the 200th anniversary of the close of the British slave trade.

Of particular note in the research is information on two prominent slave-trading bankers, Benjamin and Arthur Heywood, brothers from Liverpool, England, who founded Arthur Heywood, Sons & Co. (Heywoods Bank) in 1773. In 1883, the bank merged into Martins Bank, which, in turn, merged into Barclays Bank in 1968.

According to British records, the Heywood brothers founded their bank with money earned from the slave-trade, and used the bank to help other merchants engage in the slave-trading business as well. The Heywood brothers engaged in at least 125 slave-trading voyages. They enslaved 38,620 Africans, 6,045 of whom died during the Middle Passage before reaching the Americas.

Those enslaved were stolen from eight different regions of Africa. Most were enslaved in Jamaica, and some in the Carolinas and Virginia. Few of their living descendants have any knowledge of their African nationality or ethnicity – injuries defined as genocide or ethnic cleansing in international human rights law.

Today, Barclays is poised to become the 5th largest bank in the world if it merges, as rumored, with the Dutch bank ABN Amro. With this merger, it will inherit the assets as well as the liabilities of ABN Amro. The Restitution Study Group and other critics urge Barclays to do the right thing and tell the whole truth about its history as to slavery and recognize that it inherited the liabilities of Heywoods Bank along with its assets.

Although Barclays denied links to slavery in numerous reports, they were forced to admit to their possible role when confronted with the RSG findings in the British newspaper, The Observer.

Barclays has now conceded that companies it acquired over the years may have been involved in the slave trade. But it said that board members have not discussed the issue, and a spokesman refused to say whether they would do so soon.

In February the bank dismissed separate allegations of links to slavery. "We have been unable to substantiate these allegations," said a Barclay’s spokesman. "That said, Barclays has been in business for over 310 years and, while it is possible that some organizations acquired by Barclays may have had some linkage with the slave-trade, our founders, by virtue of their very strong Quaker connections, were members of the abolitionist movement."

Along with seeking genocide compensation, Clive Campbell’s lawsuit also attempts to block Barclays' naming of a new Atlantic Yards Brooklyn sports arena after itself – Barclays Center – for which it has agreed to pay the arena’s owners almost $400 million. Campbell is pushing for the site to be named the Harriet Tubman Arena.

Other defendants named in the action include the co-owners of the arena, developer Bruce Ratner and hip-hop mogul Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter, who Campbell says worked "in concert" with Barclays and "profited from the African Slave Trade and continue to profit from these gains, through a conspiracy dating back hundreds of years and continue to date to oppress Black people, enslave them, unlawfully deport them to all corners of the earth."

For more information, call Clive Campbell at (646) 944-7720 or (646) 963-1468 or email him at money22bk@yahoo.com .