Citigroup Says Its Predecessors Likely Benefited From Slavery

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A new review of historical documents has led Citigroup to acknowledge that slavery and slave labor most likely enriched the banks and other companies that eventually formed the present-day financial giant. The benefits were likely 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 bank’s public affairs head, Edward Skyler, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. Mr. Skyler said the review also “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 hired an independent historical research firm to carry out the review as part of a racial equity 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 murder, American companies and the public grappled with a fresh reminder of the vast injustices that Black Americans had been experiencing since the United States began taking shape as a country.