What kind of bank calls the cops on an elderly woman trying to cash a check for $140, even as the man who wrote the check confirmed it was legitimate? Perhaps a bank that at the height of the housing crisis in 2009, would be accused of rampant predatory lending practices, and according to affidavits quoted by the New York Times, referred to blacks as "mud people" and the practice as "ghetto loans".
Some things never change.
Oh, and Barbara Carroll, she's a former assistant bank manager herself, and yes, she is suing them.
Source: Miami New Times
Barbara Carroll just wanted to cash a check for $140. The 78-year-old former probation officer and assistant bank manager, who is black, stopped by a Wells Fargo branch in Fort Lauderdale last November for what she thought would be a quick errand.
Instead, she says, she spent two and a half hours at the bank's Victoria Park location while employees refused to cash her check or return her driver's license, asking the PhD-holder what she did for the money and telling her they had called police. They were suspicious that Carroll was guilty of forgery, she says — even after the man who wrote the check confirmed it was legitimate.
"I felt very embarrassed," she tells New Times. "I felt belittled. I can't tell you the emotions I felt."
After months of national headlines about black people being arrested or threatened with arrest for doing things as mundane as sitting in a Starbucks, barbecuing in a park, visiting a neighborhood pool, and selling water, Carroll has filed a lawsuit over what she describes as her encounter with institutional racism. In a complaint filed last week, she accuses the company of racial discrimination.
