An elderly Florida woman has filed a lawsuit accusing Wells Fargo of discrimination after bank employees called the police on her for simply trying to cash a check.
According to the Miami New Times, Barbara Carroll, a 78-year-old black woman who holds a Ph.D., attempted to cash a check in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on November 28, 2017. Carrol says she provided her driver’s license and a passport to a teller at the Victoria Park branch, an upscale neighborhood.
The teller, a white woman, took the identification and told Carroll to have a seat in the bank’s lobby because there was a problem. After Carroll waited for approximately 30 minutes, she asked to see a manager, who unsurprisingly also turned out to be a white woman.
The manager, according to Carroll, asked her what she did for money, refused to cash the check and wouldn’t return Carroll’s identification, informing Carroll that she had called cops. Carroll sat down and waited for the police to arrive, but when they took to long, she decided to call 911 herself.
When the cops arrived almost 2 hours after Carroll first arrived at the bank, the officers checked her ID and informed the bank employees that the license was, in fact, valid. The National Bank of Becky finally cashed the check without even offering an apology and Carroll left angry and humiliated.
“I felt very embarrassed. I felt belittled. I can’t tell you the emotions I felt,” said Carroll, a former bank teller and probation officer. “Things that we — and we being black people — things that we feel are sometimes brushed over, like, ‘Oh, she was just doing her job,’”
Carroll refused to let the slight go by unnoticed. She called Wells Fargo’s corporate office but they gave her some Caucasian nonsense about training (I’ll bet an unendorsed Wells Fargo cashiers check that it was a white woman). So Barbara Carroll hired a lawyer and filed a complaint against the financial institution.
And the most incredible part of this story is the outrageous amount on the check that Amber and Sarah refused to cash because somehow they believed the 78-year-old woman was pulling the most ingenious bank heist ever. How much was Barbara Carroll’s check that prompted a call to the police for suspected bank fraud?
It was only $140.
You know what they say: “You can’t buy love.”
But, apparently, hate is cheap as hell.