Pastors: Racism unchecked in state government
Black pastors are interviewing state workers throughout Delaware to gather evidence and testimony that they say demonstrates that racist practices go unchecked in virtually every state agency. More than 100 state workers have been interviewed in New Castle County in recent months, and the pastors in coming weeks will interview scores more in Kent County and Sussex County.
A court reporter is transcribing all interviews for the Interdenominational Ministers Action Council and the NAACP, and the groups will deliver a report to Gov. Jack Markell this fall.
“I believe the system is sick, and we will have to help [Markell] see the sickness,” said the Rev. Silvester Beaman, pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and president of IMAC. “We would like to see an eradication of this culture of racism that we see exemplified in state government.”
More than 17,000 people are employed by the state of Delaware, with roughly 5,000 of those African American. IMAC ministers and NAACP officials say they’ve heard stories about black employees routinely being passed over for promotions, enduring outright racist acts and being punished more severely for workplace infractions than white employees. In separate interviews with The News Journal, some Department of Transportation employees said they are routinely divided into segregated work crews.
Markell met with the pastors, noting that the state has a zero-tolerance policy against discriminatory practices. He also told the groups that he takes diversity in the workplace seriously.
“Most of the years that I have been governor, we have brought in folks to talk to our cabinet about the best approach that we all can take in terms of fostering a culture and environment that values diversity,” the governor said Friday in an interview with The News Journal.
After meeting with the ministers, Markell sent an email to all state employees to make clear that the pastors and the NAACP “have convinced me that there are valid concerns in this area.” And, the governor added, “Individuals should feel comfortable consulting with this group if they desire and should not fear reprisal for doing so.”
Yet people are afraid of losing their jobs if supervisors learn that they’ve participated in the inquiry, said Beaman. Many African American employees have no confidence in the state’s formal grievance process, said the Rev. Christopher Curry of Ezion Fair Baptist Church in Wilmington, who used his church on July 28 to take testimony from about 50 state workers. He said people came prepared.
“All the people who testified have a lot of documentation,” Curry said. “This is not only about verbal [testimony].”
IMAC and the NAACP are currently withholding names and claims against supervisors, and the groups blocked a News Journal reporter from hearing testimony. But the pastors said names of employees and specific allegations of discriminatory practices will be provided to the governor. Meanwhile, they’re railing against the state’s alleged racist practices from the pulpits of their churches.
The pastors insist that the issue is not about the number of African Americans on the state payroll – it’s the demeaning way African Americans are being treated by their supervisors.
“It’s not about diversity,” Curry told his congregation Sunday. “It’s about racism. There’s a difference.”
The Department of Labor is responsible for investigating discriminatory acts in state government. However, pastors who have taken testimony contend that it is the worst offender among state agencies.
In May, The News Journal requested the number of grievances filed by state employees with the state Department of Labor’s Office of Anti-Discrimination. The department denied the request, officials said, because the newspaper didn’t have written permission from each individual who had filed a complaint against the state.
John McMahon, director of the Department of Labor, said he would be happy to discuss these issues with IMAC and the NAACP – but only after allegations have been announced and documented. Until then, he can’t comment about individual allegations of discrimination because that would fall under personnel matters in which confidentiality must be maintained.
“If they have something that’s formally charged against us, I’ll be happy to try and address it,” said McMahon. “We certainly are willing to sit down with anyone that wants to see our [diversity] numbers and we can go from there.”
The governor called McMahon “an incredibly fair-minded person, and I certainly expect that as we go through this process that we’re going to get all the information that we need.”
Yet Markell suggested that state policy requiring an employee to report a grievance to their direct supervisor might be worth revisiting.
“We started to take a look at the processes within state government and I want to make sure that we’re using best practices in terms of how we deal with these complaints,” Markell told The News Journal. “And I don’t know that we are using best practices.
“Is the process one where the employees will say, ‘That makes sense,’ That it’s not just my own manager, that I may have the complaint against, it’s not just them [the manager] that are investigating the problem.”
White employees made up about 64 percent of the workforce in the Department of Labor in 2014, according to a report from the state Office of Management and Budget. Black employees accounted for about 31 percent of the department – which is larger than the 22 percent of African Americans statewide.
Sherese Brewington-Carr, a management administrator at the DOL, who is black, said those numbers don’t show that most African Americans in state government are working lower-level and mid-level jobs. Change won’t occur, Brewington-Carr said, until more minorities are involved in the hiring decisions.
“We have a lot of diversity at lower levels, but we have little diversity at high levels,” she said.
Brewington-Carr said she is embarrassed that her employer has become the target of the committee’s inquiry. But “warning signs” of employee discontent have not been addressed by management, she said. Rather than solving workplace disputes, some managers have viewed workers who filed grievances as problem employees.
“When persons present problems,” she said, “they are not the problem.”
On Thursday afternoon, Janna Perry, a black road maintenance worker for the Delaware Department of Transportation, picked up garbage from a grassy field that lines the freeway ramp connecting I-295 to I-495. Two black men worked alongside her using long-handled garbage claws to retrieve trash.
On any given day, she might be cleaning DelDOT land or mowing grass along the I-95 corridor. What is usually certain, she said, is that her coworkers will be mostly black.
“They got all the black men and me – I’m the only woman,” Perry said. “We’re all in one group and they got all the white guys on another [job site].”
Charles Purnell, another DelDOT road maintenance employee, who is black, said the tasks are not only largely segregated, but black crews typically have to perform the most arduous, or most unpleasant, duties. Despite his qualifications as an equipment operator, Purnell said he often cleans roads manually alongside black co-workers, while white employees operate machinery.
“Usually, the black guys are doing the grimiest jobs that the white guys don’t want to do,” Purnell said. “They’ll have us all in one group, and maybe have one or two separated from the rest of the group with a bunch of white dudes to make it look like what it not really is, but everybody can see.”
DelDOT supervisors said in an interview Friday that they do not consider race when assigning workers tasks on any given day. Assignments for maintenance crews are based on the availability of personnel on a given day, combined with the qualifications those particular workers might have, said Donald Weber, engineer in DelDOT’s North District facility in Newark. An employee picking up trash one day might be driving a lawnmower the next, he explained.
“When you look at the job assignments, they’re not based on a segregated work crew getting the grimy assignments,” added Mark Alexander, director of maintenance and operations at DelDOT. “We don’t make assignments based on race.”
These allegations might be a legacy of racial tensions that arose at the North District facility three years ago when a worker was disciplined for displaying a Confederate Flag on his truck, said Weber.
Then-Secretary Shailen Bhatt held a town hall meeting for workers at the facility after that incident. That’s when managers learned that employees did not always speak to each other respectfully, said Weber. Race was just one part of broader tensions that existed there, he said.
There was an issue “between staff members and supervisors and how they communicated with each other, treating each other with respect,” Weber said. “It was specific to that facility.”
Purnell, a 10-year-employee, said things haven’t gotten much better since the town hall meeting. He agrees with IMAC and the NAACP that there is a culture of racism at DelDOT. And he notes that Confederate flag license plates remain on vehicles of co-workers.
“There’s bias that goes on every day,” he said. “And it gets overlooked all the time.”
Purnell visited Ezion Fair Baptist Church on July 28 with a plan to describe to pastors the racial bias that he sees daily. He expected his black co-workers to join him, but he was the only one to show. So Purnell decided against giving testimony.
A former DelDOT employee, John Quaciari, backed up Purnell’s claims about bias toward blacks. Quaciari, who’s white, said when he first took a job with DelDOT in Newark in 2007, he noticed that many of the white road workers had grown up operating machinery on nearby farms. Those employees often drove backhoes and other excavators while black workers, some who were qualified with machinery, completed manual labor, he said. He left DelDOT in 2011, and moved to Houston.
“There’s sort of a pecking order to assignments. You have people who are going out picking up trash, and you have people who are doing manual labor,” he said. “Then you have other people operating machines.”
While neither state government officials nor black pastors would speak to the details of instances of alleged racism, The News Journal found one example of Delaware officials responding forcefully to a discrimination complaint in 2013. The Delaware Transit Corporation fired a mechanic, with nearly 20 years of experience, who had tossed banana peels onto the top of a DART bus in a maintenance facility – in view of employees in an adjacent building holding a meeting about racism.
The mechanic, Brian Ennis, contended in a lawsuit against DART that there was no racist intent behind the incident, and that it was coincidental that the meeting occurred while he had thrown the banana peels.
But for the year leading up to the incident, racial tensions had been high at that DART facility in Georgetown, according to court documents, after a white bus driver had given a racist cookbook to a black driver. DART CEO John Sisson said in an interview in May that while his agency holds diversity classes, “there are personalities everywhere” – some of them racist. At the time of the incident, Sisson was DART’s Chief Performance Officer.
“I think management at the time tried to get in there and make sure that [those issues] didn’t grow to be worse than they could have been,” said Sisson. “We do a lot to hold courses on diversity to make sure that there aren’t [tensions].”
Ennis’s case against DART was dismissed in May. He could not be reached for comment.
Pastor Curry first heard complaints about state discrimination last year from members of his congregation who are state employees. The genesis of the investigation came when he met with other ministers counseling congregants about the same issue.
Since then, the pastors have taken testimonials in Wilmington, Middletown and Newport. Although 50 individuals provided testimonials at Ezion Fair, said Curry, roughly 250 people came to the meeting.
“They were there to give moral support,” Curry said, “ whether or not they really want to give testimony.”
The pastors’ probe has identified individual supervisors who have frequently passed over black employees for promotion, said Beaman. He declined to provide those names until his committee presents its findings to Markell, but said that the incidents are particularly common in the Department of Labor.
Beaman wants to see the governor take action against supervisors that the investigation says are discriminating against black employees.
“It would be injurious, if not criminal, for the governor to [keep] them in these positions,” Beaman said.
IMAC and the NAACP said the plight of African Americans is made worse because public employee unions are reluctant to help their members who have faced discrimination. Instead, the union simply directs employees who feel they’ve been wrong to file charges with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Philadelphia, the agency that investigates federal workplace discrimination cases.
“They’re clear, we don’t handle race matters,” Curry said. “Take that to Philadelphia.”
Michael Begatto, executive director of the Delaware Public Employees union, Council 81, contended that union officials “try to get in immediately” to help state employees who make a complaint. He called Curry’s comment about public-sector unions irresponsible, and said his organization addresses discrimination complaints both against supervisors and between employees.
Begatto agrees with the pastors, though, that state agencies need to do more to address discrimination.
“The state needs to take into serious consideration the people that are in authority,” he said. “They need sensitivity training.”
The EEOC received 127 discrimination complaints from all workers in Delaware from 2010 to 2014, and based upon its investigations, it found five cases of discrimination during those years, according to data obtained by the News Journal. Case specifics are not available to the public because of federal privacy laws.
While the governor stated his support for the inquiry, he also noted in his email to state employees that testifying to the pastors does not bring the same legal rights as submitting a formal complaint with the government.
“You should understand that involvement with the NAACP/IMAC process does not initiate the official state government complaint/grievance process and, as a result, does not secure any legal rights under state or federal law,” Markell wrote.
Sen. Karen Peterson, D-Stanton, said workers who speak with IMAC and the NAACP should also file a charge with the state’s Department of Labor or with the EEOC in Philadelphia – because that’s the employees’ best approach for obtaining legal protection from retaliation.
Peterson oversaw the Department of Labor’s Office of Anti-Discrimination in the 1990s. During her time there, she said that the state rarely settled a discrimination case, even after that office ruled against it.
“Then what the employee is left doing is to request a letter of right to sue, which then means that they have to go hire an attorney,” she said.
The News Journal requested the current number of unsettled cases from the state Office of Budget and Management but did not receive that data.
Peterson agrees that racism is a problem in state government, as well as broader society. She said that some supervisors don’t address it because it is too arduous a topic to handle for one person.
“There are some state employees who are supervisors who just don’t want to deal with the issues. They feel like they are underpaid, underappreciated,” she said. “It’s cultural.”
Jonathan Starkey contributed to this report.
Contact Karl Baker at kbaker@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2329. Follow him on Twitter @kbaker6.