Discrimination Attorneys

The historian John Hope Franklin is black to the naked eye. A boulevard named in his honor runs through Greenwood, the black section of Tulsa, Okla., where he lived as a child. The Franklins are not just black, however, but also Native American. Milley Franklin, Mr. Franklin’s grandmother, was one-quarter Choctaw and was raised as Choctaw, attending Indian schools. Her children — including John Hope Franklin’s father, the lawyer B. C. Franklin — are clearly listed on the official tribal rolls that determined who was a member of the Choctaw Nation. The rolls were important, since tribal members got land when the reservations were dissolved.

Americans are often shocked to learn that black Indians exist at all — and that Native Americans actually held slaves. Like the white slave owners they emulated, Native Americans often fathered children by enslaved women and occasionally — as in Milley Franklin’s case — treated those children as family. As a result, millions of black Americans are descended from black people who were either members of the tribes during slavery or adopted into them just after Emancipation.

White families have begun to acknowledge mixed-race connections after centuries of denial. But the attitudes of some Native Americans have not evolved in the same way. Both the Seminole and the Cherokee tribes have employed discriminatory policies to prevent black members from receiving tribal benefits — and to strip them of the right to vote in tribal elections.

The Interior Department, which oversees the tribal governments through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has historically regarded this kind of racial discrimination as a violation of 19th-century treaties that required the Indian nations to treat black members as full citizens. But the Bush administration could conceivably change course and actually validate these disc

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President F. W. de Klerk urged today that people of all races be admitted to the governing National Party, which won power more than four decades ago as the racially exclusive guarantor of Afrikaner supremacy.

President F. W. de Klerk urged today that people of all races be admitted to the governing National Party, which won power more than four decades ago as the racially exclusive guarantor of Afrikaner supremacy.

Mr. de Klerk coupled the policy reversal with an appeal for ”political cooperation across existing party lines” and suggested that the party, as it advances toward negotiations on a new political order in South Africa, would seek new alliances with other political groups as part of ”an inevitable realignment in the party political sphere.”

”The new South Africa demands that those who belong together through inner conviction should come together,” Mr. de Klerk said at a regional party convention in Durban. ”Racism and racial discrimination have had their time in South Africa.”

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The House of Representatives passed a major crime bill today after approving an amendment that would permit prisoners under death sentences to seek reversal of their sentences if they could produce evidence suggesting a pattern of racial discrimination in prior state cases.

The House of Representatives passed a major crime bill today after approving an amendment that would permit prisoners under death sentences to seek reversal of their sentences if they could produce evidence suggesting a pattern of racial discrimination in prior state cases.

The anti-discrimination measure, approved 218 to 186, would apply retroactively to existing death-penalty convictions and could have a profound effect on the country’s 2,400 death-row inmates, most of whom are black.

”Racism continues to be indigenous, not only in our society, but in our criminal-justice system,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland. ”If you represent a black defendant, you know he is at greater risk than a white defendant.”

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In what appears to be a significant admission of racial problems within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency has reached out-of-court settlements in recent months in major discrimination cases involving black employees.

In what appears to be a significant admission of racial problems within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency has reached out-of-court settlements in recent months in major discrimination cases involving black employees.

One case was brought by a black agent in Chicago, and civil rights lawyers said they believed this was the first time the bureau had ever settled a racial discrimination lawsuit involving an agent.

The settlements come after a series of highly publicized and embarrassing disclosures about internal discrimination at the F.B.I., which is responsible for enforcing the nation’s civil rights laws.

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A committee appointed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recommended yesterday that the state halt executions until the effects of possible racial bias in capital cases are better understood.

”There are strong indications that Pennsylvania’s capital justice system does not operate in an evenhanded manner,” the committee wrote. ”Empirical studies conducted in Pennsylvania to date demonstrate that, at least in some counties, race plays a major, if not overwhelming, role in the imposition of the death penalty.”

Blacks are overrepresented on death row in Pennsylvania by all measures, the report said, with 62 percent of the inmates. Pennsylvania is, the report said, second to Louisiana in the percentage of blacks on death row, at 65 percent.

The committee urged the Supreme Court and Gov. Edward G. Rendell to impose an immediate moratorium, but it appears highly unlikely that the court or the governor will do so.

The recommendation is part of a broader 550-page report by the panel, the Committee on Racial and Gender Bias in the Judicial System. It has been studying the issues since 1999, said its chairman, Nicholas P. Cafardi, who is dean of Duquesne University Law School.

The committee urged the court to create a commission to study how the races of capital defendants and victims affect prosecutorial decisions and sentences. No executions should proceed, the committee said, ”until policies and procedures intended to ensure that the death penalty is administered fairly and impartially are adopted.”

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Shoney’s, the big restaurant chain which settled one of the nation’s largest racial discrimination lawsuits in 1992, is at the center of a debate between large investors and the Securities and Exchange Commission over shareholder resolutions about workplace issues.

Three religious organizations’ investment funds, and a union pension fund, have called for a shareholder vote on a proposal at Shoney’s Inc.’s annual meeting in March. The measure, if approved, would require Shoney’s to account publicly for its efforts since 1994 to reverse discriminatory employment and purchasing practices.

The Nashville-based chain, whose earnings were walloped after it paid the $103 million settlement, informed the S.E.C. last month of its decision to exclude the proposal from its proxy.

”It’s not a prudent use of our resources to generate this report,” said Betty J. Marshall, a Shoney’s spokeswoman. She said a similar request from the United Methodist Church pension fund was put before Shoney’s shareholders last year and was rejected by 82 percent of those voting.

Proponents of the Shoney’s measure say they are trying again because they believe that events at Texaco Inc. underscore why Shoney’s record on race issues is of vital interest to shareholders. Texaco management was forced to cede control of the company’s personnel policies last month as part of a settlement of a racial discrimination lawsuit.

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Last year, after 16 years as an agent in the insular fraternity of the Secret Service, Reginald G. Moore had made it to one of the most prestigious posts in the agency as a lead agent on President Clinton’s protective detail, entrusted with Mr. Clinton’s life. Mr. Moore seemed to be poised to advance to the agency’s managerial ranks.

But even though his written evaluation for 1999 shows that he was among the most outstanding agents of his rank, Mr. Moore, who is black, said he was denied a promotion and given the task of training the white agent promoted ahead of him. When Mr. Moore was reassigned to a counterfeiting squad in Dallas, he decided to defy the Secret Service’s traditional code of silence.

”I did it the way I was supposed to do it,” Mr. Moore, 40, said recently. ”I got a very, very wrong deal.”

Today, Mr. Moore officially became a lead plaintiff in a class-action complaint filed with the government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a legal action that accuses the Secret Service of a pattern and practice of racial discrimination dating to 1987 in promotions through biased selections, highly subjective personnel evaluations, arbitrary transfers and an unfair system of bonuses and awards.

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Carol Boggess says she was ”eager and willing to serve” on the jury in the 1986 capital murder trial of Thomas Miller-El in Dallas. When questioned by prosecutors, Ms. Boggess, an occupational therapist, said she strongly supported capital punishment and ”had no doubt at all” that she could sentence a person to death.

Wayman Kennedy, a Sunday school teacher and church deacon, also wanted to be on the jury and told prosecutors he felt confident of his ability to impose a death penalty. So did Billy Jean Fields, a postal worker.

Mr. Miller-El is black. He was charged with shooting two white hotel clerks, one of them fatally, during a robbery in November 1985.

Ms. Fields, Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Boggess are also black. All were excluded from the jury panel by Dallas County prosecutors, as were seven of eight other blacks interviewed as prospective jurors.

The jury the prosecutors accepted was composed of nine whites, one Filipino, one Hispanic and one black man who told prosecutors that he thought that execution was too easy, and that the appropriate punishment for murderers was to ”pour some honey on them and stake them out over an ant bed.”

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Four persons were killed in a collision between a Long Island Railroad express train and an automobile at Central Park, a village in Nassau County thirty miles east of Brooklyn, at 5:20 o’clock yesterday afternoon.

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Thirty-five years after the dismantling of legalized segregation, a majority of Americans maintain that race relations in the United States are generally good, but blacks and whites continue to have starkly divergent perceptions of many racial issues and they remain largely isolated from each other in their everyday lives, according to a nationwide poll by The New York Times.

The poll reflected some of the same complex tensions that have surfaced in The Times’s six-week examination of contemporary race relations, ”How Race is Lived in America.” The series has portrayed a stubbornly enduring racial divide, and the poll suggested that even as the rawest forms of bigotry have receded they have often been replaced by remoteness and distrust in places of work, learning and worship.

The poll, which surveyed 2,165 adults, detected some signs that both blacks and whites believe race relations are improving. The proportion of those surveyed who said race relations in the country were generally good — 57 percent — was at its highest mark in 10 years, a full 16 percentage points higher than in 1990. Large majorities of both races — 63 percent of whites and 79 percent of blacks — said they approved of interracial marriage, compared with only 44 percent of whites and 70 percent of blacks who said so in a 1991 poll.

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Two former executives of Texaco Inc. who had been taped discussing the destruction of documents demanded in a racial-discrimination lawsuit against the company were found not guilty yesterday on charges they had tried to obstruct justice.

Lawyers for Richard Lundwall, the man who secretly recorded the meetings, and Robert Ulrich, the former treasurer of the big oil company, said the acquittals vindicated their argument that the two had done nothing illegal. But the verdict by the jury of eight men and four women in a Federal court in White Plains stunned and angered civil rights leaders, who said it was based on technicalities and sent a disturbing message about permissible behavior by corporate officers.

The jury foreman, Julius Sas, said in a telephone interview last night that the jury, which included one black woman, was initially split. But over four days, they decided that for several reasons, including the fact that gaps in the tapes created the possibility that comments could have been taken out of context, ”there was just too much doubt in our minds.”

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In a direct countermove to the United States Supreme Court, Minnesota has expanded its human rights law to broaden the rights of employees and subcontractors who want to take job discrimination complaints to the state’s courts.

In a direct countermove to the United States Supreme Court, Minnesota has expanded its human rights law to broaden the rights of employees and subcontractors who want to take job discrimination complaints to the state’s courts.

Gov. Rudy Perpich, a Democrat, has signed legislation that is the most far-reaching so far in seeking to overturn the effects of Supreme Court decisions last June on employment discrimination.

Civil rights advocates have said the rulings by the High Court made it more difficult for people to press discrimination lawsuits under Federal law.

The Minnesota legislation, would help a plaintiff in an employment discrimination case in three ways:

* It would permit a person to claim discrimination not only in hiring decisions, but also at any time after the person was hired. Subcontractors could make similar discrimination claims against a contractor.

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Following are excerpts from the Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 decision yesterday holding that jurors may not be excluded on the basis of race from serving in civil cases. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion was joined by Justices Byron R. White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia; Justice Scalia also filed a separate dissent.

We must decide in the case before us whether a private litigant in a civil case may use peremptory challenges to exclude jurors on account of their race. Recognizing the impropriety of racial bias in the courtroom, we hold the race-based exclusion violates the equal protection rights of the challenged jurors. . . .

Thaddeus Donald Edmonson, a construction worker, was injured in a job-site accident at Fort Polk, La., a Federal enclave. Edmonson sued Leesville Concrete Company for negligence in the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, claiming that a Leesville employee permitted one of the company’s trucks to roll backward and pin him against some construction equipment. . . .

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AS the nation struggles to come to grips with issues of race and how to rectify past and present racial discrimination, a thought-provoking notion is beginning to be voiced: shift the emphasis of affirmative action programs from race to class.

It is an idea being espoused by conservatives such as Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court Justice, and William Julius Wilson, the liberal sociologist from the University of Chicago, and Stuart E. Eizenstat, who was Jimmy Carter’s domestic policy adviser. The rationale is that class-based affirmative action would still overwhelmingly benefit blacks, who are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the poor. But at the same time it would eliminate the appearance of so-called reverse discrimination.

Recently, Richard Cohen, the liberal columnist for the Washington Post, added his voice to those calling for a rethinking of affirmative action.

“If economic need, not race, became the basis for what we now call affirmative action, most Americans would not object,” he wrote. “Whites, too, could be helped as, indeed, they should be. After all, poor is poor, although a disproportionate number of them are black.”

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In an effort to head off a lawsuit by black agents, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation met today with a group of the agents to reassure them that he was committed to correcting discrimination in the agency.

The director, William S. Sessions, acknowledged that there had been serious problems in the past and promised that he would work with the agents to resolve their complaints over recruitment, hiring and promotion, according to people who attended the meeting.

After the meeting, David J. Shaffer, a lawyer for the black agents, said that while he was encouraged by Mr. Sessions’s remarks, he had not yet decided whether to file the lawsuit against the bureau charging racial discrimination. Mounting Tension on Race

Earlier in the day, nearly 250 black agents met with Mr. Sessions and Floyd I. Clarke, a deputy director of the bureau, for a question-and-answer session.

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The Supreme Court ruled today that a prosecutor did not necessarily violate the Constitution by removing people who are fluent in Spanish from a jury in a case against a Hispanic defendant.

The Court said a prosecutor’s doubts, based on the prospective jurors’ answers to questions about whether Spanish-speaking jurors would abide by the official English translation of Spanish-language testimony could be a valid explanation for excluding most Hispanic members of the jury pool.

The vote in the case was 6 to 3, but there was no majority opinion.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote a plurality opinion that was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Byron R. White and David H. Souter. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor filed a separate concurring opinion that Justice Antonin Scalia joined. The ruling upheld a 1990 decision by New York State’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. Racial Bias Argument Rejected

The opinions of Justice Kennedy and Justice O’Connor rejected arguments by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund that exclusion on the basis of language ability is a pretext for the kind of racial discrimination that recent Supreme Court decisions have condemned as violations of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

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In his last several years on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall could only watch as the ideological ground shifted inexorably away, leaving him isolated on most of the issues that imbue people with passion.

Still, friends and scholars say, he seemed determined to cling to his seat even if his vote had increasingly little effect on the outcome of death penalty, abortion and civil rights cases. He was intent to serve both as a strong opposition voice and to outlast the Republican hold on the White House that has been responsible for the ideological sea change on the Court.

He also knew that as a sitting Justice, he remained a live symbol, not only as the Court’s first black Justice but also as an architect of much of the nation’s civil rights history.

But, friends say, with the retirement last year of his colleague and friend, Justice William J. Brennan Jr., some last bit of resolve evaporated over the last term. Early Legal Fight for Rights

The career in which Thurgood Marshall used the law to lead an American revolution in civil rights on and off the bench began slowly in the small Southern towns of the Old Confederacy. It was there, with growing skill and unquestioned courage, that he represented black defendants against segregation-steeped officials.

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Ending a three-year inquiry into accusations of racism and sexual harassment at Wall Street firms, the New York State attorney general announced a settlement with two affiliated brokerages yesterday.

The brokerage firms, Garban L.L.C. and Garvin Guy Butler, agreed to pay a $200,000 fine and agreed to allow employees — even some whose legal claims had expired under the statute of limitations — to recover lost pay and damages in state-monitored arbitration, officials said.

The attorney general’s investigation began in 1997 shortly after three female employees filed separate complaints accusing the companies of sexual and racial discrimination that dated back to 1984.

The original plaintiffs, Donna Weber, Suzanne Taylor-Bernstein and Toni Oliveri, all worked at the company’s offices at 120 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. They maintained that supervisors condoned or were involved in making racist, anti-gay and harassing comments and made unwanted sexual advances.

The workers also charged that their supervisors retaliated against them for making complaints.

The complaints contended that pornographic material was regularly displayed on computer screens and walls on the company’s trading floor. It also said that pornographic magazines were often in open view on desks.

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Harold F. Rice is a native of Hawaii, but he is not a ”native Hawaiian” or even a ”Hawaiian” under the law of a state that reserves those terms for descendants of the people living in the islands in 1778, when Capt. James Cook of Britain and his crew arrived.

As such, Mr. Rice is barred from voting for the trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, a state agency that dispenses millions of dollars a year on behalf of ”Hawaiians,” the roughly 20 percent of the state’s population that can claim at least one indigenous ancestor, and ”native Hawaiians,” a considerably smaller group with at least 50 percent native blood. Under Hawaii’s Constitution, only the members of these groups, as beneficiaries of the agency’s largesse, may vote for its leadership.

Mr. Rice, whose Caucasian ancestors arrived in Hawaii in 1831, brought an unusual discrimination case before the Supreme Court today, asking the Justices to find him — and, by extension, some 80 percent of Hawaii’s population — the victims of racial discrimination and to open the agency’s elections to all voters in the state.

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Despite reaching the largest settlement ever in a racial bias case, the Coca-Cola Company will continue to face lawsuits from current and former black employees, a Florida law firm representing some of the workers said yesterday.

At least 17 of the 23 black employees who chose not to participate in the $192.5 million settlement will pursue lawsuits of their own, according to the firm. They decided that the recompense Coca-Cola offered did not make up for the discrimination they endured at the company, the firm said.

”It’s not a matter of greed,” said F. Shields McManus, a partner at Gary, Williams, Parenti, Finney, Lewis, McManus, Watson & Sperando, the firm representing the plaintiffs. ”It’s a matter of justice.”

Under the terms of the settlement, which was authorized last month by the Federal District Court in Atlanta, more than 2,000 former and current black employees are eligible to receive an average of about $40,000 apiece.

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