Enforcing the Civil Rights Act

Table of Contents

Preface

1 Miami July 1979

2 The EEOC

3 Irving & Freddie

4 Relocation

5 Hurricane Party

6 The Miami District Office

7 H.S. Camp & Sons, Inc.

8 Ocala

9 Continuance

10 Hard Landing

11 King Mango Strut

12 Statistics

13 Hartford

14 Drug Violence

15 Using Statistics to Prove Discrimination

16 Christmas

17 Patty’s Deposition

18 McDuffie

19 Valentine’s Day

20 Plant Tour

21 Working With Professor Gitlow

22 Opening Statements

23 Professor Howard Gitlow

24 A Man Called Black

25 John Clark

26 Monroe Leahmon

27 Ernest Dickinson

28 David Ramsey

29 Patty Coffie Dilemma

30 David Ramsey’s Cross-examination

31 Nordice Reed

32 Eddie McNeil, Cedrick Brigham & Henry Mobley

33 Rose Powers, Candyce Tharp & Tina Cochran

34 Patty Coffie’s Testimony

35 Electro-Florida

36 Eileen Barber

37 Edward Taylor

38 Patricia Dawson

39 Dennis Camp

40 Donald Camp

41 Twyla Thorpe

42 Eileen Barber’s Testimony

43 Robert Mannes

44 Douglas Boynton

45 Supplemental Complaint

46 H.S. Camp’s Defense

47 Laura Combs

48 Disturbance

49 The Camps’ Defense Resumes

50 Rebuttal

51 Closing Arguments

52 Luncheon With Freddie

53 Epilogue

Remembering Michael F. Lefkow, Esq.

About the Author

Preface

This book is a legal drama closely based upon events as I now recall them, more than 30 years later. I have relied upon my memory, refreshed and supplemented by review of Judge Scott’s decision in EEOC v. H.S. Camp & Sons, Inc., 542 F. Supp. 411, 445 (M.D. Fla. 1982), and articles printed in the Ocala Star-Banner, to reconstruct the events and the trial proceedings described herein. I have been unable to obtain a copy of the E.E.O.C. vs. H.S. Camp & Sons, Inc. trial transcript.

The dialog contained in this book is as accurate as I can recall it, but given the time interval since the statements were uttered, all of the dialog must be regarded as fictional. Some of the names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

I wish to thank my wife, Marie R. Keeney, for her invaluable assistance in reading and editing drafts of this book. My friend Tom Rapp, Esq., members of the Writer’s Group at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, Judge John Marshall Meisburg and my brother-in-law, Douglas L. Roberts, Esq. also made valuable comments and suggestions, but all errors are my sole responsibility.

James D. Keeney

Sarasota, Florida

Dedicated to the memory of

Michael F. Lefkow, Esq.

1 Miami July 1979

I stepped out of the airport through doors marked TAXI—LIMO into the sticky sweet steam bath of a Miami summer. Blazing blue sky, palm trees swaying gently amid boisterous honking traffic. This was a world apart from the grey, drizzly summer skies of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where I lived and worked as an employment discrimination attorney.

The taxi driver smiled a bit nervously. He looked relieved when I said, Dupont Plaza Hotel, as if it was one of only a few places he knew, and headed the taxi out along the palm-lined boulevard to Le Jeune Road. We passed a few car rental establishments and a Chinese fast food restaurant and got onto a freeway that ended abruptly a few miles to the east, at the sparkling green tropical waters of Biscayne Bay.

After a few turns, the stocky driver steered the Chevy Impala taxi up a narrow but ostentatious ramp. He stopped at the second floor entrance of a six-story hotel-office-apartment building that looked like it was built in the 1950s, but was still prosperous.

I got out and looked around. The Dupont Plaza was an oasis in a rock desert, backing up to the Miami River. To the north lay four city blocks of enormous flat gravel parking lots. To the east one could see Bayfront Park along Biscayne Bay, its sun-drenched park benches mostly taken over by winos. To the west, there was only another expanse of flat vacant gravel. In the summer of 1979, Miami was just emerging from its sleepy seasonal tourist cocoon. It would be six more months before 100,000 Marielitos invaded the city, nine months until the Liberty City disturbances set the town ablaze, and two or three years before Miami Vice and a renovated South Beach began to make the city chic. The development boom that would transform the city in the 1980’s and 1990’s hadn’t yet started.

I turned and walked inside, past the uniformed door attendant and into a chilled, cavernous lobby. The huge adjoining restaurant was nearly empty, with several relaxed waitresses chatting to pass the time. A wall of floor-to-ceiling windows offered a view out over the Miami River as it emptied into Biscayne Bay. Across the river, I could see a dilapidated fraternal organization meeting hall.

The lobby was empty except for three somewhat subdued tourists who, I imagined, had expected a beach. I picked out a comfortable sofa with a spectacular view of the Miami River, straightened my tie and checked my watch. Twenty minutes until eleven. Perfect timing. I was just a few minutes early for my appointment.

The Miami River was really just a concrete-sided canal. I watched a Haitian cargo ship, painted electric blue, navigating the narrow channel and heading out to sea, loaded with bicycles and empty water jugs. The bicycles were tied on with ropes, ten high, above and alongside the superstructure of the ship. They seemed certain to be scraped off as the ship passed through the rickety steel bascule drawbridge. The bridge arms were opened to a 45-degree angle, holding back traffic on Brickell Avenue, where a bikini-clad woman standing among a dozen buckets of flowers fresh from Colombia was selling carnations and roses to the waiting motorists.

Just below the windows, I could see a sport fishing boat taking on fuel at a narrow dock that stretched along the southern side of the hotel complex. Two enormous yachts were tied up along the dock, so tall they towered over the second story lobby of the hotel.

The Dupont Plaza Building was divided into three sections: hotel, office, and apartments. I got up from my seat on the hotel lobby sofa and made my way through a maze of corridors to the office section of the building. As I descended an escalator to the lower lobby, I could see a few Latin men playing Pong in a small video arcade across from the snack bar.

Just down the corridor from the lower lobby, I found a bank of spiffy elevators and scrutinized the list of office tenants on the sign board: doctors, dentists, export companies, shipping lines, Varig Airlines, lawyers, consulates, and on the 4th Floor, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Waiting at the elevator was a heavy-set man who was trying to strike up a conversation with a young woman standing beside him. He seemed to be asking if she attended the beauty school in the building. When she didn’t respond he looked at me and said loudly enough for her to hear, She’s not too friendly, is she? As we both got off the elevator at the 4th floor, he winked at me and glanced back her way, saying, New York City, right?

At the far end of the plush carpeted corridor, large gold letters spelled out, UNITED STATES EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION.

2 The EEOC

I had come to Miami because I thought the federal government was finally going to enforce the equal employment provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That hot July day in 1979 was 15 years after the passage of the historic federal legislation that prohibited discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations, and education. In Pennsylvania, where I worked at the Human Relations Commission, we had been aggressively litigating such discrimination cases for nearly 25 years based upon our state laws.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed under the leadership of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, one year after the 1963 March on Washington. Just a few months after that march, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous I have a Dream speech, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and Johnson became President. Lyndon Johnson made passage of the Civil Rights Act his top legislative priority.

Racial and sexual discrimination in private employment was made unlawful by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act which became effective in 1965. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was created the same year as the federal agency responsible for nationwide implementation and enforcement of the new law.

Unfortunately, the EEOC got off to a slow start. During its first four years, it had four different Chairmen. In addition, private attorneys who brought race and sex discrimination cases to court found that judges had widely varying interpretations of the new Civil Rights Act’s provisions. This also impeded the EEOC’s progress in enforcing the new law. The legal uncertainty made it difficult to draft regulations and train staff, and the agency struggled accordingly.

In 1972, Congress amended Title VII to give the EEOC authority to file its own lawsuits for the first time. Starting in 1973, however, the Commission again had four Chairs in four years, until the appointment of Eleanor Holmes Norton by President Jimmy Carter in 1977.

Thus, the EEOC did not initiate broadly effective efforts to enforce Title VII until more than a decade after the statute was enacted. During her 4-year tenure, Eleanor Holmes Norton reorganized the agency, closing the five national litigation centers and opening a total of 44 district offices, which for the first time put lawyers and investigators in the same local offices where they could work together. Meanwhile, however, a huge backlog of over 100,000 uninvestigated and unresolved cases had developed and a regrettable culture of low expectations and even lower initiative had taken hold throughout much of the agency.

In 1979, it looked to me like voluntary compliance was not working in states like Florida, and despite its new litigation authority, the EEOC had not yet done much about it. One of Chair Norton’s most lasting improvements grew out of her decision to hire more attorneys and move many of the EEOC’s existing lawyers out into the Commission’s district offices in almost every state. It was this effort to emphasize enforcement through lawsuits litigated out of local offices that was bringing me to Miami.

I was aware that despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act, racial discrimination had continued in portions of the South that the civil rights movement had not penetrated. One of the most important of these was Florida, the area recently assigned to the Miami District Office of the EEOC. I thought, therefore, that the Miami District Office was the most exciting place in the country for a civil rights lawyer to practice. I was eager to become a part of this new major enforcement effort.

3 Irving & Freddie

Hi, I’m Irv Miller. Everybody thinks I’m Jewish. I’m from Oklahoma. The recently appointed Miami Regional Attorney of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, my prospective boss, was six feet tall, large framed, with a friendly round face, short curly black hair, a broad nose, and brown skin. Irving had formerly worked at the EEOC’s San Francisco and Denver Litigation Centers.

He had arrived in Miami only a week before I came to meet him. His job was to create, manage and develop a legal team for the EEOC’s enforcement efforts in Florida. This new legal team would work alongside the investigation group in Miami.

I had been invited to interview for a supervisory position because the new legal unit needed a couple of future supervisors with substantial trial experience to manage a newly assembled group of eleven staff attorneys. Most of these attorneys had recently been transferred to Miami from the EEOC’s Atlanta Litigation Center. A few had also been hired from the U.S. Department of Labor to specialize in age discrimination and equal pay cases, and one senior attorney had been recruited out of private practice in Washington, DC. All of the new legal unit attorneys would be working with an existing staff of investigators who also had a brand new boss in Miami.

Sorry I’m late, Irving apologized. I’ve been trying to settle things with the IRS. They say I owe a large amount of back taxes.

I raised my eyebrow, but didn’t say a thing. He went on:

You’re from Denver. You know that beautiful Red Rocks Amphitheater west of town, right?

Yes; I can remember my uncle telling about all the rattlesnakes he had to fight off when he helped build it during the Great Depression.

Irving continued his story. You’ve heard of the band, ‘Earth, Wind and Fire?’

Of course. Who hasn’t? They’re huge.

Well, I decided to promote a concert by Earth, Wind and Fire at Red Rocks. I booked them for a $10,000 upfront fee, plus 50 percent of the gross receipts. I maxed out my credit cards promoting the show, and it was a great success. We charged ten dollars a person. The audience was probably about 10,000 people.

Wow, I said. I’m impressed.

My problem was that I didn’t sell tickets in advance. I just made the concert price ten dollars and collected the money in cash at the door. I had a bunch of people helping me, and we had big barrels to hold the money. But the fans were so enthusiastic they came in faster than we could collect the money from them. They just poured in and about half of them didn’t pay. Still, we collected about $50,000, which gave me a nice little profit. The band was a bit disappointed but not too angry. The next year I filed my income taxes and declared the $50,000 gross profit minus $40,000 in expenses on my tax return.

Sounds like the IRS didn’t agree with your accounting.

Right on, Brother. I got a visit from an IRS agent who said he was part of a special rock concerts enforcement unit. He said people who promote rock concerts often keep sloppy records of the attendance, so the IRS goes to the concerts and takes pictures to estimate the crowd size. In my case, they said the audience had to be close to 10,000 because the place was jam-packed. Since they knew I was charging ten dollars a person they concluded I had grossed $100,000 and failed to report half of it.

Man, I said. That’s a big problem. What are you doing about it?

I tried to explain what really happened. I showed them the checks totaling $35,000 that I wrote to the band for the $10,000 booking fee plus its fifty percent share of the gross. I brought in all of my checking account records to show them I had only collected $50,000, but they weren’t convinced. They said rock concert promoters always claim a lot of gate crashers but they vastly overestimate the number. In my case they agreed that there might have been 1,000 gate crashers, but they would not accept my figure of 5,000. So they want me to pay taxes on another $40,000 that I never got. I’m trying to negotiate it down, but I guess I’ll be making monthly tax payments for a long time.

This seemed like a pretty odd way to begin a job interview, but I thought maybe he wanted to show me that he was a multi-talented person with high ambitions, since he ran this concert promotion while working full time for the EEOC. Or maybe he just didn’t want me to learn about his tax troubles from office gossip and possibly get the wrong impression that he was a tax dodger.

Irving showed me around the newly-established legal unit’s offices and introduced me briefly to a couple of newly transferred lawyers who were busy with their own unpacking. Then he suggested, Let’s take a walk, shall we?

We went back out the front entrance of the Dupont Plaza, put on our sunglasses and struck out on foot across the sweltering wasteland of parking lots to the seedy but welcome shade of some huge dusty almond trees in Bayfront Park. Ignoring both the winos and the passing yachts, we traded war stories about our civil rights litigation experiences. After a few minutes Irving made it clear that the interview was just a formality. It seemed to me he just wanted a quick exchange of personal history not unlike that of a couple on a blind date, neither of whom wanted to end the evening sleeping with a total stranger.

We walked to a small piece of paradise: an upscale tropical sidewalk cafe overlooking a small, well-maintained yacht basin. The marina was filled with gorgeous sailboats and sport fishing boats, and populated by athletic men and well-tanned women in the briefest bikinis I had ever seen. Our waitress, wearing only a slightly more modest bikini, told us she lived aboard one of the boats. We ate grouper served with Cuban black beans, drank rum punches, and decided we could get along.

Irving told me about his experiences trying cases in federal courts in California and Colorado, and about