THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9408010192
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHARLISE LYLES, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 292 lines
Stephen Scott George still remembers the day he got his own truck to drive for the Southeastern Public Service Authority: Number 2417, a beautiful burgundy triple trailer that could haul 15 tons of plastic jugs, newspapers, tin and aluminum cans.
There were about eight other recycling vehicle drivers, mostly black guys. He liked them all.
For $7.52 an hour, rain or shine, yard by yard, they emptied the blue SPSA recycling bins, sorting soda bottles, cans, jars. It was hard work. But not nearly as nasty as George's old job picking up scaly dead turtles and trash on the beach. He figured he could sweat his way to supervisor some day.
Getting his own truck ``felt good, like I was on my own,'' said George, a sturdily built man of 24 with swirls of blond hair and blue eyes that kind of sparkle.
The bosses seemed OK. But one day, George overheard a white supervisor say ``little fat nigger,'' referring to Wiley Jones, a husky, affable black driver whom George had come to call his buddy.
According to George's sworn deposition in a federal lawsuit, there would be other remarks:``Shine boy,'' ``I'll get my niggers to do it,'' ``house niggers.''
The name-calling gave George a sinking feeling in his stomach, like he was real hungry or had been kicked hard. If the uneasy feeling in George's stomach contrasted with the sharp remarks George said he heard his supervisor make, there was at least one thing the two men shared: like his former boss, George is white.
The strong atmosphere of racial discord, George contends, led him into a dispute with SPSA management that culminated in his firing after nearly two years on a job he loved. In June, he filed a federal discrimination lawsuit, won a $30,000 jury award and the possibility of getting his job back.
For this story, SPSA executive director Durwood S. Curling and several supervisors declined to comment on George's dismissal and trial. All questions were referred to William E. Rachels Jr., the attorney who represented the agency in court.
``The George case was an isolated incident based on only two remarks over 18 months,'' Rachels contends. SPSA is committed to a nondiscriminatory and harmonious workplace, he said.
One reason George may have been so sensitive to intolerance is that he had once been a victim of such ill will. The feeling George says he got when he heard the slurs took him back to his grade school days in Steubenville, Ohio, where he had been placed in a learning-disabled reading class.
``Stupid . . . slow . . . egghead . . . retardo,'' kids called him.
Despite it all, he kept such a gentle disposition that his 11th-grade teacher, Cindy Thomas-Hardwick, called him `Scooter Pie.''
``It was a graham cracker with marshmallow in between covered with chocolate, sweet and mushy,'' she said. ``He was that kind of kid.''
She bolstered him against his schoolmates' cruelty. ``You don't ever say `I can't,' '' she warned him. ``And don't ever call people names like `stupid,' ever.''
George's grandfather taught him that nobody ought to be picked on or joked at. A World War II spinal injury had turned William H. George's torso practically parallel to the ground. Mean people called him ``Bent-over-Bill.'' But he didn't let it cripple him. He never parked in a handicap space. In Steubenville, he rose to city councilman, acting mayor and fire marshall. The whole town turned out the day he died in 1988.
Soon after, Scott George made his way east to Virginia Beach, where his mother and father had migrated. They came looking for more opportunity than the dying steel-mill town on the Ohio River could offer. George's mom, who works at SPSA as a supply clerk, told him about the opening in November 1990.
``We're from the North,'' Debra George said. ``Our little town was very compassionate. Scott rode in the football carpool with colored people. When he heard those names down here, he just wasn't used to it.''
Scott George loved his job, driving Number 2417, working the curb, rain or shine.
Some days, his hip joints ached from swiveling his sturdy frame back and forth as he picked up and dumped. But no supervisor was hanging over his shoulder all day. Sometimes George lent Jones and the other drivers money, $80, $100, even $200. Almost always they paid him back. Sometimes they didn't, but George got along well with them just the same.
It bothered him when the pipe-smoking superintendent, Robert Barco, seemed to pick on them. Once he asked George to report if they were tardy, slouching on their routes or stopping at grocery stores, George said in his deposition.
``I've been brought up different . . . I'm not a tattletale'' was George's response, according to his deposition. After that, Barco took to calling him names: ``Mama's boy,'' ``cry baby,'' ``sissy,'' George testified.
Another time, when George volunteered to take on a task, Barco told him, ``That's OK. I'll get my niggers to do it,'' George's deposition said.
``I couldn't believe it,'' George said two years later, still with wide-eyed disbelief.
Barco, who still works at SPSA, declined to comment. In court, he denied the remark.
According to Wiley Jones, racial slurs got to be so regular that he started jotting them down in a black, slightly soiled notebook kept tucked in a folder under his arm.
Jones said in his deposition: ``We were walking out of the office and he (Barco) would grab me, squeeze me on the butt, and also he got a tendency of throwing kisses at you. It went on and on several occasions. I mean, a person sit in a grown man's lap, you know, it brings questions . . . Is it a gay thing, or is it just harassment? (He) wants me to lose my cool?''
In late 1991, Jones was promoted to driver supervisor. As Barco made the announcement he called Jones ``my shine boy,'' real casual, right in front of new employees, George said in his deposition.
Barco denied the allegation in court. According to Rachels, Barco testified that he had simply stated that ``Jones would shine in his white shirt,'' referring to the new uniform Jones received upon his promotion to supervisor.
Fed up with the remarks after a year, Jones, George and another driver, Alvin Whitaker, requested a meeting with a SPSA personnel supervisor in late fall of 1991.
George stood up and told the supervisor that the ``shine boy'' remark had disturbed him.
Jones and Whitaker felt good about that, seeing a white co-worker put it on the line, not knowing what the consequences might be. ``We hadn't seen anyone white do nothing like that before,'' Jones said.
They hadn't done much to speak up for themselves, Jones said, because they believed they'd be dismissed as malcontents.
After the meeting, the workers say the atmosphere at SPSA didn't change much. But George kept enjoying his job. One of his favorite routes was in Hobson, a little African-American neighborhood in Suffolk.
The Hobson route would become a major factor in the discrimination charges that George would ultimately file against SPSA.
There on Sawmill Point Road, a dead-end street of aging tin roofs and well-swept bungalows across from a soybean field, George made friends with preschooler Perry Lamont King.
Come Thursday morning, the child stood on the doorstep, a bouquet of dandelions in hand, waiting for big burgundy Number 2417 to barrel round the corner. He marveled at the controls on the dashboard. He tossed a bottle in. He wanted a truck like that. So George bought him a bright-red toy fire engine.
``Yes, Lord, Perry was crazy about him,'' recalled Olivia King, Perry's great-grandmother. ``He called him his buddy. Every time he came here he had something for him, candy, a ball. If Perry wasn't around, he left it in the bin.''
And when a puppy died under the elderly, poor-sighted woman's home, George crawled under and removed the carcass.
The next week on the Hobson route, he was picking up bins and sweating in the sun on another dead-end street when he felt a firm, hostile hand grip his shoulder.
``If you don't get out of this neighborhood, we're going to kill you,'' said a young black man who stared George in the face. Four or five others stood behind him.
Frightened, George jumped in his truck, gunned the engine hard and backed out of the dead end.
Because of the incident, George was taken off the route, and it became common knowledge among the drivers that George didn't go to that neighborhood.
But no promise was ever made to take George off - and keep him off - the route, SPSA contends. It was an important distinction, because George later came to believe - and ultimately argued in court - that SPSA officials used his fear of the route to punish him for his outspokenness.
In the months following that incident, George said, the racial slurs continued.
There was a time Jones' girlfriend came to pick him up from work with her daughter. Barco commented that Jones was ``too dark'' to be the child's father, according to Jones' deposition. There was other talk about the Ku Klux Klan and cross burnings, Jones said.
One employee said he wrote letters about the racial remarks to Virginia Beach Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf, who is head of SPSA's board. ``If I received such letters, I would have turned them over to SPSA,'' Oberndorf said.
In the spring of 1992, at the end of his emotional tether, Whitaker made an anonymous call to the home of Durwood Curling, SPSA executive director.
``I just told him about some of the things that were going on in recycling I felt like wasn't right, and then he said, `Well, if you can't tell me who you are, then, you know, we really can't do nothing about it,' '' Whitaker said in his deposition.
Soon after the call, though, a SPSA executive, Joe Thomas, assembled a meeting of drivers in a vending-machine room at the Greenbrier station in Chesapeake to discuss the complaints.
George, in his deposition, said the other drivers were reluctant to speak out. ``People were dancing around the issue, and I told Joe that the word `nigger' was being thrown around, the word `shine boy' was being thrown around. I didn't appreciate it,'' George's deposition said.
In his deposition, Whitaker recalled Thomas excusing the behavior by saying: ``Well, we know how Bob (Barco) is - we know he play and joke around a lot so we have to learn to get along with his way.''
But Rachels said Thomas took the allegations seriously, making a ``beeline'' to Barco's office and warning him that if the remarks had occurred, they had to stop.
On a rainy morning about a month later, George pulled his truck up to the office to check his assignments. He was being sent back to the Suffolk neighborhood where he had been threatened.
``I was so scared, I was sick to my stomach,'' George recalled. ``It's like if you're almost in a car accident, your knees might tighten on you. I was scared. This was not a play threat that I got in Suffolk. That was the real deal.''
He offered to swap with another driver. The supervisor said no.
George parked his truck, said he was sick and drove home.
A week later, he was fired.
It was insubordination, clear and simple, Rachels argued during the four-day federal trial in George's discrimination lawsuit against SPSA, Barco and Thomas.
``There was clearly no evidence of any connection between Mr. George's termination and his speaking out about certain comments that were allegedly made at SPSA,'' Rachels said.
He told the jury that George had been reassigned to Suffolk by another supervisor who was unaware of George's problems on the route, or his complaints about racial slurs.
He added that SPSA had investigated the route and was unable to confirm any real danger, and that just a month before, George had done the route for one day along with another driver.
But George's lawyer, Richard H. Matthews, argued that George's assignment to the route and subsequent dismissal were payback for having spoken out against his boss.
A jury of six whites and two blacks deliberated two hours and returned a mixed verdict: Thomas, the supervisor who actually recommended George's dismissal, was found to have done nothing wrong, but SPSA and Barco had discriminated.
The award: $30,000 in compensatory damages. George's attorney has filed a motion for George to get his old job back or other compensation.
``I don't think that the racial issue was the reason for him getting fired,'' juror Peggy L. Eudy said in an interview. ``But SPSA did do a lot of buck passing, one supervisor after another saying the other was responsible. So we thought he really deserved to get his costs.''
As for the racial slurs, Eudy, who is white, said: ``A lot of times people around here make those comments and they don't really mean anything by it. Even they (blacks) use that word sometimes. But the workplace isn't the time and place for it.''
Rachels, who has filed to have the verdict set aside, said, ``I think they (the jury) thought that Mr. George was a nice young man who had taken up a proper social cause and he ought to get some reward for that.''
Rachels, who cringed slightly each time he had to repeat the racial slurs at issue, was careful to note that he and SPSA officials abhor such remarks.
``I don't mean to minimize it,'' Rachels said. ``I served on the board of visitors for 10 years at Norfolk State and I don't, in any way, condone this language.''
Two more discrimination suits have been filed against SPSA, by a black employee and a white former employee. One trial is scheduled for Dec. 14.
Meanwhile, Jones said he was recently placed on administrative leave from SPSA after the agency received a complaint about him driving one of their trucks while on sick time and falsifying a doctor's note. Jones denies the allegation.
After her son won his lawsuit, Debra George returned to her job at SPSA to accolades from some co-workers. ``I am very, very proud of my son. I tried to teach him to respect his elders, tell the truth and work hard,'' she said. ``And that's what he did.''
On the porch of his rental house a few blocks from Chick's Beach, Scott George sipped fruit punch Kool-Aid one recent afternoon. ``I felt he (Barco) said those things around me because I'm a fellow white guy and he thought it was OK,'' George said. ``I didn't think it was right, a government agency treating people like animals.''
He's now driving a truck for a book and magazine distributor. But he yearns to have his old job back, to work that curb, rain or shine, to ride again in Number 2417, to feel the breeze blowing through the cab as he winds past cornfields and crepe myrtle.
``I know I did a good job,'' he said. ``SPSA even chose me to pose for their brochure. It showed me shaking a black man's hand, showing how unified we were supposed to be. That was the irony of it. I remember. We took that picture on a beautiful, gorgeous sunny day.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
CASE CHRONOLOGY
Here is a chronology of Stephen Scott George's case against the
Southeastern Public Service Authority, based on court papers and
sworn statements from George and other SPSA employees.
Nov. 26, 1990: SPSA hires Stephen Scott George.
Late fall 1990: George hears first racial slur when Robert Barco,
a supervisor, refers to Wiley P. Jones, a black worker, as ``little
fat nigger,'' according to George's deposition.
Spring 1991: George is threatened on Hobson route in Suffolk and
is taken off the route.
Late fall 1991: Barco calls Jones ``my shine boy,'' according to
George's and Jones' depositions. Recycling drivers ask for meeting
with SPSA personnel supervisor to discuss racial slurs. George
speaks out about ``shine boy,'' and ``I'll get my niggers to do it''
remarks. Jones alleges that Barco squeezed him and other black male
employees on their behinds.
Jan. 27, 1992: George receives a SPSA commendation for doing a
good job.
April 1992: Driver Alvin Whitaker makes anonymous telephone call
to SPSA executive director Durwood S. Curling, complaining about
slurs, according to Whitaker's deposition. Supervisor Joe Thomas
calls meeting of drivers, where George speaks out again about racial
harassment.
May 7, 1992: A supervisor orders George to return to the
Suffolk/Hobson route, where his life had been threatened. He walks
off, and is placed on administrative leave.
May 13, 1992: George speaks about racial remarks at grievance
hearing for Jones.
May 14, 1992: SPSA, after a fact-finding hearing, fires George.
October 1993: George files lawsuit in federal court against
Thomas, Barco and SPSA, alleging that they retaliated against him
for speaking out about discriminatory practices.
June 1994: After a four-day trial, a jury verdict clears Joe
Thomas, but finds SPSA and Barco guilty of discrimination and awards
George $30,000.
July 1994: SPSA files motion to overturn the verdict or for new
trial.
by CNB