Three Black men are suing American Airlines after they were removed from an airplane under accusations they were emitting an “offensive body odor.”
In fact, a total of eight Black men were removed from the plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on Jan. 5 — apparently every Black man on the plane that day — only to be allowed back on an hour later after the airline was unable to book them another flight, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court Wednesday.
The lawsuit, obtained by Atlanta Black Star, states the three plaintiffs, Alvin Jackson, Emmanuel Jean Joseph and Xavier Veal, did not know each other and were not even seated next to each other but were singled out because they were Black.
The law firm that filed the lawsuit, Outten & Golden in New York, told Atlanta Black Star it did not have the contact information of the other five Black men to include them in the lawsuit, so it is not aware if they knew each other prior to being forced off the plane.
The lawsuit is the latest in a long string of scandals involving American Airlines, the largest airline company in the world which has been named the least reliable, according to Forbes, generating the most complaints of all airlines.
Last month, a retired Black judge sued the airline, claiming a flight attendant told her to “use the restroom at the back of the plane” even though she and her family had booked first-class tickets.
Last year, a Black mother filed a lawsuit against American Airlines after her 14-year-old died of a heart attack on a flight from Honduras to Miami when the airline’s defibrillator failed to work because it had not been properly charged. That lawsuit was initially filed in New York but has since been refiled in Texas, where American Airlines is based.
Then there was the 2020 case of a disabled Black man who was traveling from Indianapolis to St. Louis when the airline lost his prosthetic leg, which he had checked in with his luggage. Michael Williams said he spent three years trying to get reimbursed for the prosthetic leg but was only reimbursed $600 even though it had cost him $26,500.
And, of course, there is the case of the American Airlines employee accused of placing an iPhone inside the bathroom of an airplane to video record a 9-year-old girl last year. The flight attendant, Estes Carter Thompson III, ended up arrested and losing his job. However, attorneys for American Airlines tried to blame the girl for her own “fault and negligence” and for her “use of the compromised lavatory, which she knew or should have known contained a visible and illuminated recording device,” according to the Washington Post.
The latest lawsuit accuses a white male American Airlines flight attendant who is not named in the suit of singling the Black men out, having them removed one by one from the flight, which had landed in Phoenix from Hollywood Burbank Airport in Los Angeles with a final destination to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
The lawsuit states that once they were removed, another American Airlines employee agreed with the Black men that they were being racially profiled by saying, “I agree, I agree.” Meanwhile, the pilot had “announced to the mostly white remaining passengers on the plane that the delay was caused by a concern about body odor.”
When American Airlines was unable to book them on another flight, they allowed the Black men back onto the plane, which had been sitting on the tarmac for an hour, where they had to “endure the stares of the largely white passengers who viewed them as the cause of the substantial delay.”
“They suffered during the entire flight home, and the entire incident was traumatic, upsetting, scary, humiliating, and degrading,” the lawsuit states.
When the men were told to return to their original seats, where they would have had to interact with the white flight attendant who had them removed, one of the men, Jackson, requested to move to a different area in order to avoid the flight attendant, the claim says.
His attorneys say despite an open seat available in first class, the airline upgraded an Asian woman to sit there and allowed Jackson to sit in her assigned seat. When the flight landed in New York at 11:30 p.m., Jackson asked to speak to an American Airlines employee about the incident and was told he could speak with someone inside the terminal, but he then discovered there were no employees inside the terminal due to the late hour.
“American’s decision to remove Plaintiffs from the flight was not based on any legitimate rationale. It was an act of blatant discrimination, and it was done with malice and in flagrant disregard of Plaintiffs’ rights,” the filing states.
