Three Black employees who filed separate federal civil rights lawsuits accusing Nashville Electric Service (NES) of racial discrimination in its employment practices, including managers who allegedly hurled racist slurs at and denied promotions to Black employees in favor of white workers, have confidentially settled with the utility, reported The Tennessean.
Electrician Walter E. Clark III was a 22-year-employee of NES when he sued the company in the U.S. District Court For the Middle District of Tennessee in January of 2023, describing a racially hostile work environment where Black employees were regularly called “lazy n—ger,” “boy,” and suffered ongoing harassment and bullying from supervisors and co-workers because of their race.
His complaint recounts an episode in June of 2020 when a white foreman allegedly told him, “I’ll tell you how to train that son of a b-tch … put a white sheet over your head and go out there beat the sh-t out of him until he hates all white people.”
Clark also regularly heard or was made aware of other racist epithets and slurs from co-workers, including, “need to have slaves again to Make America Great Again,” none of which were addressed by management when Black employees complained, he alleges.
He and plaintiff Jimmie Hunt described their revulsion at learning about nooses found in their workplace twice during their employment. Black employees were “deeply affected and disturbed” by the racist hate symbols, according to Hunt, who was tasked with removing the noose from an employee-only smoking area on NES property on one such occasion.
NES is one of the 11 largest utilities in the nation and distributes power to nearly 430,000 customers in Nashville, Davidson County and parts of the six surrounding counties, covering 700 square miles, according to its website.
Management at NES failed to take corrective action in response to the noose episodes, nor did they adequately respond in January of 2023 when an operations manager, Ty Jones, “changed his email profile to a ‘Not Equal’ ‘≠’ symbol,” the use of which, Hunt’s complaint noted, has been adopted by some white supremacists and which the Anti-Defamation League describes “as an attempt to claim that different races are not equal to each other and to imply that whites are superior to [B]lacks.”
Black workers were regularly and systematically passed over for promotions and raises because of their race, all three plaintiffs claim in their lawsuits.
Clark was denied promotions for jobs he applied for, which he contends were given to less experienced, less qualified white employees on multiple occasions.
In 2021, while applying for a foreman position, he said the performance appraisal system was manipulated by his white supervisors to give a newer white employee in his department a higher grade.
Hunt, 58, who had worked for NES for 25 years when he filed his complaint earlier this year, described a similar pattern of unfair and discriminatory practices to prevent Black employees from obtaining promotions and raises.
Among the discriminatory tactics he said NES supervisors used to do that included changing tests administered to Black applicants and job descriptions in such a way to intentionally exclude Black candidates.
Hunt, a foreman who was the company’s only Black safety supervisor, applied for a promotion to safety and employee development manager position five times but was never hired. Less qualified white employees were repeatedly given the position instead, he claims.
Hunt argues that the job description for that position was altered to require an engineering degree to prevent him from getting the job. He was deemed ineligible for the position, even though he had performed the additional job duties of that position for two years with no additional compensation before it was given to a white employee, his complaint asserts.
“It’s almost like they’re just dictating who they want to pick for it,” Hunt told The Tennessean last year. “It feels like … they tried to knock out all the minorities from getting the promotions.”
Clark, Hunt and a third plaintiff, Tim Jones, all allege that the utility’s hiring and promotion process was discriminatory, that they were subject to ongoing racial harassment in a hostile work environment, and that NES repeatedly failed to take corrective action despite being made aware of their Black employees’ complaints.
In their legal answers to the complaints, Nashville Electric Service categorically denied all of the allegations of racial discrimination, harassment and racially hostile workplace conditions. It chalked up the alleged disparate treatment of Black employees in losing promotions to white candidates to the fact that “more qualified candidates” were chosen.
NES admitted “that a noose is a disturbing symbol for most people, and that NES prohibits the display of such symbols in the workplace.”
The company said its actions were always “based on legitimate, non-discriminatory business-related reasons undertaken in good faith.”
NES President and CEO Teresa Bryolyes-Aplin said in a statement last year that “NES does not condone or tolerate discrimination of any type,” adding that “NES embraces diversity, equity and inclusion, and our goal is to foster a work environment in which all of our employees feel welcome, safe and appreciated.”
The three plaintiffs sought a jury trial to determine unspecified compensatory damages, as well as back pay, front pay and legal costs for their economic losses, humiliation, emotional pain and suffering.
The terms of their settlement with NES have not been publicly disclosed. Attorneys for the parties did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Atlanta Black Star. Hunt told The Tennessean a protection order prevents him from discussing the settlement.
Each party is paying for its own litigation costs, according to the judge’s orders dismissing the cases.
