Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-almd-1_05-cv-01142/USCOURTS-almd-1_05-cv-01142-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 442
Nature of Suit: Civil Rights Employment
Cause of Action: 42:2000 Job Discrimination (Race)

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IN THE DISTRICT COURT OF THE UNITED STATES FOR THE

MIDDLE DISTRICT OF ALABAMA, SOUTHERN DIVISION

CLARENCE HUNTER, et al., )

)

Plaintiffs, )

) CIVIL ACTION NO.

v. ) 1:05cv1142-MHT

) (WO) 

ARMY FLEET SUPPORT, )

et al., )

)

Defendants. )

OPINION

Plaintiffs Clarence Hunter, Clarence A. Jones, and

James Starks, who are African-American, brought this

lawsuit against their current and past employers, Army

Fleet Support, LLC and CSC Applied Technologies, LLC,

claiming employment discrimination based on race in

violation of Title VII (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act

of 1964, as amended, 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981a, 2000e to 2000e17) and § 1981 (Civil Rights Act of 1866, as amended, 42

U.S.C. § 1981). The plaintiffs assert two claims: (1)

the defendants assigned more and harder work to the

plaintiffs than they did to similarly situated white

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employees; and (2) the defendants segregated its

employees, including the plaintiffs, by assigning them to

crews based on their race. This court has jurisdiction

pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1331 and 42 U.S.C. § 2000e5(f)(3).

This lawsuit is currently before the court on the

defendants’ two motions for summary judgment. For the

reasons that follow, the motions will denied as to the

plaintiffs’ work-assignment claim and granted as to their

segregation claim. 

I. STANDARD FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT

Summary judgment is appropriate “if the pleadings,

the discovery and disclosure materials on file, and any

affidavits show that there is no genuine issue as to any

material fact and that the movant is entitled to judgment

as a matter of law.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(c). The court

must view the evidence in the light most favorable to the

non-moving party and draw all reasonable inferences in

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favor of that party. Matsushita Elec. Indus. Co. v.

Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 587 (1986).

II. FACTS

Fort Rucker, Alabama, is the primary flight-training

base for U.S. Army Aviation; the Army hires outside

contractors to provide maintenance of helicopters there.

The plaintiffs work as Armament Aircraft Technicians at

Fort Rucker, working first for CSC Applied from October

1, 1988, to November 30, 2003, and then for CSC Applied’s

successor, Army Fleet. Their job duties included

troubleshooting, cleaning, inspecting, and repairing the

Army helicopters’ weapons systems after trainings so that

they could be used again. These helicopters,

colloquially called “birds,” fall into two rough

categories: “clean birds,” in which no armament has been

fired, and “dirty birds,” where armament has been fired

and has discharged gunpowder. Working on dirty birds is

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dirtier, more strenuous, and more tedious than working on

clean birds. 

The plaintiffs’ shift included two crews, one

composed of the three of them (the so-called black crew)

and another composed of two or three white men (the socalled white crew). The plaintiffs claim that the black

crew was given disproportionately more dirty birds to

clean than was the white crew. The plaintiffs also claim

unlawful racial segregation in the assignment of

employees to crews.

III. DISCUSSION

A. Work-Assignment Claim

Title VII provides that it is “an unlawful employment

practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to

discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate

against any individual with respect to his compensation,

terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because

of such individual’s race.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2 (a)(1).

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1. This burden-shifting analysis, while most

familiar in the Title VII arena, is also used for claims

under § 1981. Shields v. Fort James Corp., 305 F.3d

1280, 1282 (11th Cir. 2002); Standard v. A.B.E.L.

Services, Inc., 161 F.3d 1318 (11th Cir. 1998).

5

Section 1981 similarly prohibits race discrimination in

employment. Jones v. R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., 541 U.S.

369, 372-373 (2004). When, as in this case, the

plaintiff offers circumstantial evidence to establish a

disparate-treatment claim under Title VII or § 1981, the

court assesses the sufficiency of the proffered evidence

using the burden-shifting framework established by the

Supreme Court in McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411

U.S. 792 (1973), to show discriminatory intent. Int’l

Bhd. of Teamsters v. United States, 431 U.S. 324, 335

n.15 (1977); Williams v. Motorola, Inc., 303 F.3d 1284,

1293 (11th Cir. 2002).1

 

First, the plaintiff must establish a prima-facie

case, which creates an inference of discrimination,

Standard v. A.B.E.L. Servs., Inc., 161 F.3d 1318, 1330

(11th Cir. 1998); next, the employer must produce a

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legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for its actions;

and, finally, the burden shifts back to the plaintiff to

produce “sufficient evidence to find that the employer’s

asserted justification is false” and a pretext for

unlawful intentional discrimination. Reeves v. Sanderson

Plumbing Prods., Inc., 530 U.S. 133, 148 (2000). 

Pursuant to the McDonnell Douglas framework, the

court begins its discriminatory treatment analysis by

determining whether the plaintiffs can establish a primafacie case. A plaintiff may establish a prima-facie case

by showing that he (1) is a member of a protected class;

(2) suffered an adverse-employment action; and (3) was

treated less favorably than a similarly situated

individual not in the protected class. Maynard v. Bd. of

Regents of Div. of Univs. of Fla. Dep’t of Educ., 342

F.3d 1281, 1289 (11th Cir. 2003); see also McDonnell

Douglas Corp., 411 U.S. at 802. That the plaintiffs here

satisfy the first element is not in dispute; it is the

last two elements that are the crux of this lawsuit. 

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Under the governing standard for determining

adverse-employment actions, an employee must show “a

serious and material change in the terms, conditions, or

privileges of employment. Moreover, the employee’s

subjective view of the significance and adversity of the

employer’s action is not controlling; the employment

action must be materially adverse as viewed by a

reasonable person in the circumstances.” Davis v. Town

of Lake Park, 245 F.3d 1232, 1239 (11th Cir. 2001).

Notably, while the Eleventh Circuit in Davis expressed

caution about finding a work assignment to be an adverseemployment action, it explicitly does not “suggest that

a change in work assignments can never by itself give

rise to a Title VII claim; in unusual instances the

change may be so substantial and material that it does

indeed alter the terms, conditions, or privileges of

employment.” Id. at 1244-45. 

Because cleaning dirty birds is among the job

requirements of an Armament Aircraft Technician, the

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court does not understand the plaintiffs to contend that

the mere assignment of dirty birds to them constituted an

adverse-employment action. In other words, the

plaintiffs do not contend that no dirty birds should have

been assigned to them. Rather, it is the allegedly

disproportionately greater assignment of dirty birds to

them (the so-called black crew) than to the other crew

(the so-called white crew) that is at the heart of their

work-assignment claim. With this argument, the

plaintiffs essentially collapse into one element the

second and third elements for establishing a prima-facie

case: the assignment of dirty birds to them was adverse

because dirty birds were assigned to their crew, the

black crew, disproportionately more frequently than to

the white crew. 

The disproportionate assignment of dirty birds

between crews could constitute an adverse-employment

action, that is, it could qualify as one of Davis’s

“unusual circumstances.” 245 F.3d at 1244-45. Dirty

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birds take longer to work on than clean birds, with the

result that a crew with an over-assignment of dirty birds

could, if a crew’s work hours corresponded with the

amount of work to be done, have to work longer hours to

receive the same pay as their peers, with arguably a

decrease in that crew’s per-hour earnings; indeed,

according to the plaintiffs, the white crew often quit

work sooner than they did because the white crew had

fewer dirty birds (or none at all) to clean. See Minor

v. Centocor, Inc., 457 F.3d 632, 634 (7th Cir. 2006)

(requiring employees to work longer hours for the same

pay is “functionally the same as a ... reduction in [the

plaintiff’s] hourly pay, a material change by any

standard”). 

After reviewing the evidentiary record, the court is

convinced that the plaintiffs have created a triable

issue of fact as to whether they were disproportionately

assigned more dirty birds to clean than was the white

crew.

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B. Segregation Claim

The plaintiffs claim that they were assigned to and

maintained, in violation of Title VII and § 1981, as an

all-black crew because of their race. The defendants

first respond that, even if they intentionally created

and maintained racially segregated crews, Title VII and

§ 1981 would not prohibit this conduct as long as the

defendants otherwise did not racially discriminate

against the plaintiffs in hiring, termination, and pay

and in other tangible ways. The court strongly disagrees

with the defendants’ essentially ‘separate but equal is

acceptable in the workplace’ argument. 

An employer’s intentional creation and maintenance of

racially segregated crews is just as invidious and

offensive to the notions of equality at the heart of

Title VII and § 1981 as would be segregated water

fountains, one labeled for whites and the other labeled

for blacks, or segregated rest rooms, one labeled for

whites and one labeled for blacks. Such intentional

racial segregation in the workplace, even without loss of

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tangible benefits, is invidious and offensive because it

is inherently demeaning. Cf. Brown v. Board of

Education, 347 U.S. 483, 494 (1954) (“To separate

[children in public schools] from others of similar age

and qualifications solely because of their race generates

a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the

community ....”) (emphasis added); Parents Involved in

Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, ___ U.S.

___, ___, 127 S.Ct. 2738, 2767 (2007) (“In Brown ..., we

held that segregation deprived black children of equal

educational opportunities regardless of whether school

facilities and other tangible factors were equal, because

government classification and separation on grounds of

race themselves denoted inferiority.”) (emphasis added).

In furtherance of this notion, Title VII provides

that it is “an unlawful employment practice for an

employer ... to discriminate against any individual with

respect to his ... conditions ... of employment, because

of such individual’s race,” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1);

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the statute further provides that it is “an unlawful

employment practice for an employer ... to ... segregate

... in any way which would ... adversely affect his

status as an employee, because of such individual’s

race.” § 2000e-2(a)(2). The defendants’ intentional

racial segregation of the plaintiffs, if true, would

“discriminate ... with respect to ... conditions ... of

employment” and it would ”segregate ... in a[] way which

would ... adversely affect ... status as an employee,”

because such segregation would be inherently and greatly

demeaning to the plaintiffs: indeed, with such conduct,

the defendants would relegate the plaintiffs to secondclass status in the workplace merely because of their

race.

Nevertheless, as it ends up, the plaintiffs have

failed to establish that the defendants did, indeed,

intentionally maintain or establish racially segregated

work crews. The court therefore agrees with the

defendants’ other argument that the plaintiffs’ claim

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that they were subject to unlawful racial segregation is

without merit on the facts as presented here. For a

brief period, the plaintiffs’ shift did indeed have one

crew with two white men and one crew with three black

men. As the plaintiffs themselves have shown, however,

this composition plainly derives from a combination of

non-discriminatory events and personal preference, and

not from any segregationist intent on the part of the

defendants or the shift’s leadman, Paul Day. Indeed,

historically, single-race crews appear to be the

exception and not the rule. 

Prior to the arrival of plaintiffs Starks and Jones

on the third shift, plaintiff Hunter worked under Day in

a crew with two white men, Rick McTarsney and Randy Hall.

This crew thus began as mixed-race, but Hunter

voluntarily removed himself from it to work alone. Pls.’

Br. in Opp. to Summ. J. (Doc. No. 62), at 4. In January

2003, the first time that all three plaintiffs were

working on the third shift, the shift had three new

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workers, all of whom were black: Starks, Jones, and Tanya

Cole-Harris. See id. These three new workers had to be

assigned to the two existing crews. Because all three

new workers were black, the only way to avoid creating an

all-black crew would have been to split up the preexisting team of McTarsney and Hall. Day presumably saw

no need to do so, and he had no obligation under the law

to go out of his way to force the creation of mixed-race

crews. In the final arrangement, one crew was composed

of McTarsney, Hall, and Cole-Harris, and the three

plaintiffs worked together on the other crew. Id.

Two months later, Cole-Harris left her crew, turning

her formerly mixed-race crew into an all-white crew. Id.

at 5. At the same time, Hall left and was replaced by

Merritt Carothers, another white man; at that point, with

one one-man crew and the plaintiffs’ three-man crew, it

was only practical for Day to assign Carothers to work

with McTarsney. The creation of this all-white crew was

thus a product of happenstance and not intentional

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2. CSC Applied also asserts that the plaintiffs, by

failing to name it in their EEOC change, may not now

bring a Title VII claim against it. The court need not

reach that argument at this time, however, as CSC Applied

has shown no reason why the plaintiffs’ § 1981 claim may

not go forward. If necessary, the court will address the

particular issue of Title VII in future proceedings.

segregation. Even during this period of two single-race

crews, however, if McTarsney or Carothers were out, Jones

would be assigned to work with the remaining crew member,

creating a temporarily mixed-race crew. Id. 

***

For the above reasons, an appropriate order will be

entered allowing the plaintiffs’ work-assignment claim to

go to trial and granting summary judgment in favor of the

defendants on the plaintiffs’ segregation claim.2

DONE, this the 21st day of December, 2007.

 /s/ Myron H. Thompson 

UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE

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