Significant Moments: Stumbling Across Hidden Corruption

Un-Civil Rights

From The Washington City Paper, March 1993.

The law 'n' lobbying firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld may have civil rights leader Vernon Jordan among its partners, but it still has racial rension in its ranks. Patricia A. McNeil, a black data-processor fired from Akin Gump last April after 4 1/2 years of employment [just before her pension plan would have vested], has sued the firm, charging racial discrimination. McNeil's suit, on file at U.S District Court [in Washington, DC] alleges that her supervisor, described as "Ms. Robertson" in the suit, engaged in "offensive conduct such as telling racial jokes, making comments to the effect that blacks are perceived as not working as hard as white employees, are shiftless, lazy, [and] incompetent...." When McNeil became pregnant with her second child in August 1991, Robertson said "she did not understand why blacks have so many babies," according to the suit. "These were not isolated incidents," says McNeil's lawyer, James Kestell, "we have plenty of witnesses to the racial jokes." (Akin Gump did not return Washington City Paper's call to discuss the suit.)

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I used to work with Pat McNeil in the Litigation Support Group at Akin Gump. Oddly enough, six months before McNeil was fired -- in late October 1991 -- I complained to firm management about my supervisor Chris Robertson. I alleged that she had engaged in an arguably anti-Semitic incident.

Within a week of lodging a complaint about Robertson to the firm's senior managers I myself was fired by those senior managers despite an exemplary employment history. The firm later claimed I was mentally disturbed and potentially violent; my continued presence on the firm's premises, so one attorney manager stated, posed a risk of liability to the firm.

In conversations with other employees close to the firm I was given to understand that I had stumbled upon something that was better left alone. This was made even more apparent when my connections with the firm were suddenly terminated.