Matthew
Fogg is a veteran of wars against criminality on two fronts. Highly
decorated for his leadership in America’s war on drugs, Marshal Fogg
has also successfully fought the U.S. Department of Justice in the courts.
In 1998 a federal jury found Attorney General Janet Reno and the entire
U.S. Marshal Service (USMS) guilty of discrimination in Fogg’s career.
The jury awarded him a landmark $4 million, found the entire USMS to
be a racially hostile environment for all African American deputy marshals
and promoted him to the rank of chief deputy.
Fogg
is currently guiding employees of the US Army and the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), in their
struggle against discrimination and blacklisting at Redstone Arsenal,
in Huntsville, Alabama. He is also executive Director of CARCLE,
Congress Against Racism & Corruption In Law Enforcement.
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I’m
proud of to be a U.S. Marshal. I’m even more proud that I have fought
racism in the U.S. Marshals Service every step of the way for the past
17 years, resulting in a $4 million judgment. Since federal law limits
such awards to $300,000—equal to the sum already paid to the lawyers
who helped me prove my case of racial discrimination and reprisals—I
won’t get rich any time soon. (Compensation with back pay, however,
is expected to accumulate beyond a $1 million.) Nevertheless, the
1998 Fogg v. Reno decision was both a personal victory and a blow struck
for all the brave men and women of color in government service.
When
I say “brave,” I’m not just talking about sisters and brothers in federal
law enforcement. Minorities of all job descriptions are subjected to
daily assaults against their dignity and livelihoods in workplaces throughout
the U.S. government. Ultimately, it has been my faith in GOD who has
blessed me with a double portion of intestinal fortitude to stay the
course in this never-ending war within the most powerful institution
on the planet. We don’t pick racial fights, but we’re not backing down
either. That goes for all GS pay grades, from the janitor sweeping
the halls at the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., to the
African American Ph.D. designing weapons systems at Redstone Arsenal,
in Huntsville, Alabama.
When
I was first asked to look into complaints of discrimination at the U.S.
Army’s Redstone installation, I thought I was going to assist one employee.
Instead, I found myself on a base rife with cruel, pervasive racism.
Direct evidence indicated that minorities are systematically held back
from promotion, threatened with dismissal, ‘blacklisted’ when they file
lawful grievances, treated as pariahs in the workplace and subjected
to vile verbal abuse. My immediate advice was, get organized.
Two
years later, the 200-strong Redstone Area
Minority Employees Association (RAM), is preparing a class action
suit against Redstone’s various U.S. Army commands and NASA. RAM has
compiled evidence of massive illegality, including falsification of
documents, biased clearance revocations, obstruction of justice, and
perjury by federal managers—including many who are still employed.
I serve as RAM’s executive director and also officially represent many
of these employees in the agencies’ equal employment opportunity administrative
processes.
Redstone’s
Racist Record
For
me, a defining moment of culture bias reality came when Al Sullivan,
the former Commanding General over Redstone facility operations, finally
stopped playing the innocence game. At a press conference last year,
in response to RAM allegations, Sullivan said, “Does discrimination
exist? Yes it does. It exists in any organization.”
Ironically,
I owe my excellent training in the arena of investigations protocol
to the U.S. government. What the U.S. Marshals Service didn’t teach
me, I learned on my own in the course of suing the Department of Justice.
However, my personal experiences did not fully prepare me for the appalling
scope of institutionalized bigotry at Redstone Arsenal. Certainly,
no civilized person could have predicted the sudden resurrection of
the epithet, “Tar Baby,” the new slur of choice among some civilian
and military supervisors. It is a phrase commonly used in Ku Klux Klan web pages that portray
black Americans as sub-human. (See Tar Baby
Outrage in this issue of 
.
)
In response
to RAM’s repeated protests against all forms of discrimination, including
a demand for a congressional investigation into conditions at Redstone,
the government commissioned a $185,000, three-month study by Booze-Allen
& Hamilton, of McLean, Virginia. The company surveyed almost 2,000
Redstone employees. Although the company whitewashed a number of RAM’s
key complaints, its survey discovered shocking levels of dissatisfaction
with the promotions and appeals process on the base. An astonishing
“79.5% of non-managers and 53.5% of managers believe that selection
decisions across [Redstone] are based on relationships and favoritism,”
concluded Booze- Allen. “In addition, citing fears of reprisal, some
participants claim that challenging a decision could be detrimental
to an employee’s career.”
Had
the confidential survey been limited to minority employees, the verdict
against management would have been near-unanimous, and the term “favoritism”
would be replaced by a more accurate description of Redstone’s employment
practices: racist. Ultimately, RAM’s class action suit will prove the
rightness of our cause.
The
prospects for victory in the courts are excellent. Just last month,
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Washington, D.C. agreed
to a $3.75 million settlement of a suit by 
120
Black scientists and engineers. The plaintiffs will also get the promotions
they had been unfairly denied under NASA’s discriminatory personnel
policies.
I believe
bias practices at Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center are even
more pervasive than at Goddard.
Huntsville’s
besieged minority employees can also look forward to their day in court,
with confidence that they will prevail at the end of the process. However,
until only a few weeks ago, a key weapon was missing from the civil
rights arsenal; no mechanism existed that would make discriminating
agencies accountable for their crimes.
No matter
how high the monetary award, the offending agencies have never been
held accountable for the bill. Taxpayers, not perpetrators, paid the
price, while the agencies that committed or permitted crimes against
their minority employees lost not a dollar in funding. Agency executives
kept right on stepping up the career ladder, losing judgments but retaining
their budgets.
The
First Civil Rights Bill of the 21st Century
On May
15, we scored a righteous victory, with a lot of help from our friends
in the civil rights community and in Congress. President George W.
Bush signed into law the Notification
and Federal Anti-Discrimination and Retaliation Act, or No FEAR,
backed most notably by African American Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX)
and House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WS).
It was
a day that whistleblowers like myself will long remember. Hopefully,
passage of the No FEAR Act will become an event that racists, who are
strategically placed throughout the federal bureaucracy, will not soon forget.
Under
the old rules, agencies that were found guilty of discrimination walk
away from the courtroom without a scratch. Damage awards were paid
out of a general U.S. Treasury fund covering the entire federal government,
rather than by the agency that broke the law.
In other
words, racists responsible for harming citizens at tremendous cost to
the taxpayer were allowed to carry on with business-as-usual, totally
unaccountable for their crimes. We may finally be rid of the old system
of official impunity.
The
new rules require that settlements and judgment money come out of the
offending agency’s budget, and that each agency make a yearly report
to Congress on the number of discrimination and whistleblower cases
pending against it. They will also be forced to report on whether employees
have been disciplined for discriminating.
NAACP
board member Leroy Warren summed up the issue best. ”This legislation,”
he told the Associated Press, “should stop some of the managers whose
actions are like some international outlaw, where they can do what they
want to, when they want to and how bad they want to, without anyone
taking control of it.''
Congresswoman
Lee said the bill “could not have been passed without the pain and the
sheer agony of so many employees who came forward to mention that their
lives were made almost in the form of a nightmare because they chose
to stand up.”
I
am intimately familiar with that kind of pain. So is my soul mate in
the struggle against racial crime, Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. Her $600,000
award against the Environmental Protection Agency in 2000 was, like
mine, reduced to $300,000, in line with the federal cap. Her case against
EPA was credited as the impetus for the No Fear Act.
I was also honored to be among those who submitted
testimony before the Congress in support of NO FEAR, on May 9, 2001.
My
representation in these matters encourages support of the provisions
of No FEAR that are essential to government oversight and accountability.
I had the opportunity to hear a GS-15 civilian management official
for the US Army's Aviation and Missile Command testify under oath
on three separate occasions that a black female engineer with a Ph.D.
degree in Systems Engineering could not get promoted or transferred
because she had been "blacklisted".
Initially,
I was shocked at the boldness of his statement and the obvious lack
of concern for any consequences from his superiors. He even described
it as an actual list similar to what banks use to avoid certain areas
of town. In talking to other employees and the local AFGE union president
in that area, it appears the term blacklisting is a common language
and an accepted practice for reprisal in the Redstone area federal
workplace. This is a clear example that federal management officials
realize, they are not being held to the same accountability standards
that are enforced on private industry.
I drew
upon my own experience with the Department of Justice, which is still
spending millions of taxpayer dollars fighting me in court.
Again,
we observe an outrageous process where the DOJ simply challenges each
dissatisfied outcome and extends an already long litigious process
because, they know legally that monetary payments in Title VII will
be extracted from a special US Treasury fund not accountable to the
real violators of our great Constitution. No FEAR is fair because
current laws permit our government to personally charge plaintiffs
who do not prevail in Title VII claims with court cost and litigation
fees. 
Therefore,
in like manner No FEAR will levy real damages against discriminating
agencies and their officials who do not prevail in Title VII claims,
and capture a record that will always expose a pattern of all illegal
activity involving Title VII….
There
are so many federal agencies now operating counter productive to our
great Constitution and it’s discrimination laws. ‘NO FEAR’ will at
least make the agency heads who are found guilty, give an account
for the money they must spend on these violations; and that means,
the US Army and NASA budgets in Huntsville.
Punish
the Perpetrators
Fear
has many faces. In Black Alabama, there is the historical fear of murderous
white men with guns, torches and bombs. At present-day Redstone Arsenal,
the cultural heirs of nightriders use fear to oppress, humiliate and
marginalize African American employees. Fear of loss of livelihood
is their favorite weapon to silence whistleblowers and intimidate workers
deserving of promotion. Fear, not competence, keeps racists in charge.
Fear
is a powerful emotion. Its synonyms include: dread, fright, alarm, panic,
trepidation, terror. Through organization, and by utilizing all the
legal means at our disposal, minorities and whistleblowers can teach
the discriminators the meaning of fear.
If we
unite in large numbers, racists will dread the mere mention of
our organizations’ names.
Through
constant vigilance and careful documentation, we can turn the legal
tables on supervisors who sacrifice their agencies’ missions on the
alters of prejudice. For the first time, bigots will be frightened
for their paychecks.
We can
spread alarm in the ranks of racists, so that they will at least
pretend to be decent human beings.
If we
pull together to unmask those who draw up the blacklists, panic
will spread among the perpetrators of reprisals, who will find their
own employment terminated.
Let
them shake with trepidation that even one of their racist colleagues
might be so foolish as to utter the words, Tar Baby.
My
Mission
Most
important of all, we should all be terrified at the military
consequences of racism at Redstone Arsenal and wherever else bigotry
cripples our national defense.
The
entire nation has been summoned to confront foreign terror. Black Americans
like myself have always answered the call for help against any enemy
of our country.
My mother
and father were great godly mentors for a family of nine siblings raised
in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial and our nation’s capital. Three
of my brothers served in the Vietnam conflict and unfortunately, for
a brief period they were all in the battle zone at the same time. But
by God’s mercy all three returned home with only one carrying the US
Army ‘Purple Heart’.
My identical
twin served and protected the great state of Maryland as a State Trooper
until his career was ended by discrimination.
And
last year we laid dad to rest at 100 years of age. He lived in an era
when the Wright brothers flew the first flight and he saw the start
and finish of two world wars. He was here when former Alabama governor
George Wallace proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and
segregation forever”.
But
dad has raised-up a son that understands his historic grief. That son
shall stand on the promise of God that all men are created equal. And
using the words that Dr. King once said: “This is our hope. This is
the faith that I go back to the South (Huntsville) with. We shall hew
out of a mountain of despair (at Redstone), a stone of hope.” So in
closing, I ask the question that David asked when the biblically famed
Goliath became a threat to the mighty kingdom of Israel. What right
does this uncircumcised demon (racism) have to come before the GOD of
Israel (America)? God will deliver us!
Redstone
Area Minority Employees Association
www.ramea7.com
Congress Against Racism & Corruption In
Law Enforcement – CARCLE
http://www.bwbadge.com
Huntsville
Times – Gen Sullivan admits to discrimination at Redstone
http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/?May2001/22-e19336.html
Ku
Klux Klan site
http://www.kkk.com/
