New Job Ordered for White Made Nervous Among Blacks

The city of Louisville has been ordered to find a whites-only job environment for an Army veteran who says working with blacks causes him stress, the state Workers Compensation Board said.

Gary Pearl, 39, also will receive $231 a month until he lands a new job for a prior condition of stress that worsened when he worked with blacks.

The compensation board ruling, made Friday, quoted a doctor who indicated that Pearl had “very specific and strong feelings about working in a situation where he was the only white person.”

Civil rights leaders castigated the decision. John Johnson, Kentucky president of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said he was “astonished” that the worker compensation board “could be so outrageously racist.”

Pearl, who was discharged from the Army in the mid-1960s after trying to jump off a balcony in Germany, said his stress worsened when he transferred from the parks department to the sanitation department. Frank Radolovich, his attorney, said Pearl’s fear of blacks became aggravated when he supervised an all-black crew.