U.S. District Court Charged With Bias Against Employees

San Diego’s U.S. District Court--where victims of racial prejudice often turn to seek redress--itself is practicing racial discrimination in employment, two organizations of black attorneys have charged.

The Earl B. Gilliam Bar Assn. and the San Diego chapter of the National Conference of Black Lawyers have raised the allegations over the past few months while representing a black court clerk who claimed he was passed over for promotions because of his race.

Chief Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. of the federal court insists that the charges are groundless and that the black lawyers raised the discrimination allegations merely as a tactic to boost the clerk’s case for a better job evaluation. The chief of the Washington office that monitors the federal courts’ employment practices says the San Diego court has a better-than-average record in affirmative action.

Thompson last month raised the job rating of the clerk, Eddie Stewart of Spring Valley, but said the ruling was based solely on a supervisor’s admission that Stewart deserved a higher score--and was not designed to erase any alleged undertone of racial prejudice.

“We’ve never had any employment discrimination problems around here, and I still don’t think we do,” Thompson said last week.

Yet the attorneys who represented Stewart on behalf of the black lawyers groups contend court officials are denying an uncomfortable reality by ignoring workers’ concerns about employment discrimination at the courthouse.

“It’s somewhat ironic that the house of justice has been so blind in terms of enforcing equal employment opportunity and affirmative action in the federal court, where they’re supposed to be enforcing the Civil Rights Act and the affirmative action laws,” said attorney Thomas Gayton of the Gilliam Bar Assn. “Maybe it’s because they’re so close to the subject that they overlook it.”

Stewart, 31, is an unlikely focal point for such a controversy. A 10-year employee of the clerk’s office, he works quietly at a computer terminal on the first floor of the federal courthouse, inputting data about criminal cases and compiling reports about the court’s caseload.

He declined to be interviewed, explaining he did not want to bring any embarrassment upon the court. But records relating to Stewart’s complaint and interviews with attorneys and others familiar with the action supplied a detailed account of the case.

After being hired in August, 1977, Stewart received a succession of positive yearly evaluations by supervisors and took several steps up the job ladder within the judicial personnel system.

But last May, he took exception to a performance evaluation that rated him “very good”--the second-highest rating on the forms used by the clerk’s office. The evaluation was highly complimentary, calling Stewart “very conscientious,” “cheerful and accommodating” and “an asset” to the court.

His score of 83 points out of 100, however, was two points below the “excellent” range required for consideration for a promotion to courtroom clerk--a post coveted by Stewart and many other mid-rank court employees that historically has been filled almost exclusively by whites.

Stewart wrote a letter to Thompson, asking to be reevaluated by a supervisor he said was more familiar with his work and complaining that the original evaluation “was executed in a bias(ed) and very unfair manner.”

The letter did not raise an allegation of racial prejudice in the evaluation, and Stewart did not file a complaint under the court’s equal employment opportunity grievance system. No such complaints, in fact, have been filed since the district court implemented its affirmative action program in 1980, according to court administrative records.

Instead, at Thompson’s invitation, Stewart’s complaint was processed under the court’s system for employee appeals of job evaluations and classifications. But when Stewart appeared Aug. 5 for a hearing Thompson had scheduled to reconsider the job evaluation, he was accompanied by Gayton and Marva Davis, chairman of the local chapter of the National Conference of Black Lawyers.

Their organizations had assigned them to investigate Stewart’s complaint. And, according to a memo they submitted to Thompson, their study had found “a systematic pattern of discrimination” in the clerk’s office, particularly in the denial of promotions.

The 10-judge court employed no black courtroom clerks, they said, and only one black had held the job in the previous 10 years. Top management positions in the clerk’s office were “100% white and 99% white male.” Newly hired blacks typically were assigned to filing jobs, the lawyers alleged, while whites with similar experience got assignments with better promotional opportunities.

Finally, Gayton and Davis claimed, “black males are consistently denied opportunities for advancement commensurate with their seniority, experience, performance and ability.”

Thompson refused to entertain the discrimination charges, saying they could only be considered if Stewart brought a formal affirmative action complaint.

But Stewart chose instead to continue pursuing the case as a job-rating grievance. A series of hearings was conducted during the summer and fall. Gayton and Davis say Stewart and other court employees testified that there was racial discrimination in the clerk’s office. Thompson says there was no such testimony.

On Dec. 18, Thompson issued his decision. Based on the testimony, he ruled that the supervisor who had evaluated Stewart was unaware of several complimentary letters he had received for his work and was prepared to increase Stewart’s scores on several counts. Thompson directed Chief Clerk William Luddy to raise Stewart’s rating from 83 to between 85 and 87--enough to boost Stewart into the “excellent” range.

Luddy declined to comment on the case or the allegations of discrimination in his office.

Thompson’s decision may end the matter; the lawyers say Stewart has not decided whether to take further action. But the broader dispute about discrimination in the courthouse has not been resolved.

The black attorneys insist that racial prejudice exists in the clerk’s office. “After doing the research and hearing the testimony, I’m convinced there is discrimination in there and it should be addressed,” Gayton said last week.

But Thompson, who supervises Luddy and the clerk’s office, says the charge is baseless. “That came from left field, and it does not pique my curiosity,” he said.

Not even Stewart believes there is discrimination in the courthouse, Thompson said.

“While Gayton and Marva tried to introduce this aspect, because of course Eddie Stewart was black, I’m not so sure Stewart had any thoughts of that,” the judge said. “His letter didn’t say anything about it, and when he testified he didn’t say anything about it.”

Rather, Thompson said, the discrimination charge was a tactic employed by the lawyers to win Stewart a job upgrade.

“I question but that this was not a figment of Gayton’s imagination in order to secure a desired result on behalf of his client,” Thompson said. “I really question the motives of this whole thing. I think it was a tactic to get before me an ingredient that would influence my decision with respect to Eddie Stewart’s actual abilities, and it did not.”

Davis acknowledged that Stewart only viewed his “very good” rating as an act of discrimination after thinking through his employment history in the clerk’s office and talking to co-workers. But his initial denial of a racial element in his grievance is typical, she said, in bureaucracies.

“That is probably the biggest problem when you’re talking about discrimination cases--this area nobody wants to see, this unconscious and conscious denial that the problem exists,” Davis said.

“If these issues can be avoided, they usually are,” she added. “If there is some way not to have to deal with it as a discrimination issue, because of the need not to believe it and not to have a bad reflection on the court that’s supposed to enforce these laws, it won’t be dealt with.”

The chief equal employment officer for the federal court system says the U.S. District Court in San Diego has done well in meeting its affirmative action burden.

“This particular court looks good in terms of the statistics,” said R. Townsend Robinson, chief of the office of equal opportunity and special projects of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington. “I don’t think, merely looking at the numbers, that anyone can conclude they have discriminated.”

According to the latest personnel report filed in Washington, the San Diego court surpasses local private employers in its hiring of blacks, Robinson said. As of June 30, she said, 8% of the court’s employees were black, compared to 4.5% of the civilian labor force in the San Diego metropolitan area. Blacks received 19% of the promotions granted by the court in the year ending June 30, though all were in the clerical ranks.

Robinson conceded that the reports tell little about the clerk’s office itself, however, because they include statistics for the Bankruptcy Court and San Diego’s federal probation and parole office.

Overall, the reports say, six of the court’s 115 employees were black in 1980, when the affirmative action plan was initiated. At the end of June, the court had 222 employees, 18 of whom were black.

According to Robinson, the court has hired two additional black workers recently, though she said she did not believe the hirings were a consequence of rumblings about employment discrimination.

Davis said last week that other changes at the courthouse do seem attributable to Stewart’s complaint.

Communication between supervisors and clerks has improved, she said, and a tension that had been building while the case was under consideration has broken. Workers also have seen that the grievance processes in place can work, Davis said.

But the black lawyers plan, nonetheless, to keep a watchful eye on the courthouse’s inner workings.

“We’re not trying to act as an adversary to the federal courts or as an antagonist,” said Wesley Pratt, an aide to San Diego County Supervisor Leon Williams and president of the Gilliam Bar Assn.

“We just feel if, in fact, people are being treated unfairly, steps should be taken to rectify the situation,” Pratt said. “If there’s a lack of sensitivity, then steps need to be taken to rectify that situation.”