Black Agents Sue, Say Secret Service Discriminates

Yvette Summerour decided at the age of 6 that she would become a Secret Service agent when she saw her mother crying as she ironed clothes and watched President Kennedy’s funeral on television.

Now the longest-tenured African American woman in the Secret Service, Summerour on Thursday reluctantly joined two other black agents in a discrimination complaint against the agency. Passed over at least five times for promotion, she said, she regrets having to denounce the agency.

“I love the job; the only thing I ask is that I be allowed to become a manager,” Summerour said.

The complaint charges that black agents are passed over for top management jobs, which it says are dispensed to whites through a “good-old-boy network.”

It also accuses the Secret Service of carrying out “a pattern and practice of discrimination”--including relegating African Americans to dangerous undercover assignments--bias in hiring, testing and disciplinary actions, and “maintaining a racially hostile work environment.”

Lawyers for the agents said they have talked to 50 of the 211 black agents and that they expect many more of them to join the lawsuit, perhaps including some who are retired. African Americans comprise about 9% of the Secret Service’s 2,453 agents.

The lawyers called on President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore to intervene and order the Secret Service to negotiate a settlement.

“Discrimination is happening on the White House grounds, in the shadow of the White House and in the shadow of the vice president’s residence,” said John Relman, one of the agents’ lawyers. “These agents put their lives on the line for the president and vice president. The least the president can do is intervene now and demand that the Secret Service sit down with us and fix the problem.”

A White House spokesman said that Clinton has no plans to get involved in the Secret Service job discrimination dispute and expressed confidence that it would be resolved fairly.

For its part, the Secret Service defended its record. Spokesman Jim Mackin said that the agency “does take very seriously any allegation of racial discrimination” and is “actively engaged in assuring a diverse work environment.”

Mackin said that two of seven Secret Service assistant directors are black. One of them is Larry Cockell, the former head of Clinton’s security detail who was lifted from anonymity when independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr subpoenaed him to testify in the Monica S. Lewinsky investigation. In addition, four of the 11 largest field offices are headed by African Americans, he said.

Lawyers for the three agents alleged that Secret Service statistics show a bottleneck when it comes to promoting African Americans to senior management jobs. A little more than 4% of these jobs are held by blacks, who comprise nearly 11% of the agents on the next rung down in the agency hierarchy.

“It is really the last bastion--most of the other federal law enforcement agencies have reformed,” said David Shaffer, another of the three agents’ lawyers, who also represented African American agents at the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in recent job discrimination cases.

The Secret Service maintains that many of the agents Shaffer argues should be eligible for promotion have not been in their current jobs long enough.

The complaint asks the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to certify the black agents as a class, a legal move that could lead to a wide-ranging examination of the agency’s personnel practices.

In the federal government, such bias complaints normally are investigated within each department. Departmental decisions may be appealed to the EEOC or the courts. But in this case, the agents are seeking negotiations to reform Secret Service promotion practices. In addition to its presidential protection duties, the Secret Service--an elite arm of the Treasury Department--is charged with investigating counterfeiting and financial fraud involving forgery.

At a Washington news conference, lawyers for the agents released a 1987 internal memo in which black agents raised many of the same concerns about discrimination. But they alleged that too little progress has been made.

Summerour and two other agents who appeared at the news conference spoke reverentially of the agency and said that filing the complaint was a last resort.

Reginald “Ray” Moore, 20th overall on the agency’s promotion list and the highest-ranked African American, said that the last straw for him came when he was passed over for a senior Washington job last summer that his own supervisor thought he had earned. Instead, Moore accepted a transfer to Dallas, passing up opportunities to leave the agency for more lucrative jobs.

“The Secret Service has a storied past, [but] it has a broken present,” said Moore.

Like Summerour, John Turner said that he also hesitated to join the complaint. Turner is a 19-year veteran whose merit ranking puts him 32nd overall on a promotion list of 310 agents and second among African Americans. “I’m truly sorry that my frustrations have taken me to this level,” he said.

Lawyer Relman said that 50 agents were moved up in the last round of Secret Service promotions, while Turner and Moore were passed over. Both had served in senior management jobs in an acting capacity and--despite their high ranking on the promotion list--had seen the jobs go to others. Relman also represented black Secret Service agents denied service at a Denny’s restaurant in Maryland, although none of the three agents was involved.

Summerour was visibly moved as she explained how she had known that she wanted to be a Secret Service agent since she was a young girl in Lawrenceville, Ga., and saw her mother watching the Kennedy funeral.

“We children wanted to know why she was crying,” said Summerour. “My mother said: ‘They killed a good man. This should have never happened.’ I knew then that I wanted to make sure that never happened again. I didn’t know what the Secret Service was yet, but I knew what I wanted to do.”

After a stint in a Georgia police department, Summerour joined the Secret Service in 1986. Since then, she has held supervisory jobs on the security details of President Clinton, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and presidential daughter Chelsea Clinton. She was in charge of protecting Chelsea on a two-week trip to Europe without her parents, a surrogate mom packing a semiautomatic pistol. Summerour was also the agent in charge of security during last spring’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in Washington.

After that, she said, she applied for higher-level jobs that opened up in training, intelligence, protective operations and the Chicago and Philadelphia field offices but was passed over.

“I always get near the top, and then I get transferred somewhere else,” she said.