James D. Keeney

Enforcing the Civil Rights Act: Fighting Racism, Sexism and the Ku Klux Klan. the Story of the Miami Eeoc's First Class Action Trial . James D. Keeney

Sometime in the late 1950s, an African-American man known only by the nickname "Fetchit" was forced by Bubba Smith, a white man, to eat a raw hog eyeball at work while Bubba Smith held a razor-sharp knife to his throat. H. S. Camp & Sons, Inc. employed both men. Smith, who was Fetchit's foreman, was not disciplined. In fact, H. S. Camp & Sons, Inc. encouraged its foremen to act much like old South overseers with its black employees to "keep the niggers in line." Twenty years later the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued H. S. Camp in federal court, alleging in its class action complaint that despite the adoption of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, H. S. Camp's racist policies still had not changed. According to the EEOC?s court evidence, the company still maintained racially segregated restrooms, assigned blacks to the hardest, nastiest jobs, paid them less than whites, fired them for minor offenses, and continued to use physical threats including holding razor-sharp knives at their throats as a means of forcing them to perform odious tasks such as "dipping the hole." This is the story of how an unlikely victory was achieved despite surprising legal and bureaucratic obstacles by a dedicated team of EEOC lawyers trying their very first case out of their new Miami office.