Why did Xerox just donate $ 1 million to the Underground Railroad? Take a look at the Complaint in Howard v. Xerox, a case pending in Cincinnati Ohio federal court. The plaintiff are 5 African-American men who worked for Xerox in its Cincinnati area Ohio repair and maintenance facilities from 1997 to the present. They allege racial discrimination in their employment by Defendant Xerox. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission agreed, issuing findings of probable cause against Xerox. Plaintiffs’ Complaint, filed in December 2002, after considerable EEOC efforts to conciliate the claims proved unsuccessful, details a pervasive and reprehensible pattern of race discrimination, a racially hostile work atmosphere that most Americans would find completely objectionable. Xerox allowed this situation to continue, despite Plaintiffs’ complaints to supervisors, management, and the EEOC.

Plaintiffs’ Complaint describes some of the indignities Plaintiffs endured:
Black dolls and Afro-picks for hair were hung from nooses by the plant’s entrance...another noose was displayed in the Receiving Dock area of the Sharonville facility for months in the Spring of 2001... Racist graffiti and swastikas...were regularly flaunted... Black employees were habitually subjected to a gamut of racial epithets at the hands of Xerox’s White management and some of its employees.... “nigger,” “Black ass nigger,” “mother f---ing nigger,” “coon,” “jigaboo,” “monkey,” “cotton-picker,” and “boy”... White employees often joked about “hunting coons,” that “Black people are lazy,” that “niggers only eat chicken and watermelons” and “you are so Black all I can see are your eyes”... White managers and Human Resources Representatives either ignored...complaints or explained these racist acts as merely “old school”.

Xerox had promised an "action plan" after a "race riot" erupted in October 2001 at its Sharonville, Ohio plant. Instead, it simply went back to business as usual. The promised "action plan" involved diversity training--but Xerox never did what it promised the leadership of the company and what it promised its white and black employees who needed to learn to get along and work together in Cincinnti. Instead of the various managers and Vice Presidents who worked on the "action plan" coming to Cincinnati and providing real, helpful diversity training, the Xerox managers delegated responsibility for race discrimination training to an administrative assistant, who likely had more training on the vcr on which she played the training videotapes than she did on diversity training. And, there was nothing special about this training--employees report it was the "same old stuff" done each year, focusing on sexual harassment and barely mentioning race.

Little wonder that dozens of EEOC charges of race discrimination remain pending against Xerox in Cincinnati--Xerox has refused to conciliate and resolve the claims.