Office still fights discrimination
Howard County resident Fred Johnson, 56, was rated “highly effective” as a manager at the auto parts business where he was employed. That was in 2010, when he was the oldest — and told he was one of the best — of the 12 managers at the company.
Soon after, a new supervisor took over his department. Johnson (not his real name) was told he was being put on a “performance improvement plan.” He was fired from his job 90 days later, and replaced by a 34-year-old less-qualified employee.
Johnson was sure that the new supervisor felt “threatened” by Johnson’s greater experience, and that was why he was terminated from his job.
Investigating age bias
So where does a Howard County senior turn when he feels he had been fired because of age discrimination?
He can turn, as Johnson did, to the county’s Office of Human Rights, which looks into such complaints. Its 17-month investigation in Johnson’s case, which included speaking to workplace witnesses on both sides and checking workplace records, found that Johnson’s complaint was valid. (In bureaucratize: “There is reasonable cause to believe the age discrimination allegation is substantiated.”)
The case, according to Office of Human Rights Administrator C. Vernon Gray, is now in the “conciliation phase,” meaning that the company could appeal the decision, or sit down with Johnson and decide whether to offer a monetary settlement, employ him there again, or both.
“The law says if a person can no longer perform essential duties [of a job], he or she can be fired,” Gray said. This, he said, was not the case with Johnson.
The number of workers between 55 and 64 years old is expected to rise by 40 percent between 2006 and 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bureau says that people 65 and older are expected to make up 6.1 percent of the workforce in two more years, compared with 3.6 percent a decade earlier.
Meanwhile, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has reported, according to Forbes magazine, that complaints by aging workers are soaring — jumping from about 18,000 in 2007 to as many as 25,000 a year since 2008.
The 74-year-old Gray agreed this undoubtedly means that the Columbia-based office will be looking into more age discrimination cases than ever before.
With a staff of nine people, the office has investigated 59 age-discrimination complaints over the last five years, Gray said. That’s more than 10 percent of the 450 workplace and housing discrimination complaints it has handled over that period. Charges of racial discrimination still lead locally and nationwide, followed by sex discrimination complaints.
First black elected official
Gray himself has been a pioneer in human rights advances in Howard County. He was the first African American to win an electoral office in the county, which didn’t happen until 1982, when he was elected to the Howard County Council to serve the first of five four-year terms.
Among other incidents, he remembers during his initial campaign one already elected county commissioner refusing to shake his hand.
“Why don’t you shake the man’s hand?” asked the commissioner’s wife. The commissioner didn’t respond.
“After that, at different meetings, I made certain to stand alongside him and engage him in conversations,” Gray said. They spoke, but a subsequent handshake never occurred. Both he and Gray were of the same political party, but of different skin color.
Gray attended his fellow commissioner’s funeral.
At the time he entered elected office, Howard County was not the affluent, progressive, racially tolerant and integrated area that several of its communities — Columbia, Ellicott City, Clarksville and West Friendship — have now become.
The $125,152 median income of the county makes it the second wealthiest in the nation, according to the Census Bureau, and Columbia and Ellicott City have often been cited by national magazines as among the five best places to live in America.
Yet not so long ago, “there were no school buses for black kids, and there were separate white and black water fountains in the Howard County courts,” Gray said. He remembers, in the 1980s, blacks expressing concern to him about traveling to Howard County because of their belief that local police were racially prejudiced.
“When Jim Rouse planned Columbia with his commitment to racial justice and integration,” Gray remembered, “there were people in the county who wouldn’t come into Columbia. Even his real estate associates thought he was crazy.”
Now, Gray, a past president of both the national and the Maryland Association of Human Rights Associations and former chair of the political science department at Morgan State University in Baltimore, said that life for African Americans and other minorities in the county is “much, much better.”
Nevertheless, he added, “I would say that discrimination still exists in Howard County, and as long as we have it, we need institutions like the Office of Human Rights to protect the peoples’ rights.”
Fighting on many fronts
The office investigates, among other things, complaints of unlawful discrimination in employment, housing, money-lending institutions, law enforcement and public accommodations — such as hospitals, retail stores, schools and recreation facilities.
It lists 16 categories for complaints: race, religion, creed, marital status, familial status, sex, age, sexual orientation, personal appearance, source of income, color, national origin, physical or mental disability, occupation and gender identity.
Complaints must be filed within six months of the alleged discrimination, except for housing complaints which are given one year for filing.
Each year, the county’s Human Rights Commission honors individuals and organizations for their contributions to human and civil rights in the county.
The 2013 awardees were former Howard County Executive (1998-2006) and now Maryland State Sen. James Robey as well as the Council of Elders of the Black Community of Howard County, which works to advance the education of African American students and to pass on history and their experiences in the black community.
Robey, who is the Democratic majority leader of the Senate in Annapolis, told the Beacon he was very honored to have received the award. He agreed with Gray that race relations have improved in Howard County, especially since the mid-1970s when there were still chapters of the Ku Klux Klan operating locally.
The 72-year-old public servant-politician also remembers as a member of the Howard County police force (1966-91), then as county chief of police (1991-98), receiving complaints from some business owners that there were black people in their stores.
“Howard County may now be among the best places to live, but it’s not perfect. Prejudice still exists, on all levels — racial, religious, sex, age. Anyone who thinks that discrimination no longer exists is pulling the wool over his eyes,” Robey said.