Enforcing the Civil Rights Act: Fighting Racism, Sexism and the Ku Klux Klan: The Story of the Miami EEOC’s First Class Action

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.

James D. Keeney was born in Aurora, Colorado. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Pennsyl-vania School of Law. Before entering upon his law studies, Mr. Keeney served two years as a volunteer teacher in Tanzania. After graduating, he worked as an Assistant Attorney General at the Pennsylvania Insurance Department and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. In 1979, he moved to Miami and became a Supervisory Trial Attorney with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In 1986 he left the EEOC and went into private practice in Sarasota, Florida, where he specialized first in employ-ment discrimination and civil rights litigation, and later in securities arbitration and litigation, recovering stock market and other financial losses for his clients. He retired in 2011. This is his first book.