The Wichita NAACP Blog: NAACP Legal Defense Fund Files Brief In Wal-Mart Gender Discrimination Suit

Profile in Courage: Dr. Ronald W Walters

As the President of the Wichita NAACP Youth Council in July of 1958, Dr. Walters led the group as they conducted the first successful student-led sit-in of the Civil Rights movement. Sit-Ins were not an approved tactic of the NAACP in 1958 so when the Branch and Youth council asked for the support of the National Office, they were turned down. It required an extraordinary amount of courage for Ron as the Youth President and Chester I Lewis, the branch President, to press forward over the objections of the National Office. When the sit-in ended in August of that same year, the Dockum drug store on the corner of Broadway and Douglass in Wichita Kansas was integrated - along with the entire Rexall Drug store chain and all its subsidiaries. Following the success of the Dockum Sit-In, the Oklahoma City Branch Youth Council conducted a sit-in that August. From there, the tactic spread throughout the Midwest. In 1960, a group of young men and women from SNCC conducted a sit-in in Greensboro North Carolina which many mistakenly believe to have been the first... Dr. Walters went on to become known throughout the world for his knowledge of African American politics and leadership. He headed the African American Leadership Institute and Scholar Practitioner Program of the University of Maryland, served as Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, and retired as Professor Emeritus of the University of Maryland College Park. Dr. Walters was a dear friend, a supporter, and a mentor, and he will be sorely missed... July 1938 - September 2010

Sunday, March 29, 2009

NAACP Legal Defense Fund Files Brief In Wal-Mart Gender Discrimination Suit

On Friday, March 13th, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) filed a friend of the court brief supporting the plaintiffs in a historic, nationwide sex-discrimination lawsuit filed against Wal-Mart Stores. The lawsuit, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., was originally filed in 2001 on behalf of a class of approximately 2 million women affected by Wal-Mart's discriminatory employment practices, making it one of the largest civil rights class action lawsuits in history. The case is currently being reheard en banc by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

A federal district court certified the lawsuit as a class-action in 2004, and the original panel of the Ninth Circuit affirmed in 2007. Last month, the Ninth Circuit agreed to rehear the case before a group of eleven judges, with oral argument set for late March. Wal-Mart has asked the Ninth Circuit to hold that victims of employment discrimination can only sue as a class if they give up their right to monetary damages, and instead seek only injunctive and declaratory relief.

LDF argued in its friend-of-the-court brief that accepting Wal-Mart's position is not only bad policy, but also would be a radical rewriting of civil rights law. "When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, the clear intent was to expand protections against workplace discrimination by extending the remedies available to victims of intentional discrimination to include money damages. Wal-Mart is attempting to undermine those protections," said John Payton, LDF President and Director-Counsel.

LDF was joined on the brief by a broad coalition of civil rights non-profits, including the Asian American Justice Center, Latino Justice, PRLDEF, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Legal Momentum, NAACP, National Partnership for Women & Families, National Women's Law Center, and Women Employed.