COLUMBUS — A former Columbus-Lowndes Habitat for Humanity employee is suing the area nonprofit in federal court for racial discrimination.
Plaintiff Andrea Cureton, who resigned from her position as volunteer coordinator with Habitat on Feb. 22, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Mississippi in Aberdeen, on Wednesday. In the suit Cureton claims that another employee, who is a manager at Habitat’s store, constantly made racist remarks and that nothing ever came of Cureton’s complaints about her to the organization’s executive director.
Neither the manager nor the director are listed as defendants in the suit.
According to court documents, shortly after Cureton was hired, the manager began making what Cureton felt were racist comments in her presence and refused to stop, even after Cureton told her it offended her and complained multiple times to the director.
Cureton, who is African-American, was hired in November 2015. The first incident listed in the court documents, in which the manager called Cureton a “shy monkey,” occurred in February 2016.
She is asking for back pay and reinstatement as well as compensatory damages, though the documents say the amount is to be determined by a jury.
Attorneys Louis Watson Jr. and Nick Norris, of Jackson-based Watson and Norris, are representing Cureton in the suit. Neither they nor Habitat representatives responded to calls from The Dispatch by press time.
Among the complaints were that the manager told stories about her family’s black employee who she called “stinky,” claimed that a white woman in a relationship with a black man “was talking all ghetto” and stated multiple times that she assigned the least desirable jobs to black employees.
In addition to allegations of racial discrimination, the court documents refer to an incident in 2017, in which two mentally disabled siblings entered the store to volunteer and the manager later told Cureton never to invite them back because they were a liability to the organization. Cureton said she felt she was asked to be complicit in disability discrimination.
The documents say Cureton reported all these incidents to the executive director, who always defended the manager but promised to talk to her.
The situation escalated in December 2018 when the manager accused Cureton of stealing from the organization’s thrift store. Two months later, fearing she would be fired, Cureton resigned.
The complaint also says that Cureton’s home was damaged in a Feb. 23 tornado that hit Columbus, and the nonprofit’s board of directors wanted to give Cureton $877, which Cureton refused. She complained to the board about both the offending employee and the administrator and was told the organization did not have a policy for dealing with racial harassment or discrimination.
The board promised to investigate the matter and offered Cureton the money again, which she refused, the complaint says.
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