The Black O: Racism and Redemption in an American Corporate Empire. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1997 by John L. Parker, Jr.

If you thought that blatant, pervasive, corporate-sponsored racism could not exist in America in the last quarter of the 20th century, read The Black O: Racism and Redemption in an american Corporate Empire, by Steve Watkins.

Although it is actually a painstakingly researched account of the largest private civil rights case in U.S. history, at times it reads like an old-fashioned detective story.

In it you'll meet Ray Danner, an animated, banty rooster of a man who became the 266th richest person in America building the multi-million dollar Shoney's restaurant empire. And he did so, apparently, by spending the bulk of his days flying and driving around the South to various company restaurants adjusting thermostats, weighing pieces of fish, and instructing managers to keep black employees either out of sight in the kitchen, or off the payroll altogether. (A blackened "O" in the word Shoney's on an employment application signified to managers that the applicant was black.)

Enter Henry and Billie Elliott, a white married couple who managed a Captain D's seafood restaurant, which is part of the company that also owns Shoney's. They were fired in 1988 primarily because they refused to fire black employees and replace them with white ones at their Panama City, Fla., restaurant.

What happened to the Elliotts, it turns out, was not particularly unusual in Dannerland, but their reaction was. They took their story to Tallahassee attorney Tommy Warren, who had some experience as a civil rights litigator. At the time, Warren wasn't looking to take on any major cases, but the Elliotts' story intrigued him enough to investigate further.

He began pulling on that single loose strand of evidence, and the more he tugged the more incriminating incidents and witnesses he found. After four years and thousands of hours of painstaking detective work and court battles, that single thread eventually unraveled a massive tapestry of intentional, illegal, corporatewide racist behavior and led to the largest class of plaintiffs ever certified in the federal civil rights action, Haynes et al. v. Shoney's, Inc. In 1992, Warren won the largest settlement ever entered in such a case: $132.5 million, the bulk of which was distributed to more than 20,000 victims of the company's discrimination.

But to synopsize this case is to trivialize not only Watkins' book, but also the monumental work of Warren and his co-counsel, Barry Goldstein, making the day-to-day course of the litigation seem mundane and its eventual conclusion pre-ordained. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Shoney's assembled a veritable army of lawyers to defend the indefensible, including Nishville's high-powered Jim Neal (of Watergate fame, and also currently Al Gore's lawyer) and Birmingham's Butch Powell, a bearded, blustery, three-pieced thug who actually told Warren at one point that what he (Powell) wanted most of all from the case was to get Warren disbarred. And he was serious.

If you ever entertained the notion that practicing civil rights law against the likes of Danner, Powell and their various toadies might be an easy way to make a lot of money, this book would quickly disabuse you of that fantasy. Tommy Warren worked exclusively on the case for four years without receiving a penny for it until he was fully victorious.

Watkins, who teaches at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va., occasionally allows the sheer mass of material generated by this case to overwhelm him (the notes and sources sections in the back of the book go on for 33 pages), but he does an admirable job of making the legal intricacies of a modern civil-rights class action intelligible.

But Watkins brings more than research to this project. The real strength of the book is the story, a narrative as old as David and Goliath, and as modern as Brown vs. Board of Education, and it devolves finally, as do all great contests in human affairs, into a passionate clash of wills.

People will do evil things, perhaps out of wrong-headed convictions--as with Ray Danner--or because they are paid well, as were his lawyers. But the impulse to do good often remains something of a mystery.

If we truly believe in fairness and equality, as we say we do, we'd better thank our lucky stars that some among us have that impulse--for the Henry and Billie Elliotts of the world who, against crazy, unwinnable odds, stand up to injustice; and for the Tommy Warrens, who dare to champion them.

John L. Parker Jr., a former attorney, is an editor and publisher in Tallahassee, Florida.