Mike Baker, WRAL-TV (Raleigh), September 3, 2009
A black woman is suing the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, saying she was abruptly fired after complaining that the organization was not reaching out to African-American churches.
{snip}
Kimberly McCallum said in the lawsuit that was moved into a federal court Wednesday that she was the only black employee working in the executive offices in Charlotte when she started in February 2007. She complained to her superiors later that year when she was asked to recruit congregations to a camp program but found that a list of 635 prospective churches had only three memberships that were primarily black.
McCallum said it was apparent that black churches were excluded.
A week after raising her concerns, McCallum said she was told her job with global offices was cut because of downsizing. Her boss never raised concerns about the quality of her work, according to the lawsuit filed in June in a local court.
McCallum said she tried to get other jobs at the association, based in Minneapolis, but that she was blocked from other positions and had a later job offer revoked.
“Subsequent to her discharge, plaintiff learned that the global offices had not been downsized and that the only job that was eliminated there was the one occupied by the plaintiff,” the lawsuit says. She wants a job reinstated, back pay and damages for what she describes as discrimination because of her race.
{snip}
Original article
(Posted on September 4, 2009)
Comments
I just wonder how many primarily White churches were recruited to Rev. Wrights outings.
Billy Graham didn’t “reach out” to me either.
This is not a racial issue. It is a political one. The most religious blacks, who disagree with abortion, still vote Democrat. It is not Billy’s fault that black churches preach the opposite of what his beliefs are. Seriously, what do these black churches expect if they preach for their local black Democrat; a pro choice Democrat. If anything, Billy should cry racism because most black Christians vote against white Christians and instead vote for a democrat who hates Christians. Makes you think doesn’t it. Black hatred of whites is so strong that it makes them vote against their own religion.
If it turns out that the Billy Graham group didn’t “reach out to blacks” what of it? Since when did Billy Graham have a legal obligation to do so? If the organization isn’t doing anything illegal, I see no reason to take legal action against it.
This McCallum is either a plant or a fool. Who ever heard of a black church that reached out to whites? Churches are cultural as well as religious. Are synagogues to be sued for not having a minimum percent of gentiles? And those loving, inclusive Islamic mosques! Put the Civil Rights Division of DOJ on their tail.
This woman is either a moron or an infiltrator for SPLC, trying to destroy Graham and his church.
If there is an attorney out there…don’t churches have freedom of association?
Did not Billy Graham say that interracial marriage is a-okay? Isn’t he in favor of diversity and preaches we are all the same? This is what happens when one caves into PC.
Does McCallum know that Christianity is a religion and not a race? If so, was it her job to research and comment on the nature of the Association’s outreach efforts?
Billy Graham? You mean the “Christian evangelist” who’s a registered member of the Democratic Party, who went to Eastern Europe in the 1970s and then shilled for the Communists by telling Americans there was “freedom of religion” behind the Iron Curtain; that Billy Graham?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8326362/
http://www.freepres.org/pamphlet_details.asp?graham_facts
I don’t normally take this position on issues such as this, but I don’t care what happens in this lawsuit.
Sounds like she’s just another paranoid black malcontent, jumping to conclusions and seeing racism under the bed, behind the door and in the woodpile. She needs to learn that the 1950s, and most of blacks’ excuses to holler about “discrimination,” are “Gone With the Wind.” And by the way, the reason that most churches remain racially segregated is that that’s the way both races want it.
Since going to church is a voluntary thing (in my familiy, it was mandatory until I turned 21), what is this woman’s complaint? Billy Graham’s mistake was hiring this woman in the first place.
Do you want to wager that this is some kind of payback for a tape that was released with Graham and Nixon engaged in a taboo conversation?
Why should a church have to follow any type of anti-discrimination laws? It’s private and they can exclude people. As some people pointed out, this seems to be a double standard. Whites are not allowed to have their own organizations and churches and so forth, yet these black groups complain and demand that those mostly-white institutions accept them. Usual multicultural hypocrisy. Nothing new.
Couldn’t be starker in clarity. The only black hired by Grahams office there, is the only one who caused trouble and is now suing. Let one in to your office, your neighborhood, or your church and pretty soon they are clammoring why there isn’t more and yelling racism. It’s as much a scam as the Nigerians wanting you to “hold their oil money for them”.
I’m ordained in 2 different faiths, and what I know about stuff like this is that the courts tend to stay out of disputes where a church is involved. Churches have the right to set their own personnel policies, and very rarely do the courts intervene on that right. I don’t think this woman has the ghost of a chance in this lawsuit. I imagine that the Billy Graham ministries based their decisions on the doctrine preached at so many black churchs: the Jeremiah Wright type of belief system, which totally conflicts with what the Graham ministries teach. The court would NEVER try to force any church to accept a doctrine that was completely the opposite of the church’s official dogma. In fact, the court does not have the power to do that.
I have some familiarity with employment law. It would be very hard to establish what the plaintiff is claiming, which is that downsizing only applied to her position, or that the organization was not within its right to start and stop the downsizing with her position. If you are downsized, the supervisor is under no burden to establish prior concerns about the quality of your work. If I have three people doing basically the same job, I don’t have to establish that the one I am letting go is the one with the weakest job performance.
As for her being blocked from other positions, this would be difficult to prove. What she may mean is that the jobs required qualifications that she does not have. If she is not a UNIX systems administrator or chief accountant, for example, why should the organization make an exception and hire her for such a position?
The plaintiff’s main hope is that her race will exempt her from the rules that apply to White people, and that the organization will be forced to take her back to avoid embarrassment.
15 — Claremont White Lady wrote at 3:02 PM on September 5:
Madam, how very naive of you. If the suit gets a hearing, the woman’s got a shot. This is after all, the twenty first century.
Tom Iron…
If the organization isn’t doing anything illegal, I see no reason to take legal action against it.
Please try to remember, this is a BLACK WOMAN sueing a WHITE organization. SKIP the psychic predicts….this will go forward and she will win the “ghetto lottery”
in 99 percent of the case of chruches, they self-segrate in the same was they do at school lunch rooms. further proof the same-race children get along better, make stronger friends and share the same ideas, and aspirations - and even poitical ideology - than their white classmates. is anyone seeing what this illustrates. given their choice, kids separate along racial lines. it’s their preference to share lunch with people of there own kind which share their own culture and values. prisons are the same way. segregated to the extreme in a lunchroom. even still, there’s occasional violence….along racial lines.
1 — Bandmo wrote at 6:21 PM on September 4: “I just wonder how many primarily White churches were recruited to Rev. Wrights outings.”
Answer: 0
Tom Iron, keep your “naivete” comments to yourself - there is no need to be condescending to ANYONE here. I’ll stand by what I said in my original post, because I know it’s true. When I was working in active ministry, I did conflict resolution for troubled churches, and I had to know legal precedent. Obviously I have no guarantee for the present, but what I wrote there is accurate and based on legal precedent; it is not naive.
The way the law is currently structured, it seems as if it incentives minority employees to act as morale sucking, complaint mongering, malingerers.
If you are black and fired yourself in the unlikely condition of being gainfully employed, as soon as humanly possible just make a half dozen wild complaints about racism and there is no possible way get fired without a massive, expensive lawsuit.
Why bother perform your job cheerfully and without complaint when all that does is ensure you won’t get a six figure discrimination settlement when you eventually get fired?
And that’s what happens when you hire blacks, nothing but trouble. I had the same thing happen to me when one of my employees asked me to hire a black friend of their’s. Within a month, he was complaining that he was the only black employee. Mind you, my business only employs 15 people. Small business, and privately owned by me alone. He went to city council meetings and the BBB, etc. His work ethics were not very good, and he spent most of his time, according to fellow employees, on the phone. Eventually, I got enough complaints from customers and fellow employees and I fired him. Now my little business is 100% white, and there have been no problems since then. Oh, and I also got rid of his white buddy that asked me to hire him. He was pretty worthless too.
21 — Claremont White Lady wrote at 3:14 PM on September 7:
White Lady, no offense meant but did the precedent you mention involve a BLACK sueing a WHITE person or organization? The two are entirely different animals from a white sueing a white!
The above posters are all too common. My father hired a black woman to work for him. He fired her for stealing money from him, and when she got fired, she screamed about racism. An EEOC official came in (who was black) could tell my dad wasn’t anti-black and he said, “You know, I’m sick of other blacks screaming racism just to get sympathy.”
