Fury Bailey - Personal Injury - Wrongful Death Attorneys

A CASE I COULD NOT REFUSE

By William S. Bailey 

Fury Bailey

710 – 10 th Avenue East

Seattle , WA 98102

(206) 726-6600

December 1990 was a time of major transition in my law practice, as I prepared to leave the security of a large successful Seattle plaintiffs' firm for the uncertainty of a new two lawyer firm with my longtime best friend Steve Fury. I was also abandoning the asbestos product liability practice I had done for nearly seven years, feeling it was the legal equivalent of the assembly line workers I used to see on auto plant tours as an adolescent in Detroit . Beyond this, I was the sole source of support for a family of four, that was about to add one more member – my wife Sylvia was five months pregnant. As a child of the Depression once removed, I fretted every time I had to write another check for the laundry list of things we needed for the new firm – phones, furniture, photocopier, computers. The capital contributions never seemed to end.

Against this backdrop, I received a call from Steve Fury at home just before 9:00 p.m. on a dark mid-December evening. “Bill, we need to talk about a case I have now that would be one of the first our new firm handles – racial discrimination by the Washington State Ferry System. African American employees have received the most vile kinds of harassment. The State AG's office refuses to do anything to correct it. We'll have to try this, with $50,000 in costs we probably won't get back. Think about it.”

As I hung up the phone, I was filled with conflicting impulses. The moral imperative was clear enough. I had lived in New Orleans as a small child in the 1950's and seen the cruel edge of racial discrimination in a way that I would never forget. The facts that Steve had just presented to me were deeply disturbing – an agency of state government looked the other way while the worst kind of institutional racism was openly practiced. I was deeply offended that my tax dollars were helping to support this. I did not want to respond with silent passivity.

I struggled with a number of nagging doubts though, the strongest of which was that I had never handled an employment case before – good intentions are one thing, but these clients needed and deserved much more – a lawyer who could deliver justice through skill and commitment. Moral outrage alone wouldn't get the job done. As a raving perfectionist, I knew that I would make rookie mistakes against our more experienced opponent. I would have to work twice as hard to master the rules and strategies of the employment discrimination legal game. And then there was the money issue, taking a labor intensive costly case when I was worried already about making ends meet.

But in the end, I could not give in to these fears. I called Steve the next day – “If I don't do this case with you, I will never be able to justify it to the young idealist within, that showed up at law school in 1971 wanting to change the world.”

The State Attorney General's office did all they could to break us. The lead attorney sent Steve a threatening letter early on, “If you do not dismiss this frivolous lawsuit, we will seek personal sanctions against you and your firm.”

We fought back, using a team of private investigators to help us put together a composite picture of the hostile work environment. We urged workers of conscience at the State Ferry System to “go public” and tell us what they knew. Bit by bit, our doggedness and tenacity paid off, uncovering proof of work practices such as:

•Black dolls hanging in effigy.

•Officers openly voicing racial slurs over PA systems.

•Photographs from Hustler magazine posted on the bulletin board

showing a black person kneeling at a toilet and eating feces.

•Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday blanked out on desk calendars.

•Pictures of monkeys posted on bulletin boards with black crew

members names under it.

Nonetheless, the state waged an aggressive motions practice against us and took a large number of depositions. We were spread very thin. Two weeks before trial, Steve's four-month-old daughter required brain surgery. The government lawyers refused to agree to a continuance, so suddenly I was trying the case alone.

As the trial got underway, never before had I appreciated the importance of a free press. Outraged by the numerous, specific instances of racial harassment revealed in our case, reporters began to rain down bad publicity on the Washington State Ferry System. An emotional high point was reached in the case when the only African American captain in the fleet agreed to come in and testify on our behalf. A consummate professional, he had tried to avoid controversy throughout his career, realizing that when he finally made captain, “they wouldn't be able to hurt me anymore.” But he could not remain silent any longer, and spoke eloquently from the witness stand about all he had endured over the years.

The third day of trial, a chief assistant attorney general I knew and respected was brought up from the main office in Olympia to join the defense team. He was waiting for me when I walked into the lobby of the King County Courthouse. After greeting me he said, “You win, we're admitting liability. Make a settlement demand.” Feeling vindicated, our clients agreed to a favorable settlement with the State.

As a consequence of the suit, the former Coast Guard admiral who was the chief of the Washington State Ferry System resigned along with the director of operations. One of the Seattle newspapers ran a political cartoon of a State Ferry worker in Ku Klux Klan sheet with an accompanying editorial, “Bigotry pervades State Ferry System.” One of the plaintiffs later said, “I did this for my sons, with the hope that they will not have to go through what I did.” Another said, “I think the case raised the consciousness down there. They were threatened when they found out we could retaliate.” This case led to a number of other lawsuits against this same agency, with a wholesale change in hiring and promotion practices in the end.

For all my worries going into it, and the stresses as this case progressed, it was well worth it. In the end, it was one of the most satisfying things that I have ever done as a lawyer, something I will always be proud of.

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