Reel Legal Beat Exclusive: “We moved across the street to do some work and I moved into a workstation and started working with my partner and I looked up and I see this white sheet hanging over the top of my workstation.” Isiah Washington
Attorney Lisa Bloom and her client, Isiah Washington recently sat down with ReelUrbanNews.com to discuss Washington’s discovery of a Ku Klux Klan looking white sheet hanging above his workstation at the Sierra Aluminum Company in Riverside, Ca.
“We moved across the street to do some work and I moved into a workstation and started working with my partner and I looked up and I see this white sheet hanging over the top of my workstation.”
Speaking softly, Washington says that he was not the only person to see the white sheet object hanging in the air. “I told my partner ‘Look at this.’ Then I stopped working.”
The lawsuit states: ‘The plastic sheet was white in color and it clearly had eyehole cuts to make it appear as a Ku Klux Klan hood, known worldwide as a symbol of racial hatred and terror against African Americans.
‘This white, sharply pointed hood of a full faced sheet with eyeholes hanging, as seen by Washington at his workstation, is the most distinctive feature of the Ku Klux Klan and is known as the ‘glory suit’.”
Washington maintains that when he asked management to remove the sheet he was rebuffed. “I asked for them to take it down and my supervisor Lupe said, ‘Why, why?’ I remember a couple of people coming around and they were giggling. It was like everything just moved in slow motion. And then [Lupe] called his nephew, a forklift driver operator over. They told me to get back to work.”
The lawsuit states that the white sheet remained for another hour before it was removed.
Washington has filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against Sierra Aluminum. Attorney Lisa Bloom was direct in describing the brutal history that blacks associate with a white hood in America.
“Let’s be clear what a white sheet with two eyeholes cut out of it hanging over the workstation of an African American really means,” says Bloom. “It’s a very clear symbol of the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan, which is one of the most violent terrorist organizations in the U.S. that specifically terrorized African Americans throughout our history.”
The legal complaint states the white sheet was 20 to 30 feet in the air directly in front of Washington’s workstation. Bloom says the KKK’s white sheet serves a dual purpose. “It’s not just a symbol of overt racism – it’s designed to instill fear. And from what you can see, Isiah Washington even sitting here today, it did instill fear. And it would in any reasonable person.”
Read our article: reelurbannews.com/isiah-washington-attorney-lisa-bloom-files-suit-sierra-aluminum-company/
