by BAR editor and columnist Marsha Coleman-Adebayo
Dr. Coleman Adebayo’s tells her own story as a whistleblower in the Environmental Protection Agency, and the growth and triumph of a movement to protect all the truth-tellers in the federal civil service and beyond. She has graciously allowed us to serialize her book. This is the first installment.
No FEAR: A Whistleblower’s Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA - Chapter 1
by BAR editor and columnist Marsha Coleman-Adebayo
“I was struck by the stark disparities that ran—over twenty-five years after the civil rights movement—along clear fault lines.”
I burst into the Women’s room. An older black woman was sitting in a chair inside, smoking. I waved at the cloud of smoke.
“I wish you’d do that outside.” I had seen her around the office. She was an executive secretary. I closed the stall door.
“You working on air quality or something?”
“If you don’t care about your own health, you could at least be considerate of others. Second-hand smoke kills. You should know that, working here.”
“Oh, I know what kills.”
I emerged from the stall and went to the sink, the woman assessing me.
“How’s Inga working out for you?” she asked.
“She’s very capable, thank you.”
“I trained her. I trained all the good secretaries.”
“And you are…?” I looked at her in the mirror.
“Lillian Pleasant.”
“Marsha Coleman-Adebayo.” I turned back to my image. I looked like hell.
“When are you due?”
“Excuse me?”
“You told them yet?”
I shut the faucet off, went to the paper towels, dried my hands, and patted perspiration from my face with the damp towel. “I haven’t told anyone yet, except my family. Why?”
Lillian shrugged. She struggled to her feet and stubbed out her cigarette. She turned her face toward me smiling as she leaned on the door. “I’ll smoke outside from now on.”
Checking my profile in the mirror, I smoothed down my dress.
The hope and optimism of the sixties had been instilled in us as a people. And for those of us who came of age when hope summoned our intelligence and our sense of duty, it still remained. Long after the assassinations, still believing we shall overcome, we entered the workplace skeptical, but optimistic. If there was any meaning that could begin to temper the loss, it was the example of the nascent power of the common people when they organize. This was the torch passed to my generation. I was determined to carry that torch forward and hand it improved to the next.
But in my earliest days at the EPA in 1990, I was struck by the stark disparities that ran—over twenty-five years after the civil rights movement—along clear fault lines. The pay disparities in the system ranged from, in government vernacular, GS-1 to GS-15 (at the high end). Above this was the Senior Executive Service—the elite of all federal workers—few in number but heavily dominated by white men. The make-up of the lower grades became more populated by African Americans and women in a descending scale of pay and rank.
Right at the outset there were alarming signals that the culture within the Office of International Activities was a far cry from enlightened. The most jarring of these came the day of my first weekly staff meeting after returning from maternity leave. Another African American, Franklin Moore, joined me at the meeting.
“The make-up of the lower grades became more populated by African Americans and women in a descending scale of pay and rank.”
I arrived at the conference room ahead of Franklin where the other members of our section, who were all white, were already seated around a table. On seeing me in the doorway, my supervisor, Alan Sielen, called out.
“Come on in, Marsha. We’ll make you an honorary white man so you can join us.
While all those around the table burst into laughter, I was stupefied. I felt humiliated. I felt belittled. I felt attacked and not a little angry. Having never been in a similar situation, I was at a complete loss as to an appropriate response to the rush of emotions washing over me. But I also knew that a strong response could be catastrophic to my career. This was the first time I felt the powerful forces that rise up inside a person subjected to prejudicial ridicule. There were opposing urges to hide and to fight, and a tremendous desire to yell that I knew everyone who was laughing was well aware of how difficult it was for me. Worst of all, I was keenly aware of the fact that I had blinked in this first encounter with racism. They had no dogs. They had no hoses or guns. But with only a single chorus of laughter I had caved. Then Franklin Moore walked in and was welcomed with the same greeting. Only this time, I was seated among them.
I wanted to crawl under the floorboards and hide. Franklin’s face went from open and kind, to blank, as he stood in the barrage of laughter. I wanted to run to him and hold him, but his face had turned into a warrior. Franklin moved forward slow and calm, placing his briefcase on the table before addressing Sielen directly.
“Do you have any idea what you just said to me?” Franklin’s face was stone. “Before you answer that, let me tell you something. I have travelled to South Africa extensively. I travel as a United States citizen. I carry a United States passport. Everywhere else that means something. But when I went to South Africa, a U.S. passport wasn’t good enough. I had to stand and watch some white fool stamp Honorary White on my passport before I could enter their country.” He paused to collect himself. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you do that to me here.”
“Now calm down, cowboy. Let’s not overreact here.” Sielen’s back was up.
“Overreact?”
“That’s right, overreact. I know a thing or two about racism. I went to same school as Jackie Robinson, for Crissake.”
Had I not witnessed it with my own eyes and ears, I would not have believed it if someone had told me about Alan Sielen extolling the virtues of having gone to the same school as Jackie Robinson. Or how impervious a man could be when everyone else in the room was aghast by his going on and on about it. Franklin didn’t even feign listening. He sat shaking his head in disbelief.
About a week later I went to Alan Sielen’s office for my annual performance review. During my maternity leave, Sielen had given Paul Cough a non-competitive promotion, making him my supervisor, although Paul had neither my experience nor educational background. When I mentioned this to Sielen, he was incredulous.
“I was keenly aware of the fact that I had blinked in this first encounter with racism.”
“There you go again,” Sielen said, “complaining. Look, you’re an intelligent woman. You know how to prevent pregnancy. How can you let yourself get pregnant and still expect to compete with a man?” He wasn’t done. “No wonder people think you’re hard to get along with. People around here are starting to think you’re uppity.”
“Uppity, Alan? Do you know what that means?”
“Yes, I know what it means.”
“Who have you heard say that they think I’m uppity?”
“The other day Alan Hecht told me he thinks you’re uppity.”
Alan Hecht was Sielen’s boss. He hardly even knew me.
In 1993, backed by President Clinton, who was on record as a champion of women's rights and justice, Vice President Al Gore’s former Legislative Director, Carol M. Browner, confidently strode into this environment as the new EPA Administrator.
With Carol Browner’s selection to head EPA, an excitement came that I had not felt in the Agency before. Early on we paid close attention to her every move for signs indicating what kind of manager she would be, what mattered to her, and how she would implement policy. One rumor was of the new Administrator having called a meeting of senior staff. Browner, it was whispered, had walked into the conference room to the clatter of all the men rising on her arrival. She strode to her place at the conference table, looked around the room, and seeing no other women present snapped, There are no women department heads at this table. This is unacceptable.
There was a different atmosphere around her that left me unsettled. Something bordering on contempt. Was it for the staff? Or was it some deep disdain for the process itself, which required cheerleading when she preferred bare knuckles?
Two quick appointments sent a stir through the agency. Both were department heads. Both were women. Carol Browner was signaling her support for women's place at the table. Yet I was not the only one to note another signal. Both women were white. By 1993 it was inconceivable that the vetting process for EPA department heads would proceed without considering racial minority representation for senior management positions. …
…I was beginning to hear about preparations for the 4th World Summit on Women that was to be held in Beijing, China, in September of 1995. My contacts at the UN were abuzz, and several colleagues in other federal agencies were beginning to gear up for their participation in the summit. This seemed an ideal opportunity to leverage the Agency’s efforts with the UN within another dynamic, multinational constellation of highly skilled and motivated people. But when I ran the idea past my boss, he doused it with ice water.
“People around here are starting to think you’re uppity.”
“Why do we need to be limiting ourselves to a summit with women?” He was annoyed. Whether aware of it or not, he repeated the standard reasoning. “Don’t we all drink the same water? Breathe the same air?”
I resisted saying: There you go again, Alan. I had made a conscious effort to avoid any confrontations with him after my earlier honorary white experience. I was reluctant to press the issue, but I remembered how violated I had felt then. I vowed that next time I would be prepared to engage them. “This is not a women-only issue, Alan. The women attending this event will be doctors, lawyers, wives, mothers. They represent families, entire communities, professions, governments. Madeleine Albright will be there. Hillary Clinton.” I had no idea why I thought this might impress him.
“Oh, come on, Marsha. You can walk down the street to have tea with them. We don’t have the resources to be sending people half way around the world for stuff like that.”
I didn’t even float Arundhati Roy….
…“All of that women's lib crap, we don’t have to take it.”
Lillian and I looked at each other. I was walking past her desk.
“If it happens out there, that’s one thing. Nothing you can do about that. But inside?”
It wasn’t uncommon to hear a manager lay down the law just loud enough to be overheard. Lillian mouthed the words: Let’s talk.
There were eyes and ears and tongues inside the EPA. Lillian didn't want to be overheard. She couldn't afford to have what she would say be repeated. I didn’t understand it then. I had come into the Agency as a GS-14. But Lillian, after years of hard work and diligence at the Agency had worked her way up from the secretarial pool to the position of executive secretary.
I was moving with purpose, my heels hitting hard on the walk. I saw Lil before she noticed me after she had popped a pill into her mouth and threw her head back to swallow it, nodding to acknowledge me.
“You all right?”
After swallowing hard, Lillian’s eyes widened. “Are you?”
Catching myself, I tried to calm down.
“My boss’s been appointed an ambassador,” Lillian said.
“Well, that’s okay, isn’t it?”
“For him. He’s going to Europe.” Lillian squinted at the distance. “They’re sending me somewhere colder’n that.” She looked back at me.
Lillian rolled her eyes, shaking her head, slow and emphatic.
“Pat’s a little quirky, but she’s not going to overwork you.”
Lillian looked at me with a smile. “I’ve never minded working hard.” She closed her eyes against the breeze, head tilted back.
“I don’t know what to say, Lil. I’m so sorry.”
We wanted to be outside in the open, the wind riffling our hair. Yet Lillian’s hands shook as she opened her purse and lit a cigarette. It seemed difficult for her to sit still. …
…It shouldn’t have surprised me so, but it did. There was so much work to do for Beijing that there was no way to get through it. I had vented some worry about it one day to Lillian Pleasant and she had said, ‘Just give it to me. If all you need’s the typing, I can tear through it in no time.’ I had come around the corner to Lillian’s desk to see how she was progressing. There she was, language for the Conference to one side, craning her neck to the other way to read the small print in her dictionary. I could hear her reading a definition under her breath.
“Hi, Lil.”
“Oh, hi, Miss Marsha.”
“You don’t have to worry about the spelling, Lil. I can run a spell check once it’s key-stroked.”
Lillian looked up and smiled. “I was just trying to figure out what a hormone mimicker is. Just a habit. I never let a word slip past me before I know its meaning.”
The spine of the book was frayed, the pages dark along the edges.
“There were eyes and ears and tongues inside the EPA.”
A day later, as I was walking back across the outdoor plaza to EPA headquarters from a Beijing preparatory meeting with Hilary Clinton at the White House, I heard someone sobbing. Peering around a pillar I found Lillian, crumpled in a corner.
“Lillian? Lil, what’s wrong? What’s the matter?” I went to her and put my arm around her.
“They’ve taken everything away from me,” Lillian sobbed, “my dignity, my self-respect . . .”
“Oh no, Lillian! Nobody can do that. Come on. You’re just tired.” I hugged her. “Come now. Don’t cry.”
“They have transferred me to the typing pool.”
“What?”
“All of my years of service, and she put me in there with the girls fresh out of high school.”
“Who did that?”
“My supervisor did that,” Lillian wept. “Oh, Lord! I feel so bad.”
She was really trembling. “Lil’ you have to go home, rest.”
“If I go home, the office will mark me down as AWOL and that will give them another excuse.”
“Lillian,” I said, “I know you have high blood pressure. You’re very upset. This cannot be good for your health. Please, you must go to the health clinic.“ I helped her to her feet. “Look, we can take this to someone higher up, but you have to take care of yourself first.”
“You think I should file with Civil Rights?”
“I don’t know, Lil. Why don’t you talk with your minister? Fortify your spirit, and then decide.”
Lillian nodded. “I know, I know. But don’t you think—”
My cell phone rang. “That’s my husband. I’ve got to go.” I held Lillian’s face between my hands patting her eyes. “Promise me that you will go to the health clinic?”
Lillian shook her head yes.
When Lillian stopped by my desk it was two hours later.
“What on earth are you still doing here?” She was trembling worse than before.
“They told me that I can’t leave until I finish my work.”
“Well, didn’t the clinic give you something to release you?”
“I gave it to them! They still won’t sign off on me leaving.”
“Okay, Lillian. It’s okay. You need to go home. Call your doctor, Lil. Take care of yourself. That’s the most important thing.
“They’ve taken everything away from me,” Lillian sobbed, “my dignity, my self-respect . . .”
Still later Lillian came back. —I can’t get anyone to sign off on my leave.
The weather was nice enough not to need coats. With my Leo blood it’s always so much better when the weather doesn’t require coats. I had let the warm breeze get the better of me and loitered as long as I could before resigning myself to entering the sick building. With the scent of fresh air on my clothes it seemed so different. It was a good hair day, a day to enter the office feeling pretty.
Inga stood up when I came in, tears streaming down her face.
“Inga, what’s wrong?”
“It’s Lillian.” She dropped her head, her shoulders quaking as she spoke. “She died this morning getting ready for work!” Inga looked up again. “I didn’t want to tell you over the phone.”
I looked at Inga.
“It was a massive heart attack.”
I turned and walked out of the office. I was heading toward Lillian’s cubicle, then stood and looked at her desk. Two just-so stacks of paper stood in neat piles between the phone and her dictionary, the pages smudged along the edges like an old deck of cards.
The woman who had taken such pride in discovering buried meanings between its pages was now dead.
See Marsha on C-Span Book/TV at:www.marshacoleman-adebayo.org.
Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo is the author of No FEAR: A Whistleblowers Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA is available through amazon.com and the National Whistleblower Center. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo worked at the EPA for 18 years and blew the whistle on a US multinational corporation that endangered vanadium mine workers. Marsha's successful lawsuit lead to the introduction and passage of the first civil rights and whistleblower law of the 21st century: the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR.)