Portrait of a company behaving badly
Excerpt of a TIME magazine article on a book
March 16, 1998

Like thousands of upwardly mobile blacks who moved into Fortune 500 companies during the 1980s and 1990s, Bari-Ellen Roberts seemed to embody the American dream.

In 1990 Texaco hired her as its first black senior financial analyst. But, Roberts soon concluded, in spite of Texaco’s public commitment to equal opportunity, the company had no intention of treating black employees fairly. Says she: "I wasn’t up against a glass ceiling. I was up against a brick wall."

In addition to being subjected to a stream of racial taunts, Roberts was repeatedly passed over for promotions.

Roberts and a black co-worker, Sil Chambers, filed Roberts v. Texaco, a racial discrimination class action, in 1994. The suit was settled in 1996 for the largest sum ever allowed in a discrimination case, $176.1 million, after news stories about secret tape recordings of company officials discussing the destruction of evidence sought by Roberts’ lawyers in racially offensive terms led to a huge drop in Texaco stock prices.

The book [Roberts vs. Texaco], written with Time national correspondent Jack E. White, is excerpted here:

Cyrus felt like a secret agent when his wife Robin Anne dropped him off.

"These are the two you’re interested in," [Rich] Lundwall teased, taking two microcassettes from his shirt pocket and waving them seductively at Cyrus. In addition to Texaco executives, ‘cleaning up’ documents, said Lundwall, "there’s highly offensive language not acceptable in the civilized world that reflects a company-wide attitude of discrimination."