A. Shonn Brown, left, and Michael Hurst, right.It was the evening after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Video of a police officer pushing his knee against the black man’s neck for nearly nine minutes as Floyd screamed out for help, lost consciousness and ultimately died was circulating throughout the world. And A. Shonn Brown, a black in-house lawyer in Dallas, was devastated.
Brown, who serves as vice president and deputy general counsel at Kimberly-Clark Corp., sat and had a drink and a somber conversation with her close friend and former law partner, Michael Hurst. He’s a white trial lawyer and partner at Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann.
“I was pretty low,” Brown remembers. “I said, ‘I’m just tired. I’m exhausted and I don’t know what to do anymore.’ He said, ‘What can I do?’ And I said, ‘Use your voice. Until white people call out racial injustice, then it’s a black issue. But this is an American issue and this problem with race is not created or perpetrated by black people. This is perpetrated by white people. And until white people stand up and say, ‘Not here. This is not my America. It’s not going to change.’”
Three days later, on the night of May 29, Hurst got his chance to stand up when an employee at a Sonic Drive-In off Inwood Road in Dallas allegedly threatened to call the police on Brown’s 17-year-old son and five of his friends. Why? Because they’d exited their cars, according to Brown. She says her son and his friends quickly left the restaurant.
“When you say, ‘I’m going to call the police on you,’ that feels like a threat on their lives,” Brown says.
She says her son had hung out with friends outside vehicles at the same Sonic during prior visits to the restaurant. But the last time he went was different, she says, because everyone in his group was black.
One member of the group is the child of Tasha Grinell, assistant general counsel for the Neiman Marcus Group. Another is the child of Dallas County Associate Judge Monica Purdy. A girl who was with the group was left “visibly shaken and very upset” after the incident and told her mom, who alerted the other parents, Brown says.
She went to the Sonic that same night and says she saw two other groups of young people outside their vehicles. Most were white, she says. She confronted an employee who she says subsequently told the other teens to get back into their cars but without threatening to call the police.
Brown has requested a copy of the surveillance video from the night in question but hasn’t received it yet.
A. Shonn Brown, deputy general counsel and VP at Kimberly-Clark.She later recounted the experience in a Facebook post and gave Hurst permission to contact Nils Okeson, general counsel of Sonic parent company Inspire Brands Inc., after Hurst asked to get involved. The Sonic in question is corporately owned, according to Brown.
“Last night the children of some of my closest friends, who happen to be African American, were profiled and humiliated at a Sonic in Dallas in a middle class neighborhood where I happened to have grown up and attended school,” Hurst wrote in a message to Okeson. “Needless to say, my friends are angry, scared for their children and beyond frustrated.”
He shared Brown’s written account of what happened and urged Okeson to “immediately take action and use your position and platform for righteousness and to help be a solution to escalating racial tension and discrimination against not only my friends’ children but against a demographic where I suspect Sonic derives substantial revenue.”
Okeson’s reply: “Thank you for your concern. The Sonic team is in touch with the parents.”
Hurst and Brown were not impressed with the response.
Michael Hurst, partner at Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann in Dallas.“He [Okeson] could be a very wonderful, decent person. But clearly he’s in a position where he could have taken this baton. He could have run with it. He could have done something very good, not only for the community but also for Sonic burger and Inspire. Instead he, in my humble opinion, dropped the baton,” Hurst says.
Brown adds, “Even if he personally wasn’t going to dive in and do something, and that’s not necessarily what I was expecting, but I expected as an organization that they would take on more of a leadership role on this and not push it down. I was disappointed.”
Okeson and Inspire representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
However, Brown says that she has talked with an area supervisor and regional director of operations for Sonic and described them as being “extremely receptive to the experience that our kids had.
“They immediately apologized that this happened to our children,” she adds. “They said they obviously needed to look into it.”
The director of operations also informed Brown and the other parents that Sonic does not, in fact, have a policy that prohibits patrons from exiting their vehicles at the drive-in, according to Brown.
On Thursday, her son, his friends and their parents are slated to meet with Sonic representatives to further discuss the situation.
Brown says she wants the teens to share their story, how they felt that night and convey that “this is not right and should not happen.” She also wants Sonic to explain how the company plans to address what happened to her son and his friends and “look in the mirror at their policies and think about how they, as an organization, can improve.”
“They have a diversity statement on their website, all companies do,” she adds. “The question is, ‘Do they live up to it with the actions that they take?’”
Brown notes that she and the other lawyer parents involved in the situation have not disclosed what they do for a living to Sonic, though Hurst did reveal that information in his message to Okeson. Still, Brown says it shouldn’t matter.
“I don’t think it would’ve changed how Sonic responded,” she says. “I do think that we are uniquely situated because we are researchers and investigators and questioners based on our background, profession and education. It caused us to approach this likely in a different way.”
Despite the number of lawyers involved in the situation, Brown says legal action isn’t at the forefront of their minds at the moment.
“My primary motive is protecting these kids,” she says. “I think if I can help them psychologically push this to a place of positivity in how they dealt with this and came through it, then that also feels like a win.”
Read More:
‘Things Are Different Now’: General Counsel, Corporations React Publicly to George Floyd’s Death
Crisis Management Lessons From Franklin Templeton’s Central Park Incident Response
‘It Could Have Been Me’: Black Attorneys Reflect on George Floyd’s Death and What Comes Next
"general" - Google News
June 04, 2020 at 02:58AM
https://ift.tt/3czP2dH
In-House Lawyer, Trial Attorney Call Out Sonic Drive-In General Counsel After Alleged Racial Profiling Incident | Corporate Counsel - Law.com
"general" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YopsF9
https://ift.tt/3faOei7
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "In-House Lawyer, Trial Attorney Call Out Sonic Drive-In General Counsel After Alleged Racial Profiling Incident | Corporate Counsel - Law.com"
Post a Comment