Introduction

Texaco recruited banking executive Bari-Ellen Roberts with promises of a professional challenge and advancement. But she and 1400 other African Americans faced a persistant pattern of racial discrimination so onerous that it wound up in a lawsuit-and ultimately in the largest discrimination settlement in U.S. History. This is the true story of how a giant corporation was challenged against all odds by one brave woman who was determined to stand her ground.

Here, in Bari-Ellen Roberts' own words, is the fascinating, infuriating, and ultimately triumphant account of how she acheived an electrifying result that could change the face of corporate America, including the inside story of the notorious "Texaco Tapes," which recorded senior executives making racially-charged comments while they allegedly plotted the destruction of evidence. Here is a fresh and inspiring vantage point on what is unquestionably the major civil rights battleground of the twenty-first century: the workplace. Spellbinding and eloquent, intensely personal and dramatically riveting, this is the most persuasive yet damning account of corporate racial discrimination ever written.

Editorial Review

This book is a chilling account of the successful $176 million class-action racial discrimination suit brought against the Texaco corporation by Bari-Ellen Roberts and her 1,400 fellow African American colleagues. Roberts served as a senior financial analyst at Texaco from 1990 to 1997. With help from Time correspondent Jack E. White, she takes us from her Cincinnati origins to the fateful day she went to work for Texaco where she endured Neanderthal-like discrimination from her white colleagues, such as a vice president of human resources labeling her diversity-building proposals as "militant," coworkers using racial slurs such as "little colored girl," and seeing her boss in a Sambo costume at a Halloween party. Roberts tells of the stress, anger, fear, and ultimately the will it took for her to become the lead plaintiff in the case. She ultimately secured in- and out-of-court settlements with the help of a justice-oriented white executive, Richard Lundvall, who went public with taped racist comments made by his white colleagues. Like Rosa Parks, Bari-Ellen Roberts shows a courage that has benefited all Americans. --Eugene Holley Jr.

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