FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 5, 2016

Kraemer, Manes & Associates, LLC “KM&A” has filed a complaint against the Community College of Philadelphia (“CCP”) in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for race and gender discrimination as a result of CCP’s failure and refusal to hire a part-time employee to a full-time faculty position in the Spring of 2015.  In the case of Brarailty Dowdell v. Community College of Philadelphia, it is alleged that Mr. Dowdell was denied hire and passed over in the hiring process due to his race and gender.  Mr. Dowdell was equally qualified or more qualified than those seven applicants chosen for hire.  Additionally, Mr. Dowdell had a longer tenure than any other applicant, having worked for CCP in a part-time capacity for over ten years.

The case of Brarailty Dowdell v. CCP has already garnered extensive media attention.   The reason for the interest in this case is not merely the legal issues it raises as discussed below but the fact that Mr. Dowdell is a well known African American movie producer.  In the complaint, it is alleged that CCP discriminated on the basis of race, on the basis of gender, and further, on the basis of combined race and gender.  Mr. Dowdell, as an African American male, would have been the fourth African American male hired in over fifteen years.  The English Department, for which Mr. Dowdell applied, has upward of 120 full-time faculty staff.  A claim for race/gender combined has been considered by Federal Courts as a viable claim under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  Most notably in Lam v. University of Hawaii, 40 F.3d 1551, 1562 (9th Cir. 1994), wherein a female Vietnamese national was denied the Director of the Law School’s Pacific Asian Legal Studies Program.  The Ninth Circuit opined in response to the University’s assertion it was not bias because it considered hiring a Caucasian female and a Vietnamese male: “where two bases for discrimination exist, they cannot be neatly reduced to distinct components.”

Kraemer, Manes & Associates, LLC is an employment law firm with principal offices in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, serving all counties in Pennsylvania, focusing on employment law, business law, litigation, and civil issues.  KM&A clients include employees, small businesses, parties in litigation, and people with a variety of legal issues.

For more information about this case, contact Christopher J. DelGaizo, Esquire at (610) 844-1779 or at cd@lawkm.com.