- Lawsuit claims that only black passengers were removed after odor complaint
- ‘We were walking through the aisle of shame’ said one. ‘It was horrible.’
DAILY MAIL
Every single black passenger on an American Airlines flight was rounded up and ordered off the aircraft after a crew member decided they smelt, a lawsuit alleges.
The eight men, who did not know each other, had boarded Flight 832 at Phoenix Airport for the five-hour flight to New York JFK in January.
They were all seated in different parts of the plane but all were picked out and hauled off after a ‘white male flight attendant’ made a complaint about ‘offensive body odor’ inside the aircraft, the suit claims.
Staff spent an hour a looking for an alternative flight but, when none could be found, the men were asked to get back on the aircraft and retake their seats.
‘I knew that as soon as I got on that plane, a sea of white faces were going to be looking at me and blaming me for their late flight of an hour,’ said Emmanuel Jean Joseph.
Jean Joseph and fellow passengers Alvin Jackson and Xavier Veal had each taken a connecting flight from Los Angeles before boarding the plane at Phoenix.
Veal decided to record the incident on his phone after noticing that all the black passengers, and none of the white passengers, were being removed.
‘I started freaking out,’ he said.
Video shows staff in the gate area struggling to find them another flight with one man slamming the incident as ‘un-f***ing-professional’, and another remarking that ‘This ain’t no random pick’.
A black American Airlines attendant at the desk appeared to agree with the claim that their removal was racially motivated, admitting: ‘I do not disagree with you.’
Three of the men began talking when they gathered at baggage reclaim at the end of the flight, and they lodged the lawsuit on Wednesday in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
‘They had to re-board the plane and endure the stares of the largely white passengers who viewed them as the cause of the substantial delay,’ the lawsuit claims.
‘They suffered during the entire flight home, and the entire incident was traumatic, upsetting, scary, humiliating, and degrading.’
American Airlines has yet to offer an explanation for why the men were removed from the flight, but insisted in a statement that they ‘take all claims of discrimination very seriously’.
