Historical Spotlight: Lockheed Martin
It seems that in this day and age, discrimination makes the world go around. From unjust slavery to immoral segregation, Black Americans have fought hard to gain an equal foothold in society. No other group of people have been systemically undermined, sabotaged, or kicked down despite all of their major contributions, inventions, and cultural influence on the world. Join me as we shine a Historical Spotlight on Lockheed Martin and how its discrimination has led to multiple lawsuits over time.
The Lockheed Corporation originally started in 1926 and underwent a merger in 1995 with Martin Marietta to form the present-day Lockheed Martin. The company is an American defense and aerospace manufacturer headquartered in Maryland and has built everything from bombers to stealth fighters to missiles to helicopters and even rail vehicles. It is one of the country’s largest defense contractors with 73% of its 2024 revenue being from the federal government.
It’s a contractor for the Department of Energy and NASA and is even involved in surveillance for the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service. Lockheed has a vast reach and is an active lobbyist to ensure its interests are addressed and protected in Congress.
There have been several lawsuits and federal investigations against the company for discrimination against Black Americans. Employees have sued for hostile work environments that included racist slurs, death threats, and biased promotion practices.
The abuse has gone back as far as segregation and probably well before that too. There was a complaint made in 1961 to the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity about the Lockheed-Georgia Plant in Marietta that ultimately led to a national push for workplace desegregation called Plans for Progress.
Back then, Black employees were barred from using certain cafeterias, restrooms, and other facilities, and barely received any opportunities for advancement once the company secured a $1 billion contract to provide 5,000 jobs in the area. A group of Black employees and former employees formed the Observatory Council on Discrimination to change the workplace environment and fight for their equal rights.
In 2001, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of hundreds of Black American employees who said the company systematically denied promotions, paid lower wages, and turned a blind eye to racial harassment. Unfortunately, the case, Reid v. Lockheed Martin, wasn’t granted class certification and was dismissed.
Just a year later in 2002, three Black American employees in Palmdale, California sued that they were passed over for promotions. They also mentioned how they were affected by the racist graffiti all over the workplace, leading to a hostile work environment.
On July 8, 2003, a Lockheed Martin plant in Meridian, Mississippi had a racially motivated mass shooting where five of the six victims killed were Black and eight others were hurt by a fellow assembly line worker named Douglas Williams. After the shooting, Lockheed’s President refused to disclose if the company was aware of any red flags from the assailant.
Numerous Black employees submitted complaints before the tragic event occurred and the company even ordered him to attend anger management courses and diversity training, but he refused. Lockheed didn’t do anything to address the rogue worker’s behavior, leading to an unnecessary loss of life in the name of hatred.
From 2005 to 2008, Lockheed Martin was investigated by The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) after a claim was made by Charles Daniels, a Black American electrician who received racial slurs and death threats from his coworkers and a supervisor. Finally in 2008, a $2.5 million settlement was paid to Charles, the largest settlement at the time for a single-person race case.
In 2017, a federal judge denied a $22.8 million settlement proposal and refused to certify claims of racial discrimination after two Black Lockheed employees attempted to show discrimination in the company’s performance-review system. Even though the employees claimed that the review process resulted in lower pay, lower retention rates, and fewer promotions for Black employees, the judge didn’t find their arguments persuasive enough to rule in their favor.
In 2021, Lockheed was in hot water again after The U.S. Department of Labor found that it was egregiously discriminating in their hiring processes from January 2017 to June 2018. The RMS Engineering & Technology Unit paid $700,000 in back wages to 616 applicants, many of which were Black Americans, who were unjustly denied engineering roles.
Despite the massive amount of money, Lockheed Martin has not learned its lesson and it seems that the organization doesn’t care about the money it's lost since it continues to repeat the same egregious actions. The leadership has created a culture that allows racism and discrimination to fester and grow. The organization as a whole has failed to address complaints properly and have turned too many blind eyes to the outright ridiculous harassment that has happened over the years.
While the little slaps on the wrist penalties are better than nothing, there would need to be real consequences like possible incarceration for violating an Anti-Black American Hate Crime Bill to get them to completely stop the toxic behavior. There also should be a governing body that can audit and punish organizations that refuse to provide safe environments for Black American workers.
It’s incredibly sad to see that a company, an organization, would forgo profit and potential business all to continue discriminating against a segment of its very own workers simply because of their skin tone. That type of near-sightedness almost always precedes failure, and in Lockheed Martin’s case, they have a reputation for breaking the rules more times than not.
Refusing to fix the hostile environment has led to millions of dollars lost, poor public opinion, and even legal ramifications. Since 1995, the company has had to pay $676.8 million to settle 88 instances of misconduct. The federal government contracts keep it afloat, but its success is definitely not from the repeated unjust treatment of Black Americans.
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Signed,
Jessica Marie
