Michael McWilliams is pictured before assuming his duties as director of the Rumford Public Library on Nov. 12, 2019. He filed a lawsuit is U.S. District Court in Portland against the town earlier this year, alleging racial and gender bias. Submitted photo
PORTLAND — A former Rumford library director who is Black is suing that town, claiming he was the victim of racial and gender bias when he was fired without cause.
In a civil complaint filed in February in U.S. District Court, Michael McWilliams, who now lives in Boston, claimed he was treated differently than other town employees because of “express and implicit bias” by the town manager and the Rumford Library board of trustees, who are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
Through his Portland attorney, Sally Morris, McWilliams said he endured instances of insubordination and rude treatment by some of the six library workers and his authority was repeatedly undermined by the town.
He said he received contradictory directives from the town manager and the board regarding how to handle personnel matters with library workers.
McWilliams “was discriminated against and treated differently when the board of trustees and town manager’s actions were motivated by their express and implicit bias against Black males and they interfered with and undermined his efforts to manage very difficult employees, gave him contradicting directives, and refused to credit his complaints and recommendations, while faulting his performance as not being consistent with ‘small town western Maine’ practices,” according to the lawsuit.
An attorney for the defendants responded to the complaint last month, denying McWilliams’ allegations of discrimination and claiming they always acted in “good faith” and “without knowledge that their conduct violated any clearly established constitutional or statutory rights” of McWilliams.
McWilliams started working as library director Nov. 12, 2019. On March 13, 2020, Town Manager Stacy Carter fired McWilliams.
After he was fired, Williams filed a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from which he was given the OK to go forward with a lawsuit.
McWilliams was the only Black and African American person and one of only two males employed at the Rumford Public Library.
The Rumford Library trustees were responsible for the administration and operation of the library and ultimately responsible for making employment decisions for the library and its employees, according to his complaint.
During his tenure at the library, McWilliams “experienced implicit bias against Black men and explicit discrimination from the board of trustees, town manager and employees at the library,” he said.
McWilliams learned when he started the job that two white female employees, who were sisters, “had long-standing and serious instances of performance problems and of offensive, insubordinate behavior toward patrons and staff, which was detrimental to the interests of the Rumford Public Library because the behavior of these two white female employees had created tension between the Rumford Public Library and its community patrons.”
McWilliams had attended a trustees meeting before starting his job where he learned that one of the two sisters “had used offensive profanity in her interactions with a female library patron,” according to the complaint.
Although the board “found the behavior reported at the November 2019 Board of Trustees and that of these two white female employees … ‘awful’ and ‘reprehensible,’ they took no disciplinary action against the employees,” the complaint said.
When he started his job, McWilliams suggested that he sit down and talk with the employees, the complaint said, but board members “expressed skepticism and considered his efforts to be a waste of time.”
Shortly after McWilliams started at the library, he “attempted to resolve the issues, but it very quickly became apparent that his efforts were not working,” the complaint said.
In November 2019, a female library employee expressed discriminatory sentiments by objecting to books on display for Banned Book Month because the book had two women kissing on the cover, according to the complaint.
One of the sisters again directed profanity … at a library patron in December 2019 and patrons approached McWilliams complaining about the employee’s combative nature at the circulation desk where she worked, the complaint said.
In December 2019, McWilliams asked the other sister to help library patrons with a party in the reading room, “to which the employee responded, ‘I will not be babysitting any patrons because of one of your bad decisions,'” the complaint said.
The board “demonstrated its express and implicit bias against McWilliams as a Black man by interfering with Plaintiff McWilliams’ efforts to manage employees that the Board of Trustees knew were “awful” and “reprehensible” and should have been terminated,” the complaint said.
When the worker who refused to help in the reading room called the board chairman to complain about McWilliams’ directive, the chairman “immediately rushed to the library to support (that worker’s) refusal against McWilliams’ reasonable directive in his role as library director,” the complaint said.
In January 2020, McWilliams discovered that one of the sisters had lied about the use of her sick time, he said in the complaint.
He met with that worker to discuss the issue. Afterward, her sister “barged into McWilliams’ office and berated him for how he handled the meeting with her sister,” according to the complaint.
The sisters “then filed a false complaint to the town manager.” Despite their “well-documented disciplinary problems, the town manager wholly accepted their complaint and instructed McWilliams to meet with employees privately when he is disciplining an employee, which he had done,” the complaint said.
McWilliams reported all of these incidents to the board Jan. 6, 2020, at their monthly meeting, he said. He detailed other instances of one of the sisters “being rude to patrons, he explained that he had met with the two employees and taken steps to address the behavior. McWilliams recommended that the two employees be terminated,” according to the complaint.
But the board “told McWilliams that would never happen,” he said. The next day, a member of the board emailed McWilliams and “instructed him not to meet with either sister “without a trustee present,” the complaint said. The trustee’s directive “explicitly contradicted the directive of the town manager to meet with employees privately,” according to the complaint.
Sometime in January 2020, a member of the board came to the library and met with McWilliams.
“She spent several hours ‘sharing’ with McWilliams ‘some of the cultural differences between big city and small-town libraries.’ The member of the board explained the cultural differences in connection with instructing McWilliams on how to manage (the two sisters) who had a clear record of behavioral problems. The board member suggested that McWilliams hold a staff meeting, which was a third directive on how to deal with these employees,” the complaint said.
In February 2020, another one of McWilliams’ employees approached him about the books he had purchased for Black History Month and made the following statement: ‘I don’t mean to upset you, but our patrons do not read these kinds of books.’ The employee further stated that buying the books was a ‘waste of money’ because, again, according to the employee, ‘our patrons don’t read those kinds of books,’ and that in the past she had ‘weeded out those kinds of books,'” according to the complaint.
McWilliams “found these comments to be very upsetting and distressing,” the complaint said.
He “was distressed because, not only did the comments represent discriminatory and racially biased animus, but the comments were also contrary to the professional ethics and purposes of public libraries,” the complaint said.
McWilliams immediately reported this interaction to a member of the board, but that member “minimized the comments and ignored McWilliams’ complaint by stating that the comments were a result of the employee’s ‘stress’ and that the employee was McWilliams’ biggest ally at the library,” the complaint said.
“Against this backdrop of repeated instances of express and implicit bias against McWilliams during a short period of time, McWilliams continued to experience instances of insubordination, rude treatment of patrons and co-workers, and refusal to assist with certain tasks by” the sister workers, the complaint said.
McWilliams brought the “ongoing behavior problems” about the sisters to the attention of the board at its February meeting where McWilliams suggested a new reporting structure to avoid negativity and insubordination. “At no time did the trustees object to McWilliams’ proposal,” the complaint said.
He also brought his concerns about one of the sisters to the town manager because members of the board “had demonstrated their bias against him as a Black male, had undermined his authority, and had been ineffective in terms of taking action against the employees,” according to the complaint. The board had been “upset with McWilliams for bringing issues to the town manager instead of keeping them” within the board, according to the complaint.
The town manager investigated the complaint about one of the sisters and, at a hearing on March 2, 2020, his findings “substantiated the behavior McWilliams alleged, which the town manager described as “grumpy,” “ugly” and “lapses of judgment” and that, if her behavior did not improve, she would have to look for work elsewhere,” the complaint said.
Yet, the town manager didn’t suspend or fire that worker and allowed her to return to work the next day, according to the complaint.
During a board meeting on March 2, 2020, a community member spoke out against McWilliams’ treatment of the sisters who worked at the library. That speaker “falsely accused McWilliams of abusing and harassing women at his prior library position in New Jersey, a baseless allegation. Being falsely accused in public of such abuse was devastating to McWilliams. Later in the meeting, the Board of Trustees acknowledged that (one of the sisters) was spreading rumors and mounting a disinformation campaign intended to disparage McWilliams.
The stress of these events caused McWilliams to be unable to work March 10-12, 2020, due to acute anxiety,” the complaint said.
On March 13, 2020, the town manager fired McWilliams.
He hadn’t been disciplined before his firing, nor had he been advised that his performance was unacceptable or that his job was at risk, according to the complaint.
“McWilliams was treated differently and discriminated against because of his race and gender when he was terminated without warning or legitimate justification when a white female employee was not terminated for serious insubordination and behavioral transgressions that were detrimental to the interest of the library,” the complaint said.
He is seeking compensation for lost wages, plus interest, as well as punitive damages and costs,. including attorneys fees.
McWilliams claims his 14th Amendment equal protection rights were violated. He asserts he received “disparate treatment” based on race and gender from other library employees and that his firing was retaliatory.
The defendants denied in a July response that “at all times,” McWilliams had “performed his job satisfactorily,” as he had claimed in his complaint.
They also denied he had experienced implicit bias and explicit discrimination from the board, the town manager and library workers.
The defendants said the town manager hadn’t engaged in race and gender discrimination when he fired McWilliams.
The defendants demanded a jury trial and attorneys costs.
He succeeded Tamara Butler, who resigned July 31 to take a job with a Waterville publishing company.
McWilliams had been assistant librarian for Bayonne, New Jersey.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts communications from Syracuse University, a master’s degree in management from New Jersey Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in library and information services from Rutgers University.
McWilliams said he’d served a little less than a year as an assistant librarian at a community college and a little over a year as a librarian at a public library.
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