I t’s a tale of two street departments. One is that the head of the department, Rick Rhoden, should be terminated for allowing or being part of racist treatment of Black employees. The other is “Move along; nothing to see here,” which was the finding of an investigation into the department.
The anti-Rhoden crowd claimed that the locking of a restroom and the cordoning off of a room amounted to a problem. On top of the locked toilet, there were other allegations of mistreatment relating to promotions and such.
Those concerns were laid at the feet of Mayor Shirley Washington, who has had Rhoden’s back in all of this, and by that we mean that she did not know of anything Rhoden had done that was worth firing him over. To get to the bottom of it all, she said she would investigate the matter, and the findings of the investigation were released on Friday afternoon.
Specifically, the investigation didn’t find anything, other than someone being called “Bubba,” which was being handled by management.
It’s hard to know how the same person can be someone who needs to be fired and someone who has done nothing, that all that smoke is there but no fire, and yet that’s what we are faced with.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The people who conducted the investigation took surveys from employees, allowing them to answer anonymously. And then investigators also talked to employees and to Rhoden and an assistant. From that information, the investigators declared their findings.
What seemed to push this whole thing out into the open was the restroom and wall. The contention was the restroom was locked and a wall built to keep Black people out of the restroom and an adjoining room.
What investigators found was that the restroom was in use for two women who worked in the office and that when they moved to a different area, the restroom was locked, barring all people, Black and white, from using it.
We imagine Rhoden is relieved, but we doubt the anti-Rhoden group will be comforted by the results of the investigation, given that it was conducted by people in the mayor’s employ. On the other hand, the investigation was a laudable effort to figure out what was fact and what was fiction.
Perhaps the best thing that can come of this is the understanding that the city takes such allegations seriously. There is, of course, no place for racist behavior anywhere in society, although finding it and rooting it out are completely different matters. With this experience on the table, those in a position of authority are put on notice that the world is watching. For public institutions particularly, that is how things should be.