Marshals Service employees have alleged racism for decades. Their case may finally be heard.

Davis is Black, as was his predecessor.Two current Black employees of the Marshals Service, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of a fear of retaliation, said they believe discrimination remains a problem at the agency, echoing others who have retired in the past few years.“There was a time where the overt racism was the predominant source of racism — you know, the nooses on people’s desks and that type of thing,” said one current employee, who recalled getting a promotion in the past few years only after filing an EEO complaint. In 2017, the Secret Service agreed to pay $24 million to Black agents claiming bias in its promotion process.Secret Service agrees to pay $24 million in decades-old race-bias case brought by black agentsThe Marshals Service has been unwilling to come to the table in a similar way, said lawyer David Sanford, whose firm Sanford Heisler Sharp represents the class-action members — more than 700 current and former employees, plus thousands more unsuccessful job applicants. In the early 1990s, an agency report described a gap in job satisfaction between Black and White employees, and widespread perceptions among personnel that a “good old boy network” disenfranchised minorities.But lawyers behind the class action argue the Marshals Service has never meaningfully addressed Black employees’ concerns and said they are unaware of any broad review of the agency’s racial climate since the 1990s.“What case goes on for 27 years, of this magnitude, and can be kept so quiet?” asked former D.C. deputy marshal Robert Byars, 63, who retired from the Marshals Service in 2020. The Marshals Service again declined to discuss specific claims but said it took discrimination complaints seriously.“Is it fair to paint us with a broad brush just because there have been discrimination complaints filed?” Debbie Ridley, a Black official in the agency’s equal-employment office, said in an interview for CBS’s two-part series. Things that I started years ago, so I’m very proud of that,” said McKinney, who was the second Black person to lead the agency and now serves as president of the U.S. Marshals Service Association, an organization of current and retired employees.In interviews, current and former employees gave detailed accounts of their allegations, some of which are described in the class-action complaint. The job reopened months later with a more advanced Spanish-language requirement — she no longer qualified — and went to a White Hispanic colleague who, she said, ridiculed her driving and said she was like the “little Black lady on ‘Police Academy.’ ” She declined to identify the colleague.Ten current, former Black female D.C. police officers sue the city, claiming discriminationAn expert who analyzed several years of “canceled” positions for the agency as part of the now-dismissed lawsuit said that six out of 37 had Black candidates ranked first for the job.Tracy Bryce, who left in 2015 after holding the same position in D.C. for two decades, said she eventually stopped applying for the higher-paying job of deputy marshal. One of the agency’s current employees detailed several instances of White colleagues using the n-word, including to describe another member of the agency.The class action touches on alleged racist comments only in passing, but its members recounted a range of offensive language, including White deputies who called Black colleagues “boy” and “monkey man.” They also mentioned repeated problems with violence against Black inmates in one cellblock in D.C.“I think that the code of silence pervades, and people thought perhaps they could get away with events like this,” a federal judge said in 2008, noting the many Marshals Service members in the courtroom as she sentenced Stephen Cook, a White former deputy in D.C., to 24 months in prison for beating a handcuffed Black man.When a deputy was recorded calling a suspect the n-word in 2018, the Marshals Service put the Ohio employee on administrative leave and said it had “zero tolerance for this type of behavior, which does not represent our agency’s core values of justice, integrity and service.” Later that year, an official said the unidentified employee was no longer with the agency, local media reported.Bryce, 55, said that many Black employees of the Marshals Service stopped reporting incidents because “nothing got done.” But she said she felt compelled to do so when, for the first time in her Marshals Service career, a White colleague made her fear for her safety.