Ray Moore became known as “the guy” soon after he filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against his employer, the United States Secret Service.
“Lots of people said, ‘Ray was the last guy we thought would sue the agency because he was such a company guy,” Moore said. Agents would respond “you’re the guy” when they met him.
Moore loves the Secret Service, the agency that protects the president and investigates financial crimes.
But in 1999 Moore was again passed over for a promotion — a job that went to a less-qualified white agent who Moore then had to train.
He had spent five years President Bill Clinton’s protective detail and said being passed over in '99 “was the last straw. That’s when I got fed up with everything.”
Moore filed a lawsuit to which, ultimately, more than 100 black agents signed on. The suit described an agency that fostered a racist culture and routinely promoted white agents over more qualified African-Americans.
The “that guy” label followed Moore to multiple assignments and even to his last one as head of the Secret Service office in Atlanta.
“I just wanted to effect change, and I did,” Moore, who retired last spring after 32 years with the Service, said Wednesday.
Government lawyers filed paperwork Tuesday agreeing to settle the 16-year-old case for $24 million. Lump sums of as much as $300,000 will be paid to each of the original eight plaintiffs, including Moore. The agency did not admit wrongdoing or institutional bias, but it agreed to change its promotion practices.
“This is money that, if they had been promoted in the way that they should have been, they would have earned,” said Desmond Hogan, one of the lawyers for the agents. “Our clients’… main motivation in filing suit is knowing future generations of Secret Service agents shouldn’t have to deal with this problem.”
Moore was 25 and studying for a master’s degree at West Georgia College (now university) when the agency hired him in 1984.
His first assignment was in Miami. Next he went to Baton Rouge. In his decades with the Service, Moore says he was assigned to a total of seven cities.
He was an instructor at the training academy until 1994, when he was assigned to Clinton’s protective detail. When the Service announced promotions in June 1999, however, Moore was not on the list.
Moore said that, in an acting capacity, he had already been doing the job to which he had hoped to be promoted. But the job went to a white agent with less experience and lower performance reviews, Moore said.
On top of that, he said, he had to train that agent, who was to become his boss.
“That wasn’t the first time I saw discrimination within the agency,” Moore said.
While Moore did get promotions in the years before he filed his suit, he didn’t make it to the top of any particular office or operation.
After he lost out again on a promotion, Moore said, one of his managers told him, “I don’t agree with what happened but it’s the Secret Service way. So we have to live with it.”
Moore said Wednesday, “I knew what it meant. … ‘This is what we do.’ They wanted to make sure you conformed. They wanted to make sure you were on the team, you were making sacrifices.”
He received critical and sometimes dangerous assignments. Moore was assigned to do advance work for overseas presidential trips or for last-minute visits to disaster areas. He also was sent into other cities to assist in financial crime investigations that required a black agent undercover.
“They didn’t hire black or minority agents, so I (was) sent around the country to work undercover,” Moore said. “I had to go in by myself.”
Clinton was still president when Moore filed his complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a required step before a discrimination lawsuit can be filed. By then, he was in the Dallas office.
His colleagues responded by being cool toward him, Moore said. And three or four months later, the agency’s inspector general opened an investigation of him based on an anonymous letter that claimed Moore used the agency’s phones, fax machine and computers “in furtherance of my suit. They came back with no findings,” Moore said.
“Somebody in that office wrote that letter because it was postmarked from the Dallas field office,” Moore said.
In the years leading up to the settlement, the agency took a public relations beating.
During interviews in 2008 by lawyers preparing for a possible trial, it was revealed that senior Secret Service officials exchanged racist emails, such as one allegedly titled “Harlem Spelling Bee” and containing a list of “black” definitions of words. There also was an email that joked about lynching.
Also in 2008, a federal magistrate wrote in an opinion that the Secret Service had “made a mockery” of evidence rules and court orders in the case. U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson also wrote that testimony by a key Secret Service witness was “riddled with discrepancies.” She said the agency had spent years hiding and destroying evidence.
As the lawsuit neared a resolution, Moore said more and more minorities, as well as women, were promoted.
The settlement was “the right thing to do,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, whose agency oversees the Secret Service, said in a statement.
“I am pleased that we are able to finally put this chapter of Secret Service history behind us,” Johnson said.
Moore got news the case was over on Friday, but the paperwork was not filed until Tuesday.
“I waited patiently,” Moore said. “Once it was filed I could exhale.”
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