The latest legal battle coming against American Airlines isn’t about a window flying off the plane or disputes over Skiplagged tickets. Three Black men are standing up for themselves and five others who claim they were racially targeted when removed from a flight earlier this year.
A lawsuit filed by Alvin Jackson, Emmanuel Jean Joseph and Xavier Veal in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York stems from a January incident. The suit claims American Airlines employees asked eight passengers, all for whom were Black, to exit their plane headed to John F. Kennedy International Airport from Phoenix because of an alleged “offensive body odor.” A video of the incident shows the group of passengers at the door of the plane right before the jet bridge speaking with the flight attendant.
“This is crazy. Y’all just took like eight Black people off the plane... Yo, I paid for the flight just like everybody else. So, we don’t have a right to be on this flight?” said Veal behind the camera. The flight attendant then orders them to exit the jet bridge and ask their questions to the staff in the airport.
In another clip, the men are seen speaking to another airline staffer. “This is discrimination… just because of the color of my skin,” one passenger said. “This is insane!” says another.
“I agree. I do not disagree with you,” the staffer responded.
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The lawsuit claims that the men were held in the jetway for about an hour and then moved to the gate area where they were told they would be rebooked on another flight to New York later that day. The lawsuit alleges that an American Airlines employee indicated that the complaint about body odor came from a “white male flight attendant.”
A gate agent seen in the video at one point seemed to agree that race was a factor in the decision to remove the men from the flight.
When another flight to New York could not be found, the men were put back on the same plane. Jackson described the experience as uncomfortable, saying, “Everybody staring at me, me and all the other Black people on the plane were just taken off.”
Huhta confirmed that none of the men knew each other, nor were they sitting next to each other on the plane.
Jackson, Jean-Joseph and Veal told NBC News they were left haunted by the incident, hesitant to step foot on another plane because they were anticipating another debacle.
“Being grouped and removed hits all these trigger points of things that I don’t think should happen to Black people anymore,” Jackson told NBC.
American Airlines said in a statement that they take the claims seriously, but asserted the allegations do not reflect the company’s core values.