Discrimination lawsuits aren’t new. With increased knowledge about fundamental human rights and the clamor for equal opportunities, individuals can quickly fight against unjust practices in the courtroom.
So, from employment to housing, education, disability, and sexual discrimination, we’ve seen many leveraging the legal system to pursue fair treatment. However, pastors dragging their local church to court for gender discrimination are relatively less common than others.
It’s for this reason that the news of a Black megachurch being the defendant in a lawsuit bordering on sexism was quick to break the internet. It also doesn’t help that the church in question, Abyssinian Baptist Church, located in Harlem, is widely reputed as Black America’s flagship church.
Eboni Marshall Turman, a professor from Yale Divinity School, is the plaintiff in the suit. She was also one of the applicants hoping to fill its Senior Pastor position, which was left vacant by Rev. Calvin O Butts III’s demise in 2022.
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Turman is alleging that the religious institution denied her the opportunity to compete with the other candidates in the final round because of her gender.
According to the complaint, “Gender discrimination motivated the decision not to hire (Marshall Turman), a fact discussed openly during meetings of the Committee, including by Grant and another Committee member, who said that Abyssinian would only hire a woman as its Senior Pastor ‘over my dead body.'”
In the lawsuit she filed on December 29, 2023, she accused Valerie S. Grant, the church and search committee chair, of “pressing issues not broached with (Marshall Turman’s) male counterparts” as the interview commenced.
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The AP has also revealed that Turman is seeking “unspecified monetary damages from the defendants for ‘lost wages, lost benefits, other economic damages, shame, humiliation, embarrassment, and mental distress,’ as well as an injunction forbidding any hiring-related gender discrimination,” in the lawsuit.
However, the church has denied all of Turman’s allegations of bias on their part. According to its spokesperson, LaToya Evans, “While she and others were considered for the role because of their impressive backgrounds, she ultimately fell short of some key requirements for the role, where other finalist candidates prevailed and moved forward in the process.”
Grant has also claimed that all applicants received unique questions because the interview process was personalized. As such, it was a no-brainer that Turman, the only female candidate, would receive different questions from the others.
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Ultimately, she was one of the 11 applicants out of 47 who made progress in the interview process. Unfortunately, the votes she received weren’t enough to take her to the final stage.
Turman, the church’s youngest female assistant pastor from 2002 to 2012, had also served as Rev. Calvin’s assistant before his death. She’s a researcher passionate about “sexism in the Black Church,” which is the theme of her yet-to-be-published book, “Black Women’s Burden: Male Power, Gender Violence, and the Scandal of African American Social Christianity.”
Although Turman refused to comment on the matter, we’ll follow up on the lawsuit as it unfolds and keep our fingers crossed for the outcome.
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