Brown, Goldstein & Levy recognizes Black History Month throughout February. This year’s theme, “African Americans and Labor,” highlights the innumerable ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – have remained at the core of the Black American experience.
2025 marks the 100-year anniversary of the creation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids by labor organizer and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, which was the first Black union to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor. This union paved the way for greater Black worker participation in organized labor, where workers were able to successfully advocate for improved working conditions for Pullman porters who faced severe racism and exploitation on the job. Learn more about this year’s theme by visiting the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the founders of Black History Month.
Our firm has been dedicated to fighting against racist systems and attitudes since our founding in 1982. We remain committed to protecting the rights and amplifying the voices of Black employees in and out of the workplace.
In line with this mission, our attorneys represented a Maryland Legal Aid attorney who was detained by a deputy sheriff following a court hearing for “lawyering while black,” and won an arbitration award of more than $250,000 on behalf of a Hooters server fired from her job because of Hooters’ racially discriminatory image policy—both cases that received national attention. BGL also obtained an $800,000 verdict plus the renaming of a school in honor of an African American school superintendent whose contract was not renewed because of his race.
Brown, Goldstein & Levy acknowledges the pivotal role that the hard work of African Americans has played in shaping our country’s history. This month and always, we stand with those working tirelessly to protect and advance the rights of Black individuals and dismantle structural racism and the pervasive mistreatment of the Black community.
To learn more about BGL’s commitment to helping clients protect their livelihood, advance in their profession, and stand up for their rights, click here.
