JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The Mississippi Senate discriminated against a Black attorney by paying her about half of what her white colleagues were paid for doing the same job, the U.S. Justice Department says in a lawsuit it filed Friday.

“Discriminatory employment practices, like paying a Black employee less than their white colleagues for the same work, are not only unfair, they are unlawful,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Kristie Metcalfe worked as a staff attorney for the Mississippi Senate’s Legislative Services Office from December 2011 to November 2019. Attorneys for the nonpartisan office write bills and handle other legal questions for the 52 senators. Many of them stay on the job for decades.

The Senate office employed only white attorneys for at least 34 years before Metcalfe was hired, and she was the only Black attorney on staff during her time there, the lawsuit said.

Metcalfe’s starting salary was $55,000, while other Senate staff attorneys were paid $95,550 to $121,800, according to the lawsuit. The other attorneys received pay raises about a month after Metcalfe was hired, making their salary range $114,000 to $136,416. Metcalfe did not receive a raise then.

The current governor, Republican Tate Reeves, presided over the Senate as lieutenant governor from January 2012 until January 2020 — most of the time Metcalfe worked for the Senate.

The Associated Press sought comment about the lawsuit Friday from Reeves and current Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who is also a Republican.

“We do not comment on pending litigation,” said the current secretary of the Senate, Amanda Frusha White, who works for Hosemann.

Metcalfe’s salary remained $40,000 to $60,000 less than her lowest-paid white colleague during her years on the job, the lawsuit said. It also said the Senate hired another attorney, a white man, in December 2018 and set his salary at $101,500, which was $24,335 more than Metcalfe was being paid at the time.

Metcalfe and the new attorney both had eight years’ experience practicing law, although the new attorney had not yet worked for the Legislature. They were assigned the same types of work for the Senate, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit said Metcalfe complained about the pay disparity to with then-Sen. Terry Burton, a Republican. As the Senate president pro tempore, Burton was chairman of the Rules Committee, which sets staff salaries. He denied Metcalfe’s request to equalize her salary with that of her new colleague, the lawsuit said. She resigned about 11 months later.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Nov. 11, 1991

Endesha Ida Mae Holland debuted her play, “From the Mississippi Delta,” at the Circle in the Square Downtown in Chicago. 

The play, partly financed by Oprah Winfrey, detailed her journey from poverty and prostitution in the Jim Crow South to a life of activism in the civil rights movement. Born in 1944, she grew up in a shack in Greenwood that was overrun with roaches. When she was 11, a white man, who had hired her as a babysitter, raped her and afterward handed her a $5 bill. 

“I decided then and there not to tell mama what had happened,” she wrote. “What was the point? So we could both feel bad?” 

She turned to prostitution to help her family make ends meet. In 1962, she pursued a young man to the SNCC office in Jackson, where she discovered Mississippi’s burgeoning civil rights movement. In the movement, she found a purpose that had been lacking. She was jailed 13 times for her involvement, including one time where she was sent to one of the nation’s worst prisons, Parchman. 

In 1965, a suspicious fire, which Holland suspected had been set by the Ku Klux Klan, killed her mother. Instead of quitting, she vowed to make something of herself, and fellow activists encouraged her to get the education she had never received. 

In 1981, she won the National Lorraine Hansberry Award for writing one of the best plays in the nation. A decade later, “From the Mississippi Delta” debuted. 

Holland worked as a professor at the University of Southern California until she retired. She died in 2006 of ataxia, a degenerative nerve condition, and a Mississippi Writers Trail marker now honors her.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today’s Taylor Vance and Bobby Harrison interview Central District Supreme Court Justice Jim Kitchens about his Nov. 26 runoff election. Kitchens is being challenged by state Sen. Jenifer Branning, R-Philadelphia. (Note: Mississippi Today also has extended an invitation to Branning to appear on “The Other Side” podcast.)

READ MORE: As lawmakers look to cut taxes, Mississippi mayors and county leaders outline infrastructure needs

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.