Take a quick look at the website of Woodgrain Inc., a manufacturer of wooden doors and the components to go with them, and you’ll see a smiling Black man in a warehouse.
But seven Black men recently fired from the Idaho-based company’s Aurora location would probably argue the warehouse workers are not smiling right about now.
In May, the seven filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court alleging they were wrongly fired after circulating a petition expressing concerns about the workplace environment there, and after experiencing racial discrimination that they say included their boss comparing them to “monkeys.”
Woodgrain leaders in Aurora as well as in their Idaho corporate office did not respond to emails or phone calls from CPR News, but on June 27, the company responded to the complaint in court, admitting that the comment pertinent to monkeys was made, but that it wasn’t racist — a response that has taken a plaintiff and his lawyer by complete surprise.
The Incident
The incident setting off the lawsuit occurred at the Aurora headquarters near Chambers Rd. and I-225 about nine months ago, on October 11, 2024, according to the lawsuit, interviews with three of the plaintiffs, and their attorney.
That’s when the lawsuit alleges that Operations Manager James Moore, a white man also known as Jay Moore, made a disparaging comment: “Mr. Moore told three Black employees … that they looked ‘like monkeys trying to f*** a coconut,’” the lawsuit states.
In its 39-page response filed June 27, Woodgrain admits that Moore said the words, but denied “that there was any racial connotation or animus connected to the statement,” per the response.
Then, the lawsuit alleges that things went on at the business like nothing happened. “Mr. Moore continued working at Woodgrain and acting as if nothing had happened,” the complaint states.
Next, the employees met with the warehouse general manager, but allege that he did not take the matter seriously or give Moore any consequence. The complaint states: “As of October 14, 2024, Mr. Moore had not even received a formal write-ups or any written discipline as a result of his comments likening plaintiffs … to monkeys,” a statement to which Woodgrain agreed in its response.
A few months later, Darren Brown, one of the plaintiffs, wrote a petition outlining some of the discriminatory behavior, and circulated it, collecting nearly two dozen signatures from Black and Hispanic colleagues. He then emailed the petition to the corporate human resources department in January 2025, he said in an interview.
The day after, Michelle Bloom, who directs Woodgrain’s human resources company-wide, sent a letter to Aurora employees stating that HR would launch an investigation. The complaint alleges Bloom met some of the complainants in 15- or 20-minute conversations, during which they say she implied that further complaints about racially disparate treatment would lead to their being fired, which Woodgrain denied in its response.
At the end of January, the Black Woodgrain employees who are suing the company were brought to a conference room. They were then all fired and told the reason was that they were “low performers” – despite having gotten good performance evaluations earlier the same month. All of those fired had signed the petition.
The defendants deny that armed guards were present when the mass firing happened, and insist the employees were fired because business was slow. Woodgrain said in its response that the employees were fired “due to a business slowdown, the company was having to make budget cuts, and [they] had been identified as low performers and were being terminated.”
Other allegations in the lawsuit are that a white male with no experience was hired at a higher wage than experienced Black employees, and that promotions have gone to white new hires instead of long-serving Black employees, which Woodgrain also admits, agreeing to a paragraph in the complaint that states: “long-tenured African-American employees have been denied promotional opportunities, and open positions have instead been filled by new hires, all of whom are white.”
The lawsuit requests a jury trial, compensatory and punitive damages, and legal costs.
According to the plaintiffs’ attorney Benjamin DeGolia, with the civil rights and employment firm DeGolia Law, the Aurora location has about 40 employees, nine of whom were Black, and seven of those Black employees have been terminated and told not to work for any competitors.
Plaintiffs’ Stories
Plaintiff Corey Tate, 24, is still angry about what happened, and his voice started to shake at a few points when he described his feelings. He said Moore made the comment as he and a few of his colleagues were working on a large order, pulling together lots of different items, mouldings, nails, two-by-fours and other door-related supplies, to send out as requested by a client. Once he heard the statement, he said he was so shocked he attempted to give Moore an out.
“At that moment I had paused … and then I specifically asked him and gave him the opportunity to correct himself,” Tate said. “I don't know if it was a joke or something … and even if that is a joke, it’s a very insensitive and disgusting joke in the first place.”
To push back and clarify what he could hardly believe he heard, he said something to Moore along the lines of “Are you sure? Because ‘monkeys’? ... It gives slave master vibes,” he said. According to Tate, Moore responded to that with a flippant answer: “[He said] ‘I don’t know what else I’d call you but a monkey.’ And then just walked away.” Woodgrain denied this portion of the exchange happened.
“It was a very mentally disturbing situation,” Tate said. Efforts to talk to senior staffers in the Aurora facility went nowhere, he said, with the workers being told “this is how it is and just get over it,” he added.
Ron Lamb, a Black 57-year-old production manager, is another plaintiff. He said management asked him to calm the workers after they began to respond to what they heard and to discuss it with each other, which Lamb declined to do. “I was like, ‘Dude, you did that yourself,” Lamb said in an interview.
Lamb signed the petition and was then fired, he said, being told that the organization was doing a “reset” that did not include him. Since then, he has tried to find a new job but has not been able to, because, he alleges, Woodgrain is blocking the fired workers from being hired elsewhere. He said he’s been losing sleep because of it. Other plaintiffs interviewed said they have not been able to find work either.
Another plaintiff, Darren Brown, 35, who was also fired, said in an interview that he had been taking FMLA leave when the incident happened last fall, so he wasn’t there to hear it. He said Woodgrain went a step further with him, accusing him of “milking the system,” despite his fiancée’s suffering a difficult pregnancy that brought her to the hospital about three dozen times.
When he returned, he was told about what had happened, and decided to take action. He was motivated by his own experiences: Around the same time, he had applied for a better position at Woodgrain’s Aurora warehouse, but he didn’t get it.
So he decided to draft the petition, which says in part: “Existing here in this culture, we are afraid to voice our opinions. Because once you do, you will be singled out and targeted … The toxic and biased culture … is not right and needs to be corrected. Below are the signatures of every peer and coworker who feels the same way.”
He said he was fired at the end of January, given a reason he didn’t believe: “They actually said they fired us, saying that we were underperforming; we were not productive in our role.” He said he and his colleagues had never received negative reviews about their work, and found it frightening and confusing that there were armed guards present when he and others were terminated.
Reaction to the case — and the defendant’s response to it
DeGolia, the lawyer representing the fired employees, said that he doesn’t often see cases like this, nor does he come across responses in which the defendants admit to charges.
“This is something that I rarely see, and I don’t want to say that I see this degree of really awful harassment frequently. That wouldn’t be true. I mean, I’ve litigated a lot of cases with really bad harassment, but this is certainly up there,” DeGolia said. “This may be the most intimidating and employee-threatening behavior that I’ve seen from a human resources professional in my career.”
The response, DeGolia said, was a surprise, too. “Admitting Moore referred to them as monkeys, but claiming it had no racial connotations is corporate gaslighting at its finest,” he said. “I don’t think the public is going to believe it, and I’m very confident that a jury is not going to believe it either.”
The next step in the case is a scheduling conference between the attorneys and a magistrate judge on September 3, during which a discovery process will be arranged for the case, according to DeGolia.
