Celebrating the Madison Dept. of Civil Rights’ 20th Anniversary: One of the Country’s Best (Part 2 of 2)
(Above): Madison DCR Director Norman Davis (r) is greeted by Wesley Sparkman, director of the Dane County Tamara Grigsby Dept. of Civil Rights (Below): City of Madison staff gather to celebrate at the Madison Dept. of Civil Rights’ 20th Anniversary
by Jonathan Gramling
The Madison Dept. of Civil Rights was created in 2006 when former Mayor Dave Cieslewicz merged the Madison Affirmative Action Department and the Madison Equal Opportunities Commission into one department. MEOC was established back in 1963, a year before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed on the national level and Affirmative Action had its origins in the creation of the affirmative action officer in 1973.
The first director of the newly formed Dept. of Civil Rights was Lucía Nuñez who had previously led Centro Hispano. When Nuñez left to take a position with Madison College, Norman Davis, who had led the Affirmative Action division, took over as the director of the department. Davis is retiring in October 2026.
The work of the Dept. of Civil Rights is both on the intervention side as well as the prevention side. The intervention side keeps the department pretty busy.
“Our complaints are in the 500-600 range that we receive every year,” said Davis. “Not all of them are eligible. Sometimes people file something with us and there has been too much time or it didn’t actually happen in the city of Madison. The geographic boundaries are important. But we get about 500-600 complaints in every year.”
The city of Madison has the most protected classes of any governmental unit in the state and perhaps in the country. And while employment and housing complaints lead the way, the nature of the complaints has evolved over time.
“The nature of the complaints have evolved over the last 20 years,” Davis observed. “The top two are always housing and employment. Depending on the year, they sort of trade places. Race and sex are still the top protected classes. But yes, those things have trended over time. We actually have a special relationship with the Equal Rights Division and the U.S. Equal Opportunities Commission. We work collaboratively with them. Sometimes if they are interested in a certain pattern or practice, they will partner with us, either to investigate or they will take some of our cases as like a class action so that they can really address any negative trends. We have a contract with the EEOC and they pay us fees for each case that we process on their behalf. We have some of the same protected classes. So if the concern happened in Madison, then we can investigate it on their behalf and they pay for our handling of that case.”
While formal complaints are an adversarial process, the trend now is to mediate and reconcile to minimize the financial and human costs associated with the process.
“We put a greater emphasis on trying to resolve cases short of hearings and appeals,” said Clifford “Ford” Blackwell, MEOC’s hearing examiner. “About 10 years ago or so when Byron Bishop came to the office, he and I talked about the idea of creating a mediation position so that once the case was filed, the parties would have that opportunity to try to short circuit the whole process and if it was a misunderstanding, clear that up before positions got set too hard. I think it’s been highly successful. And Rebecca Below who is our mediator just does an astoundingly good job. Byron also did a very excellent job in mediation and conciliation. So that’s one important distinction.”
And there can be a true human toll on both sides of the aisle to the point, one can wonder if there was any true winner.
“I think there is an interest in trying to minimize the costs and the impacts of litigation,” Blackwell said. “One of the things that struck me the most from my private practice days, in doing a housing case in La Crosse, seeing how my clients were affected by first having to come and tell me their story, tell me what happened and then go through repeated depositions and each time, having to relive that act of discrimination, it seemed that repeated effect on affected individuals really made a strong impression on me about how important it is to try to minimize the traumatic effects on complainants in particular. But I also have over time seen the impact that it can have on respondents, respondents who sometimes have been wrongly accused of discrimination and their feelings of confusion on what they did was so wrong or did they do anything wrong. So in general, from my perspective, one of the things that we have tried to do is lessen those effects on both sides of a conflict.”
The Department of Civil Rights also has a proactive impact on affirmative action and the diversification of the workforce bith within the city and nits contractors.
“We review the work force materials of all of our non-exempt contractors,” Davis said. “And the city has thousands of contractors, everything from who we buy our safety goggles from to who we buy our buses from. And there are all the different services like accounting that we procure. A little known fact is that every one of those employers is covered by our Affirmative Action policies. And all of their employees are covered by our Affirmative Action policies. And so there is really hundreds of thousands of people because we don’t just do a check box review on their Affirmative Action plan, we actually review them in detail and require changes, if necessary. But hundreds of thousands of employees in Wisconsin and across the country are covered because of the work that we do in the Dept. of Civil Rights. We buy buses from California, so those bus companies and their employees are covered. We review their employment policies, and their demographic make-up. They are all covered by our policies.”
And there are real-life consequences for companies that don’t comply.
“If they don’t get it in, we actually take them to a hearing before the Affirmative Action Commission,” Davis said. “I think we’ve had a couple of years where we did not end up with any debarment because folks got their plans in. But on average, we’ll have 4-5 debarments every year.”
As Davis retires this month, he is leaving a robust and healthy civil rights department.
“We’re very blessed,” Davis said. “We’re very unique as an agency. When I talk to my colleagues across the country, they are like, ‘You have how many people?’ This work is done a lot of different ways. But we do everything civil rights. There is not another civil rights role in a different agency that is doing something different. We cover the entire city in one department.”
And a healthy civil rights department bodes well for a healthy city of Madison.
