Called “Monkey” on the Job. The Trucking Company Did Nothing.
A supervisor at P.A.M. Transport told a Black truck driver: “You’re going to get your monkey A-S-S out there and do the job or I’m going to write you up” — and the company’s official response was to do absolutely nothing.
The Setup: 2,600-Employee Company, Two Black Drivers, Zero Accountability
P.A.M. Transport, Inc. is a trucking company operating out of Whites Creek, Tennessee, with roughly 2,600 employees on its payroll. Thomas Michael Smith and Monaleto Sneed, both Black men, worked there as local truck drivers under the Texas Regional Relay network, transporting freight across the region at a flat daily rate — meaning they were paid the same no matter how long the route or how many hours they sat waiting.
Smith worked at P.A.M. from October 2018 through April 2019. Sneed started in February 2019 and stayed until April 2020. Both men reported to driver manager Jermaine Davis, who in turn reported to operations manager Jordan Claytor, who is white. What unfolded under that management structure, according to both men’s sworn testimony, was a sustained campaign of racial harassment and unequal treatment that the company repeatedly refused to stop.
Smith testified that he routinely worked close to 70 hours a week — far more than his white coworkers — because Davis assigned him longer routes with extended wait times. Sneed testified that he was sent on two daily round trips to Horse Cave, Kentucky, a two-hour drive each way, while a white driver named Melvin made the same trip once a day. Both men say they received damaged trucks while white coworkers got newer ones, and Sneed says he was denied vacation and holiday pay that white drivers received.
The Company Heard About It and Ignored It
Smith says he reported the abuse repeatedly to a driver liaison named James Brown, who acknowledged that Davis’s behavior “shouldn’t be going on” and promised to “check into it.” The harassment continued. Sneed filed complaints with multiple people in management: liaisons Brown, Tyrone Luckett, and Keith Coatney, as well as their manager Fred Meek. According to Sneed, not a single person took action to stop what was happening.
Smith eventually resigned in April 2019, citing the working conditions directly. Sneed was fired in April 2020. The company’s stated reason for firing him: performance issues, including “refusing loads” and “leaving in the middle of a shift.” Sneed denies both charges. Notably, Sneed had never been formally disciplined before the termination, and the recommendation to fire him came directly from Davis, the same supervisor Sneed had been reporting for misconduct, with Claytor’s backing.
Three Years in Court, Then a Lower Judge Threw It All Out
Smith and Sneed filed their lawsuit on March 26, 2021, bringing claims of race discrimination, retaliation, and hostile work environment under federal and state civil rights law. P.A.M. Transport filed for summary judgment — asking the court to throw out the case without a trial — in May 2022. The lower court sat on that motion for two years and then, in May 2024, granted P.A.M. Transport’s request in full.
The lower court’s reasoning was extraordinary. It held that “monkey” and “monkey-ass” are not “plainly racist terms” and that any conclusion they were used in a racial context “can be drawn — if at all — only by inference.” It also dismissed the evidence about white comparators because Smith and Sneed could not prove — through something like a genetic test or a formal self-identification — that the people they perceived as white were actually not Black. The lower court cited zero legal precedent for these requirements.
The lower court further suggested that the racism of the slurs was “diminished” because one of the two supervisors who used them, Davis, was himself Black. Smith and Sneed appealed. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a supporting brief and showed up at oral argument to back them. On September 25, 2025, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed every one of those conclusions and ordered the case sent back for trial.
P.A.M. Transport’s Defense Strategy Was to Pretend the Words Mean Nothing
P.A.M. Transport’s central legal argument was that “monkey-ass” is a distinct phrase from “monkey” and that attaching the word “ass” somehow strips the slur of its racial meaning. The appeals court found this argument so weak it used a single word to describe it: frivolous. The court noted that derivative terms of “monkey” — including “monkey-ass” — have been recognized as racial slurs by courts across the country, and there is “no benign explanation in the record” for why supervisors would have directed these specific words at Black employees.
P.A.M. Transport also pointed to its written Anti-Discrimination and Harassment Policy as evidence that it acted responsibly. The appeals court rejected this too. Handing employees a policy document is not the same as running an effective anti-harassment program. The company offered zero evidence that supervisors received training on the policy, no evidence that the policy imposed any actual requirements on managers, and no evidence that anyone took corrective action after Smith and Sneed reported the abuse.
Timeline: From Hiring to Appeal
The Non-Financial Ledger: What This Actually Cost Two Human Beings
Courts measure harm in legal standards: severe, pervasive, unreasonable. Those words flatten what actually happened to Thomas Michael Smith and Monaleto Sneed every single day they showed up to work. What happened was this: the people with power over their paychecks, their routes, their job security, and their professional futures looked at them and chose to use a word that has been deployed for generations to strip Black people of their humanity. They did it more than once. They did it directly. They did it in a threatening context. And when Smith and Sneed pushed back, the entire apparatus of the company — liaisons, managers, supervisors — shrugged.
Smith testified that the treatment from Davis and Claytor hurt his morale, caused him significant anxiety and fatigue, and made it more difficult to do his job. Sneed said the same. Think about what that means in practice: you are behind the wheel of a commercial truck, sometimes for close to 70 hours a week, running on less sleep, carrying more anxiety, and knowing that the person who can fire you called you an animal to your face and faces no consequences. The physical danger of driving while that degraded and exhausted is real. The psychological weight of showing up every day to a place that has told you, through its inaction, that your dignity is not worth protecting — that weight is not abstract.
— Court of Appeals, summarizing Smith and Sneed’s testimony
Smith quit. He left a job in good standing because the working conditions had ground him down. That is what corporate apologists call a “voluntary resignation” — as if choosing to leave a place that calls you a monkey and piles extra hours on your back while the white guy next to you goes home early is a free and equal choice. Sneed stayed longer, nearly a full year after Smith left, still reporting the abuse, still getting nowhere. Then Davis — the same supervisor Sneed had reported for racial harassment — recommended that Sneed be fired. Claytor backed the recommendation. The company completed the termination. The stated reason was “refusing loads” and “leaving in the middle of a shift,” both of which Sneed denies. He had never once been formally disciplined before that termination.
The lower court’s decision to throw this case out added another layer of institutional betrayal. After years of litigation, a federal judge told these two men that their testimony about racial slurs directed at them by their own supervisors was legally insufficient, that their perception of who was white around them was legally unreliable, and that the racism in the words used against them was diminished because one of the men who said them happened to share their race. That reasoning sent a clear message: the bar for proving that your workplace treated you as less than human is set deliberately and almost impossibly high. The appeals court reversed it — but the damage of fighting that battle for years is its own cost, one that never shows up in any settlement figure.
Legal Receipts: The Quotes That Condemn Them
“You’re going to get your monkey A-S-S out there and do the job or . . . I’m going to write you up.”
— Supervisor Jermaine Davis to Monaleto Sneed, as testified by Sneed under oath. Court record R. 33-2, PageID 663.“Given the history of racial stereotypes against African-Americans and the prevalent one of African-Americans as animals or monkeys, it is reasonable — perhaps even obvious — to conclude that the invocation of the term ‘monkey’ against an African American is intended [as a] racial insult.”
— United States v. Jones, Sixth Circuit, 1998, cited in the appeals court’s opinion against P.A.M. Transport.“The use of the word ‘monkey’ to describe African Americans carries similar odious[ness] as the use of the word ‘n—-r,’ which is pure anathema to African-Americans. To suggest that a human being’s physical appearance is essentially a caricature of a jungle beast goes far beyond the merely unflattering; it is degrading and humiliating in the extreme.”
— Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, Spriggs v. Diamond Auto Glass, 2001, quoted by the Sixth Circuit in its ruling against P.A.M. Transport.“P.A.M. Transport offers no reason — and we can think of none — as to why the addition of the word ‘ass’ somehow obviates the racialized nature of the term ‘monkey.’ . . . This argument is frivolous.”
— Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Smith et al. v. P.A.M. Transport, Inc., September 25, 2025.“There is ‘no benign explanation’ in the record as to why Plaintiffs’ supervisors would have directed these specific terms at them.”
— Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Smith et al. v. P.A.M. Transport, Inc., September 25, 2025, citing Jones v. UPS Ground Freight.“P.A.M. Transport has not proffered evidence sufficient, at the summary judgment stage, to meet the first prong of the defense. While it points to the fact that it gave Smith and Sneed a copy of its Anti-Discrimination and Harassment Policy, our caselaw makes clear that the existence and provision of a harassment policy alone are insufficient to show ‘reasonable care to prevent and correct promptly any racially harassing behavior.'”
— Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Smith et al. v. P.A.M. Transport, Inc., September 25, 2025.Societal Impact: Who Pays When Companies Get Away With This
Economic Inequality: The Wage Theft Hidden Inside the Workload
P.A.M. Transport paid its Texas Regional Relay drivers a flat daily rate, regardless of hours worked or distance driven. On its face, that sounds neutral. In practice, it meant that loading Smith with nearly 70 hours of work per week while white drivers logged significantly fewer hours was a direct transfer of labor value. Smith and Sneed provided more labor for identical pay. The company captured the surplus. This is wage theft by design, and the racial targeting of who bears the heavier load makes it both economic exploitation and racial discrimination at the same time.
The structure is worth examining clearly. Two loads to Horse Cave, Kentucky — a two-hour drive each way — versus one load for Melvin, a white coworker doing the same job. That gap represents roughly four hours of additional unpaid driving per day for Sneed alone. Over the course of his employment, that adds up to hundreds of hours of labor performed for zero additional compensation. The company’s own records, cited in the appeal, show route assignments — but P.A.M. Transport argued those records proved equal treatment. The appeals court found the records did not “clearly show” that Smith and Sneed worked the same hours as white counterparts. The dispute gets to go to a jury.
The economic harm extends beyond these two individuals. When companies successfully use racial harassment to push out workers — through constructive discharge, as in Smith’s case, or manufactured termination pretexts, as in Sneed’s — they avoid paying out long-term wages, benefits, and any compensation that comes with seniority. The human cost is invisible to the balance sheet. The company’s lawyers get paid. The workers who were abused out of their jobs have to find new ones and start over.
Public Health: Anxiety, Fatigue, and Commercial Trucks
Both Smith and Sneed testified under oath that the harassment they experienced caused them “significant anxiety and fatigue” that made it “more difficult to do their jobs.” Their jobs involved operating commercial vehicles. This is a direct public safety issue that the court record documents plainly. Truck driver fatigue is one of the leading causes of fatal commercial vehicle crashes in the United States. A work environment that deliberately degrades workers, piles on extra hours, denies them the dignity of baseline professional treatment, and then sends them out on the road is a threat to everyone sharing those highways.
The psychological impact of racial harassment is well-documented in public health research. Chronic exposure to workplace racial discrimination is associated with elevated cortisol levels, disrupted sleep, hypertension, and increased risk of cardiovascular disease. For workers like Smith and Sneed — already subject to the physical demands of long-haul and local delivery driving — layering sustained racial abuse on top of a physically grueling work environment compounds health risks that do not disappear when the shift ends. The company’s failure to act after being notified means it chose to perpetuate those conditions.
Workload Disparity: Sneed vs. White Coworker “Melvin” (Daily Horse Cave Loads)
The Cost of a Life: What P.A.M. Transport Bet on Getting Away With
The amount P.A.M. Transport spent correcting racially abusive supervisory behavior after multiple employees reported it. Zero training documented. Zero corrective action recorded. Zero accountability enforced. The company’s entire risk-management strategy was handing two men a policy pamphlet and hoping they’d go away.
Meanwhile, two Black men spent years in federal court fighting to have a jury hear what their supervisors said to their faces. The legal fees for that fight are a cost borne entirely by the workers, not the corporation.
Estimated additional hours of unpaid labor Sneed performed relative to his white coworker Melvin over the course of a single year — if he drove two Horse Cave loads (8 hrs total round-trip) versus Melvin’s one load (4 hrs) on a five-day work week for 50 weeks. That is roughly the equivalent of nine full additional 40-hour work weeks performed for zero extra pay.
This estimate is based on Sneed’s own testimony and the documented one-way drive time of approximately two hours. The company collected every dollar of value that extra labor produced.
What Now: The People to Watch and the Actions That Matter
Corporate Leadership at P.A.M. Transport
The source document does not name P.A.M. Transport’s current board of directors or C-suite by name. The following corporate roles bear accountability for the policies and management culture that allowed this conduct to persist:
Regulatory Watchlist
What You Can Actually Do
If you work in trucking or logistics and have experienced racial harassment, contact the EEOC directly at eeoc.gov. The statute of limitations on Title VII claims is typically 180 to 300 days from the date of the discriminatory act — clock awareness matters. Driver liaisons and intermediaries exist at most large carriers; document every interaction, every complaint, and every non-response in writing.
Support the Teamsters and other transportation worker unions that advocate for driver rights and anti-discrimination protections. Individual lawsuits like this one take years and enormous personal cost. Collective bargaining agreements with anti-discrimination teeth are the structural fix that protects workers before the abuse starts, not after.
Follow this case as it proceeds to trial. The appeals court reversed the dismissal on September 25, 2025, and sent it back to the lower court. Smith and Sneed still have not had their day in front of a jury. The fight is not over. Pay attention to what P.A.M. Transport does next — whether it settles quietly, fights again, or finally faces public accountability.
The source document for this investigation is attached below.
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