Elnoria Howell, an African American woman hired by the Baldwin County Board of Education as a Central Office Receptionist in 2005, had risen through several reclassifications and promotions before landing in the Human Resources Department. The dispute crystallized in 2018 when HR Director Jennifer Sinclair began reallocating duties among department staff — partly to accommodate an injured employee — and Howell objected to taking on filing responsibilities. After Howell complained to Superintendent Eddie Tyler about the workload assignments, the Board ultimately transferred her to a Central Office Secretary position in the Transportation Department, a different building on the same campus, with no change in pay or job classification. The Board later filled the open HR secretary slot with a white woman.
Howell sued the Board, Tyler, and Sinclair, alleging race discrimination and retaliation under Title VII, along with claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and the Equal Pay Act. The district court granted summary judgment across the board. On appeal, the Eleventh Circuit, in a per curiam opinion by Chief Judge William Pryor and Circuit Judges Lagoa and Kidd, affirmed on every preserved claim.
On the disparate-treatment and demotion claims, the panel held that Howell failed to identify valid comparators. The court applied the standard from Anthony v. Georgia, 69 F.4th 796 (11th Cir. 2023), requiring a comparator to have engaged in the same basic conduct, been subject to the same policies, shared the same supervisor, and had the same employment history. The six white employees Howell named fell short: at least one had filed a grievance against Sinclair over work assignments and pay and had that grievance denied just as Howell's was, and Sinclair had terminated another of the proposed comparators for performance reasons — undercutting the theory that Sinclair singled out African American employees for scrutiny. The panel also noted that Howell had received all pay raises awarded to similarly situated employees, had been promoted over white applicants, and had been offered work-assignment options not generally extended to other staff. Because the proposed reassignment to a receptionist role was rescinded before Howell suffered any tangible harm, the court observed that it did not constitute an adverse employment action, citing Pennington v. City of Huntsville, 261 F.3d 1262 (11th Cir. 2001).
The hostile-work-environment claim failed at the threshold requirement that the harassment be race-based. Howell conceded that no one at the Board ever directed a racial slur at her or used racially motivated language. The panel further held that even if the incidents had been racially motivated, they were too sporadic and isolated — and the totality of circumstances not sufficiently severe or pervasive — to satisfy the standard drawn from Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775 (1998), and Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc., 510 U.S. 17 (1993).
On retaliation, the panel observed that much of the conduct Howell characterized as adverse predated any protected activity she had communicated to the defendants. The court noted that when an employer contemplates an adverse action before an employee engages in protected activity, temporal proximity between the protected activity and the subsequent adverse action does not suffice to show causation. Even assuming Howell cleared the prima facie hurdle, the panel held she failed to show that the Board's stated operational justifications were pretextual or that her protected conduct was a but-for cause of the transfer under University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, 570 U.S. 338 (2013).
The § 1983 claims were separately barred by Alabama's two-year statute of limitations: Howell alleged that her disparate treatment began on April 16, 2018, and continued through August 28, 2018, and she did not file her original complaint until October 13, 2020. Her attempt to invoke the continuing-violation doctrine was deemed abandoned because she failed to raise it in her opening brief on appeal.