After a nine-month ordeal of racial harassment and retaliation that resulted in the termination of one employee, a jury in Des Moines, Iowa, delivered a burning rebuke to a local storage systems company.
A Polk County, Iowa, jury awarded $205,300 to Devin Michael Ellis, a former lead installer at Storage and Design Group Inc., after concluding that the company and one of its managers, Ronald Patterson, put him through a racially hostile work environment before firing him for having the nerve to voice his disgust with them.
The warning signs have been there from the moment Ellis started working for the Iowa company in December 2021.
Patterson reportedly said, “Oh, one last thing,” at the end of his hiring interview, a comment Ellis would hear dozens of times at his Iowa workplace. “I need you to cut your dreadlocks,” Ellis claimed he was told. The barrage of remarks regarding his hair continued constantly after that. Patterson told him to chop off his dreadlocks at least 20 times, comparing them to “worms.”
Yet the harassment over hair was just the starting point.
Ellis’ lawsuit claims that Patterson often referred to African-American workers as “a bunch of monkeys” and told them to “stop monkeying around,” terms he never used with white employees. Patterson ludicrously accused Ellis of racism against white people after Ellis confronted him and said the comments were offensive.
Ellis, whose brother and mother are white, resisted, but the relationship only became more toxic.
Work trips were hampered by the rivalry. Ellis had a disagreement with Anthony Straylee, a white coworker, at one job because he didn’t want to be in the same room as Black coworkers, according to the Atlanta Black Star.
Straylee even mentioned his relatives’ ties to the Ku Klux Klan in a text message to a manager, saying he “didn’t want to stay with Black people.” Later, though, Patterson defended Straylee as a “straight shooter” and said that the event was a watershed in Ellis’ career.
Ellis kept going on, voicing grievances within the Iowa company, but he was met with defensive behavior rather than a helping hand. In one meeting, Patterson admitted to using racial jokes but dismissed them as innocuous.
Ellis lost his job within a week.
Many predominantly White spaces are cesspools of anti-Black racism. So much so that antiBlackness is normal. I was in better physical and mental health when I primarily worked from home. https://t.co/iy65Q2TySi
— Deadric T. Williams (@doc_thoughts) August 12, 2023
What was Ellis’s official reason for being fired by the company? Alleged disobedience regarding the return of a company vehicle.
Then, a Polk County District Court Judge, Samantha Gronewald, pointed out several errors in that account. She pointed out that Ellis was fired right after he complained to managers and the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, even though Storage and Design Group’s discipline policies were being overlooked.
A jury sided with Ellis on August 1, 2025, stating that the company had retaliated against Ellis for speaking out and that Patterson had privately taken part in racial harassment. $154,000 in retaliation damages and $51,000 for emotional distress were awarded in the verdict.
Stuart Higgins, Ellis’s lawyer, celebrated the verdict as long overdue justice.
He said, “The jury found that our client suffered severe emotional harm due to persistent racial discrimination in the workplace — and that his employer unlawfully fired him in retaliation for speaking out.”
Hiring discrimination is as rampant now as it was in 1989.
Whites get 36% more callbacks than equally qualified Blacks and 24% more than Latinos—even with identical resumes where only the name is changed.
No evidence of discrimination against Whites.https://t.co/A1pWrNwjiU
— Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) July 30, 2019
Patterson and Storage and Design Group have abstained from making any statements to the public regarding the decision.
Ellis, who suffered months of humiliation in Iowa, views the outcome of the trial as more than just financial reparation; it is proof that his struggle was vital for him and all Black employees who have been told to remain concealed in hostile places of work.
