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Walmart Is Ordered to Pay $4.4 Million in Damages to Black Man

Walmart has been ordered to pay $4.4million in damages to a man who sued the store, saying he was racially profiled and harassed by a Walmart employee at a Portland, Oregon, area store in 2020.

Michael Mangum was awarded $400,000 in non-economic damages and $4 million in punitive damages by a Multnomah County jury, with the victim’s lawyers saying it was the largest discrimination case in Oregon history.

Walmart employee Joe Williams, a theft prevention worker, had ‘spied’ on Mangum while shopping, ordered him to leave and called police when he refused, according to the lawsuit.

Mangum, who was 59 at the time, visited the Walmart in Wood Village on March 26, 2020, to buy a light bulb for his refrigerator.

The litigation is a landmark test of a recently passed state law allowing lawsuits against anyone who improperly calls law enforcement with the intent to discriminate, his lawyers said.

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Williams told Mangum to leave the store, but Mangum refused, saying he’d done nothing wrong.

Mangum’s lawyers said Williams told Mangum he was going to call the police and tell them Mangum had threatened to ‘smash him in the face.’

Williams called the non-emergency police dispatch line and told the operator he ‘had a person refusing to leave,’ the lawsuit states.

But according to Mangum’s lawyers, deputies from the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office responded and ‘refused to take action against Mangum.’

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Williams in a deposition denied the allegations that he wrongly called the police, saying Mangum had threatened to hit him.

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