Corrigan-Radgowski Employee Suing Over Officer's Confederate Flag

UNCASVILLE, CT — Carla Moore, an African-American woman, has been on the job with the Connecticut Department of Corrections for 25 years. She’s never been disciplined and has always had satisfactory, or better, job performance reviews, she says.

Yet, as she claims in a federal lawsuit, after she voiced a complaint about a corrections officer’s display of a Confederate flag plate on his vehicle, which he parked next to an American flag near the entrance of a state prison, she was punished.

Moore is a correctional identification records specialist at the Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center in Uncasville.

In her federal lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court, she alleges that the officer was apparently allowed to park his vehicle in an area that’s not used by employees and is right next to a building entrance where an American flag flies. And, her suit alleges, his truck was always parked in a manner so that the Confederate flag was clearly visible, the lawsuit said.

New Haven-based lawyer John Williams said the officer parked his vehicle there for most of 2018. The suit reads it had become a "permanent fixture."

Moore brought her complaint to her supervisor in November of 2018 and that’s when she alleges in court documents, a white male supervisor addressed her "in a physically threatening manner, screaming and pointing at her."

A month later, she followed with a written complaint. A month after that, she was “punished” for speaking out, she says, with an unpaid one-day suspension in January of 2019.

A call and email to Moore for comment was not immediately returned. The DOC was reported to have said it does not comment on pending litigation.

The full complaint may be read here.