April 30, 2021
Jim Evancho
On April 29, 2021, a 40-page Federal Lawsuit was filed by the previous Anniston Deputy City Attorney, Jason Odom, outlining a possible racial and age discrimination case, with the U.S. District Court N.D. of Alabama. The complaint named The City of Anniston, Steven Folks (in his individual capacity), Ben Little (in his individual capacity), and Glen Ray as the defendants of the filed case.
Jason Odom is 52 and had served as Anniston’s Deputy City Attorney from 2015 until his termination in 2020. During this time Mr. Odom had not received any disciplinary actions against him and the city commended him for his service at the time of his termination. There was no reason for the termination given to Mr. Odom other than the city was going to “move in a different direction.”
The complaint states that prior to January 16, 2020 Ben Little had encouraged the city to terminate Jason Odom and the Public Defender due to “an alleged lack of diversity among lawyers employed by the city.” During this time Mr. Little also indicated he wanted to replace Mr. Odom with an African-American. This was not Mr. Little’s first time being accused of racial discrimination. In March of 2019 the city manager, Jay Johnson, filed a formal complaint for racial discrimination and workplace harassment against Mr. Little and David Reddick. The complaint was resolved in 2019 when the City paid Mr. Johnson a monetary sum for his resignation. Mr. Johnson was then replaced by Steven Folks who is African American.
The complaint went on to say that in September of 2019 Glen Ray, President of the Calhoun County NAACP chapter urged the City to remove Mr. Odom and replace him with an African American attorney. During a public city council meeting, Mr. Ray accused Mr. Odom and Judge James Sims of being “outsiders” who were “robbing this City. They are lying.” Mr. Ray then called Judge Sims, who is African American, a “white man trapped in a black man’s body.” The complaint outlined numerous other occasions listed where Mr. Ray attended public city council meetings to demand the termination of Mr. Odom. On one occasion Mr. Ray warned that if they “Don’t get Jason Odom out of that City Court, this City is going down.”
The complaint also outlined that after Mr. Odom had been terminated the City posted a job opening for the position of City Deputy Attorney and the deadline to submit applications was set for February 27, 2020. During the application acceptance time, only two applications were received. Jason Odom had submitted an application as did Ted Copland. Mr. Copland had been the City Deputy Attorney prior to Mr. Odom and was willing to return to fill the vacancy. The City chose to keep the position unfilled for over half a year while they contacted African American attorneys that had not submitted an application to recruit them to fill the position.
We reached out to Mr. Odom for any additional information but he stated he was unable to comment on the case due to pending litigation and deferred comments to his counsel.
We also reached out to Jackson Hodges, Public Information Officer for the city of Anniston, who stated the City was unable to comment on the case due to pending litigation.
