January 18, 2020
Sherrilyn Ifill was returning to Baltimore from New York on Amtrak train 80 Friday, as she does at the end of many working weeks, when she says a junior conductor approached and asked her to give up her seat.
To say that the internationally known civil rights attorney and activist bristled would be an understatement.
"When I was laying her out to the [lead] conductor, at one point, I said, 'I can sit where I want,' and I thought, 'This isn't 1950,' " the Baltimore resident, who is African American, wrote in
her Twitter feed Friday night.
What unfolded in the pages of Ifill's Twitter account was a sometimes irate description of an incident that is evoking memories of just the kinds of civil rights violations she has spent her career fighting, all as Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend — a time she calls "sacred" — was getting under way.
"I am colossally disappointed in @Amtrak for both this incident & the way it was handled,'" she tweeted Saturday afternoon.
Jason Abrams, an Amtrak spokesman, said in an email to The Sun that the company tried "numerous times" to reach out to Ifill directly Friday night and apologized to her upon finally reaching her Saturday morning.
"We should have responded publicly sooner, and we apologized for the incident and our slow response," Abrams wrote. "Amtrak is looking into the matter more closely so that we can prevent situations like this going forward."
Ifill, the president and director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York and cousin of the late former Evening Sun reporter and PBS political analyst Gwen Ifill, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
According to her Twitter account, she was sitting in a general-admission area of a largely empty passenger car Friday when a female conductor asked her to leave her seat and move into another car.
"The conductor has asked me to leave my seat because she has 'other people coming who she wants to give this seat.' Can you please explain?" she tweeted at 5:36 p.m. Friday, directing her words toward Amtrak officials as well as her more than 163,000 Twitter followers.
Ifill later called for a lead conductor in order to voice her displeasure, but the encounter that followed only compounded her frustration.
"I laid it out. [The younger conductor] now said 'she wanted to keep empty seats at the front,' " Ifill wrote. "Me: 'oh so there were no 'special passengers.' "
The senior conductor offered his apologies, Ifill wrote, but the younger agent simply said, "Follow me; I've found a seat for you."
"What really disturbs me is how someone with this authority can just entirely make up something so ridiculous and approach a customer in this way," Ifill tweeted. "I did wonder when she was carrying on — how far will I take this? And the immediate answer in my mind was 'all the way.' "
On Saturday morning, Ifill noted that as the situation developed, Amtrak officials began following her account online but nonetheless waited to reach out to her publicly, via Twitter, or privately by direct message.
"You are doing this all wrong," she wrote in a tweet meant for Amtrak officials.
As Ifill described the events in real time, her followers took umbrage — and pointed to painful echoes.
Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 is considered a turning point in the civil rights movement, and the fact that this incident happened on the cusp of Martin Luther King Jr. weekend only deepened the irony for some.
"Shades of similarities from civil rights history are [so] fitting here that it doesn't even need mentioning ... what this reminds you of," @_amroali tweeted.
"Rosa Parks in 2020. Unbelievable," @ShaimaStreet wrote.
Spokespersons for the passenger service have informed Ifill that an investigation is under way.
"We apologize again for what happened on the train last night and understand that both this and our slow response are upsetting," one Amtrak official tweeted on Saturday. "Our senior business and operations executives are sharing the information we received from you by phone with internal teams so that we can learn and prevent situations like this going forward."
