Ford Motor hit with another sexual harassment lawsuit

By Alice Thomas-Tisdale

JA Publisher Emerita

A story of employment discrimination exposed by Angela Buckner, owner of Mississippi’s Mic Magazine, is gaining national attention.  Ayanna Lynn, a Jackson State University graduate from Indianola, MS, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Ford Motor Company. The National Association of Black Defenders (NABD), a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights organization, has taken on Lynn’s case. A press conference was held July 1, 2026, in Chicago, IL to draw attention to the company’s history of discrimination. Ford’s Chicago assembly plant has paid more than $30 million in federal harassment settlements. 

“We came to stand with workers whose accounts they say mirror a national pattern of institutional failure. What we are is a national organization that speaks out for those that cannot speak out for themselves,” Priscilla Williams Till, NABD’s Mississippi director and a distant cousin of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955, told the Chicago Crusader. “We expose corruption.” Williams Till is also founder of the Emmett Till Justice for Families Foundation.

Dr. Michael McCorvey Sr., NABD’s founder and chief executive officer, also spoke during the City Council meeting to reach Ald. Peter Chico, whose 10th Ward includes the Ford plant. “We are calling for justice for all of these workers,” he said. “On one hand you have employees facing sexual harassment and racial discrimination in the workplace, and on the other you have people paying money to a union who does nothing for them.

“We are calling for a full investigation on what is happening in this city and at this worksite,” he said. “These men and women shouldn’t go to work and have to worry about being harassed or bullied on the job. If nobody is going to stand up for them NABD will and we will not back down until we get some answers.”

Also part of the delegation was Shirley G. Johnson, NABD’s national director of membership, and Fred Chambliss, a federal whistleblower terminated in 2023 after alleging corruption and unpaid wages at the Federal Correctional Institute in Yazoo City, MS.

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