The women who claim they were kicked off the Napa Valley Wine Train for “laughing while black” have filed a $11m racial discrimination lawsuit against the train company.  Related: Napa wine train controversy: 'I do think it was based on the color of our skin'  The Sistahs on the Reading Edge book club members, who are mostly black, said they had decided to sue not for the money but to raise awareness that racism is still rife across American society.  “We feel it is really important for us to speak up,” Lisa Renee Johnson, a member of the book club, told the Guardian on Thursday.  “Racism is something we are going through as a country. We hope that as a result of this [lawsuit], people will start to look more at their internal biases.”  The 11 women – 10 black and one white, ranging in age from their 50s to 85 – said that on 22 August they felt severely humiliated when they were marched off the train “as if we were criminals” and handed over to four waiting armed police officers.  Johnson said two of the women have also lost their jobs – as a nurse and a financial services executive – as a result of the media furore surrounding the incident.  “We were a book club going out for the day to celebrate a birthday, and we ended up being left in a dirt lot just because someone thought we didn’t deserve to be in a white space,” said Johnson, who chronicled the incident in real time on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #laughingwhileblack.  “We want people to realise that this is our life and there have been very serious repercussions.”  The women, who concede that they were quite loud and boisterous, said they were first warned about their “offensive laughter” before the train had pulled out of the station in Napa.  The book group members, who were on their 17th annual summer outing, asked the maître d’ who they had offended.  “She [the waitress] said: ‘When you laugh, I see it on the [other] passengers’ faces.’ It was awful. It was a horrible experience.”  The women are being represented by a prominent Bay Area civil rights lawyer, Waukeen McCoy.  He said the case was one of the most egregious he had come across in 22 years of practice and added that it showed racism was still prevalent throughout all strata of society.  “It is malicious in how [the train company] posted false statements about this group of women to say that these women were physically abusive,” McCoy said.  In the aftermath of the incident a posting on the Napa Valley Wine train Facebook page alleged “verbal and physical abuse toward other guests and staff” by the group.  “I think it’s worth a lot of money,” McCoy continued. “Once the jury hears their story, they are going to be compelling.”  Tony Giaccio, chief executive of the Napa Valley Wine Train, belatedly apologised to the women and conceded his company had been “100% wrong” in its handling of “this regrettable treatment of our guests”. Giaccio maintains that the ejection of the women was not racially motivated.  A spokesman for the train company did not respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit on Thursday.  At a press conference on Thursday, McCoy said: “This lawsuit shows that blacks are not just being treated different in big cities, but also in small towns like Napa.  “Not only were they kicked off the wine train for being black they were defamed on social media. Two of the women lost their jobs as a result.”  Johnson told the Guardian: “Nobody got fired, no one go reprimanded. They don’t feel they did anything wrong. How can [we] accept that?  “We, as African American people, we don’t get a choice. When we get up in the morning, we are black.”
Two book club members have lost their jobs in midst of media furore resulting from incident in which they allege train kicked them off for ‘laughing while black’