In Hall v. Coal Bed Servs. Inc., No. 24-10572, 2026 WL 2581843 (11th Cir. Sept. 1, 2026), the court, inter alia, reversed the lower court’s award of summary judgment on plaintiffs’ race-based discrimination claims asserted under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 42 U.S.C. § 1981.
As to Title VII, the court explained:
Title VII prohibits employment discrimination “because of [an] individual’s race.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1). To defeat his employer’s motion for summary judgment on a Title VII discrimination claim, a plaintiff may use the McDonnell Douglas framework or the convincing mosaic approach, which we have characterized as “two paths to the same destination—the ordinary summary judgment standard.” McCreight v. AuburnBank, 117 F.4th 1322, 1335 (11th Cir. 2024). Whichever path is used, the destination is the same: an answer to whether the evidence is sufficient for a reasonable jury to infer illegal discrimination. Id.
Some examples of evidence a plaintiff may use to construct a convincing mosaic of discrimination include: “(1) suspicious timing, ambiguous statements, and other bits and pieces from which an inference of discriminatory intent might be drawn; (2) systematically better treatment of similarly-situated employees; and (3) [a showing] that the employer’s justification is pretextual.” Poer v. Jefferson Cnty. Comm’n, 100 F.4th 1325, 1337 (11th Cir. 2024) (quotation marks omitted and alterations adopted).
As a reminder, we view the evidence in the light most favorable to Hall and Hughes, making reasonable inferences in their favor as well. See Phillips v. Legacy Cabinets, 87 F.4th 1313, 1320 (11th Cir. 2023). Doing that, this is the convincing mosaic of evidence showing intentional racial discrimination: (a) White co-worker Ramsey, who lost his job the same day Hall and Hughes did for the same conduct, asked to be rehired and was given his job back the next work day, while they were stonewalled in their repeated attempts to get their jobs back under the same conditions as Ramsey; (b) all three men worked a half shift the day they lost their jobs, but the company paid Ramsey as though he had worked a full shift, while it paid Hall and Hughes for only four hours of work; (c) the company replaced Hall and Hughes with two White laborers, one of whom had been fired by the company less than a year earlier for failing a drug test; (d) the company told the EEOC that the drug test that led to the terminations was random, but Williams later insisted in his deposition that the test had been administered because an employee reported that he had seen Hall and Hughes smoking marijuana on the job; (e) the company did not give Hall and Hughes the same opportunities to improve their skills and advance that it gave White employees at the same level, and it gave Hall and Hughes the dirtiest jobs among the laborers; and (f) one of their supervisors, Toxey, never referred to Hall and Hughes by name, calling them “y’all” and “them,” while always referring to White employees by name, and he once belittled them by calling them “boys” and telling them that he had “more black friends than” they did.
Taking that mosaic of evidence and drawing from it reasonable inferences in favor of Hall and Hughes, it is convincing enough that a jury reasonably could find that Coal Bed Services racially discriminated against them when it terminated them from their employment and did not consider them for reemployment on the same terms as it did their co-employee Ramsey.
The court reached the same conclusion, for the same reason, as to plaintiffs’ 42 U.S.C. § 1981 claims.