Parson v. Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation records

The Parson v. Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation records document an employment racial discrimination lawsuit filed by African American workers at the Kaiser Aluminum plant in Chalmette, Louisiana in 1967. The collection spans 1951-1985, and includes the years leading up to the case and the decades that followed, as the case went through various court systems.

The collection consists of court records from Orleans Parish District Court and the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court. The court records are organized by court and by document type within. Court documents include: affidavits, briefs, claimant lists, depositions, declarations, docket sheets and exhibit lists, findings of facts, interrogatories, memorandums, motions, orders, and transcripts. The collections also includes: correspondence between the plaintiff and defense legal teams, legal research, Supreme Court petitions for Writ of Certiorari, and plaintiffs’ back pay calculations. One folder of ephemera contains “Whites Only” signs from segregated areas of the Kaiser Aluminum plant.

The Parson v. Kaiser Records also includes restricted materials that will not be open to researchers until 2055.