Northrop Defeats Black Engineer’s Race Discrimination Lawsuit

Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. acted for legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons when it declined to promote an engineer, who is Black, to a program manager role, a federal judge said.

Plaintiff Otis Robert Harris III alleged he faced race-based discrimination at the Northrop Grumman Corp. subsidiary. But “undisputed evidence” shows Northrop had legitimate reasons to pick another candidate, who is White, for the management job, and Harris didn’t provide evidence suggesting those reasons were pretext for bias, the US District Court for the District of Maryland said.

Harris spent more than five years working for Northrop in Baltimore. The company offered ...