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A Black woman says she was removed from a Delta Airlines flight after simply looking at a white flight attendant.
According to Atlanta Black Star, Teresa Hudson Jordan filed a federal discrimination lawsuit, alleging that she was kicked off a Delta flight after a flight attendant took issue with the way she looked at her.
The alleged incident unfolded on March 27 when Jordan, a frequent Delta flyer and first-class passenger, and her teenage daughter were flying from Lexington, Kentucky to New York City.
After the plane doors closed, Jordan leaned over to say something to her daughter. A flight attendant then passed by, and Jordan “looked up at her and made eye contact, but did not say a word,” according to her complaint.
Jordan's eye contact sparked a sudden outburst from the flight attendant, the complaint states.
“Without any provocation whatsoever, Flight Attendant Doe, a Caucasian woman, began screaming at Ms. Jordan, yelling: ‘Don’t look at me like that! Don’t eye me up and down. If you can’t comply with my commands, then I’ll turn this plane around and we can go back to the gate!!’”
Jordan repeatedly told the flight attendant that she would "comply," but the plane worker continued her rampage, per the suit. The passenger stayed in her seat and never raised her voice during the exchange as other bystanders looked on in disbelief at the flight attendant's unwarranted outburst.
“I’ve never seen/heard a flight attendant act so aggressively towards a passenger. It was disturbing and unwarranted,” one bystander reported to Delta, per the complaint. Another wrote that the flight attendant “had treated Ms. Jordan as if she were a ‘dog or a slave.’”
According to the complaint, the flight attendant went to the cockpit and lied to the crew about the incident, alleging that Jordan was disruptive and noncompliant. The pilot then moved to turn the plane around and ordered Jordan to be removed from the flight.
A gate agent escorted Jordan and her daughter off the plane.
“This case epitomizes the revolting reality that, even in the year 2025, Black Americans continue to endure the indignity of ‘Flying While Black,’ an experience steeped in humiliation and echoing the dehumanizing degradations of the Jim Crow South,” Jordan’s complaint states.
Jordan’s attorney, Jon Norinsberg, said in a statement: “It’s absolutely outrageous what happened to her. She has multiple eyewitnesses who saw what happened, perfect strangers, who wrote to Delta about it."
Delta addressed the suit, saying, “While we have no specific comment on this pending litigation, Delta has zero tolerance for discrimination of any form."
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