The head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund is looking for answers after she claims an Amtrack employee asked her to give up her seat on the train to accommodate someone else, on the weekend of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Sherrilyn Ifill garnered support on social media Friday after she tweeted about the incident, claiming a conductor asked her to move with no explanation on her train ride out of Washington, D.C. to Baltimore on Friday. Although her tweet was liked by nearly 50,000 accounts and retweeted more than 11,000 times, Ifill said she didn’t hear back from Amtrak until nearly a full day later.
“There are no assigned seats on this train,” she said in her original tweet Friday. “The conductor has asked me to leave my seat because she has ‘other people coming who she wants to give this seat.’ Can you please explain?” Ifill wrote that when she later spoke to the agent who asked her to move and the lead conductor, then said “she wanted to keep empty seats at the front,” apparently contradicting what she told Ifill earlier.
“I laid out the facts and made clear that I know that it is absolutely contrary to policy and unacceptable to pick one passenger from an unassigned seat and demand she move,” Ifill said in a tweet on Friday. Social media users were perturbed by the incident and showed support for Ifill in numerous responses, some even comparing the incident to when civil rights icon Rosa Parks was told to move to the back of the bus in 1955.
Amtrak said in a reply tweet Saturday that it attempted to reach Ifill numerous times to no avail, though the NAACP official disputed the claim. Ifill said that not only did they have access to her on Twitter, but the company had her email address for the ticket information as well as her contact information provided as a Select Executive Plus customer. Ifill tweeted that the lack of contact was either “system failure or lack of effort.”
The Amtrak account then apologized to Ifill n Saturday. “As of today, we’re changing our policy about how we respond on social media to ensure we’re faster and more transparent,” the account said. The company and Ifill did eventually connect in a conversation that Ifill described as respectful and apologetic. Amtrak officials promised to investigate the incident, according to Ifill’s retelling of the conversation.
