Former Steelers Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport, in a civil rights lawsuit filed last year, said they were denied awards but would have qualified had they been white. Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody dismissed the suit in March on procedural grounds. But with calls for racial justice intensifying in the U.S., and as she marks 10 years overseeing the NFL concussion case, the 86-year-old judge has issued two later orders suggesting the practice troubles her.
First, she ordered the NFL and the lead players lawyer to mediate the race-norming issue — with help from a diverse panel of medical experts. Now she’s seating the lawyers for the Black players at their negotiating table.
“As the court learned from the media, the NFL has committed to eliminating racial norms from the settlement and replacing them with a new set of norms that ‘will be applied prospectively and retrospectively,’” Brody wrote in Thursday’s order. She said the lawyers for Henry and Davenport “have presented research on the appropriate use of norms, and they may have information that would be useful to the mediation.”
Those lawyers had no immediate comment on the judge’s order. They had asked for the right to intervene several months ago. Lead players lawyer Christopher Seeger, whom Brody had named class counsel in the case, opposed their motion to intervene in March and said he saw no evidence of any race bias in the administration of the fund. On Wednesday, he apologized, saying he now saw the problem more clearly and hoped to regain the trust of Black players.
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