Just two weeks after his victory in the August 4 Democratic primary election, St. Louis County Executive Dr. Sam Page has fired Hazel Erby as the leader of inclusion for the county.
“Well…….I was just relieved of my duties as Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” Erby wrote in a tweet at 5:54 p.m. on Tuesday, August 18. “@DrSamPage said ‘I do not need you on my staff anymore’!!”
In the following tweet, Erby wrote, “I will not be silent! Blacks are NOT valued in this administration, particularly Black women!”
Erby told The St. Louis American that Page didn’t provide a reason for his decision.
Page’s chief of staff, Winston Calvert, did not say why Erby was fired. But he said Page would replace her with civil rights activist Kenny Murdoch.
Erby, who had been a champion for racial equity on the St. Louis County Council for 15 years, resigned from her council position to become the inclusion director after Page became the interim county executive in spring 2019 following Steve Stenger’s criminal indictment.
Erby had voted against Page becoming interim county executive because she said that she was the council’s senior Democrat in line for the position. However, she and Page agreed to move forward as a team, they said at the time.
As inclusion director, Erby was in charge of overseeing some of the initiatives that she championed as a councilwoman, including minority participation and the creation of a North County recreation center.
However, over the past several months, things began to unravel. In April, Erby and her team called into question why African-American contractors were excluded from the $1.67 million temporary morgue that was built as part of the county’s COVID-19 response. Despite a county law requiring that 24% of contract dollars go to minority-owned business enterprises (MBEs) — a law that Erby championed — less than $1,000 was awarded to Black contractors, a joint investigation by The St. Louis American and Type Investigations found. Erby’s office oversaw compliance of the 2018 inclusion law, and her team was not informed about the morgue’s construction, in violation of protocol.
Recently, Page removed Erby from having any involvement in compliance in the construction contracts, she said. Erby said she believes it was because Page was pressured by county contractors who didn’t like the new minority participation requirements.
However, in an August 17 email to Erby, Page wrote that she had consistently said she didn’t want to oversee that aspect of inclusion.
“In several meetings last week, you shared your excitement regarding the future without feeling responsible for the M/WBE program” (minority-owned and women-owned business enterprises), Page wrote in an August 17 email. “I hope you still see the important role for a strong leader in diversity, equity and inclusion efforts that transcend the M/WBE program.”
Page and Erby were also recently butting heads about budgetary needs for the inclusion office.
When Page called her just half an hour before her tweet, she said she thought they would be able to talk about this and other issues. Instead, he told her that he was letting her go, even though he said she had done a good job as director, Erby said.
Back when Erby was selected for the position, many advocates in the community were hopeful at the potential change she could bring.
“You know she’s not going to back down from the fight, and that’s what we’ve been needing for a long time,” Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis City NAACP, said at the time.
“When you look at her experience with the County Council for 15 years, she knows where the wrongs are buried and where the inequities have occurred most often. Also, the employees of St. Louis County have just gotten the strongest advocate that I can think of in the county’s history.”
