A singer who joined the historic Motown group Four Tops in 2018 sued a Michigan hospital on Monday, accusing its staff of restraining him and ordering a psychological evaluation because they didn’t believe he was part of the band.
Singer Alexander Morris, who is Black, filed a lawsuit accusing Ascension Macomb-Oakland Hospital of racial discrimination and two employees of negligence over an incident in April 2023, when he was taken there by ambulance with chest pain and difficulty breathing. breathe.
When Morris, 53, told hospital staff that he was a member of the Four Tops, who helped define the Motown sound in the 1960s with hits like “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch) ” and “ Reach Out I’ll Be There” — staff “wrongly assumed he was mentally ill” and a security guard was instructed to restrain him, the lawsuit alleges.
When Morris offered to show his ID card, according to the lawsuit, the security guard, who is white, told him to “sit his black ass.”
“None of the nursing staff intervened to stop the racial discrimination and mistreatment,” says the lawsuit, which accuses the staff of taking oxygen away from Mr. Morris, who had a history of heart problems, while they performed a psychiatric evaluation.
The nonprofit health system that oversees the hospital, Ascension, issued a statement declining to comment on the pending litigation but saying, “We do not tolerate racial discrimination of any kind.”
The Four Tops have seen a rotation of replacement singers since their heyday. Their only surviving original member, Abdul Fakir, invited Morris to join the group in 2018 and has been performing with them since 2019. At the time of Morris’ hospital visit last year, according to the lawsuit, the Four Tops had been was on tour with another Motown gem, the Temptations, and the group had recently performed at a Grammy benefit honoring Berry Gordy, Motown’s founder.
To convince the hospital that he was not “delusional,” according to the lawsuit, Morris showed a nurse a video of him performing at the Grammys event. Staff then canceled the psychiatric evaluation, removed his restraints, which the lawsuit said had been in place for about 90 minutes, and re-administered oxygen.
The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, said that after the ordeal, Mr. Morris was offered a $25 gift card to a supermarket, which he He said he refused to accept.
“The hospital denied my identity and basic human dignity and then offered me a gift card,” Morris said in a statement provided by his attorneys.