Willie Levi, 73, champion for disabled workers, dies

If Willie Levi had enjoyed choice in life, he would have gone back to Texas — back to the small city of Orange, where he had played the spoons, sung the blues and lived in a shotgun house crowded with cousins.

But Levi never had much choice. He was sent first to an institution and then to Iowa, where he and other men with intellectual disabilities worked in virtual servitude at a turkey-processing plant for decades. He never made it back to Orange.

Levi — a claimant in a successful lawsuit by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that championed proper pay and working conditions for people with disabilities, died April 23 at his home in Waterloo, Iowa, after contracting the coronavirus, according to Paula Passe, one of his courtappointed guardians. He was 73.

“He was a great advocate for himself and for the men he called ‘brothers,’ who shared the same pain,” said Robert Canino, the EEOC lawyer who tried the case. “Like many of the men, he was not as indignant as he was happily determined, as though he saw the coming of justice.”

Levi was born in Orange on Aug. 19, 1946, to Ernest and Rosalie Levi. His father was a mill worker, his mother a hotel housekeeper. He lived with cousins until he was 19, when he was taken to a Texas state school in Mexia, more than 200 miles away.

He won gold medals at statewide track meets for special schools, sang with a traveling gospel choir and knew how to summon music with a comb or a couple of spoons.

In 1974, Levi was sent to work for Henry’s Turkey Service, which then dispatched him and other men with disabilities 1,000 miles north to Muscatine County, Iowa, where the company had a contract with a turkey-processing plant.

Levi specialized in soothing the creatures that he sent swinging on shackles toward the kill room.

“I pat ’em on the belly when I get ’em on the shackle,” he recalled. “I say, ‘OK, OK, Tom, quieten down.’”

As recounted in The New York Times and in an online Times documentary, the men were paid the same $65 a month for decades, in a perversion of a labor law that allowed people with disabilities to be paid less than what a nondisabled person was paid for the same job. Never given options about employment or housing, the men were forced to live in an old school converted into a bunkhouse.

Levi talked often of returning to Orange, but his family members either had died or could not be found. After his death, though, Canino and The Times located a few relatives.

Levi was to be buried in the same historic African American cemetery that holds the remains of his mother. Back home in Orange.