Rolling Out interviews AIM-exposed UNC administrator’s attorney on investigation
January 3, 2026
Attorney Artur Davis has spent his career fighting for workers who face discrimination. As a partner at HKM Employment Attorneys and former four-term congressman from Alabama, Davis has represented everyone from hourly employees to senior executives. His current case involves Janique Sanders, who was fired from UNC Charlotte after being targeted in a hidden camera video by the right wing group Accuracy in Media. Davis argues that Sanders lost her job not for breaking any rules, but for expressing support for diversity and inclusion values.
Can you tell us about Janique Sanders and what happened in her case?
Janique Sanders is a brilliant young African American woman who graduated Phi Beta Kappa, the highest academic honor that one can win at an undergraduate university in the United States. She worked for Rutgers doing community engagement, community leadership work. In the early 2020s, she went to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and she was doing what we now call DEI work. She did their work very well, very capably, but Janique Sanders could not control the political climate in this country.
We had a change in this country in 2024 and 2025. Things that were celebrated, things that were applauded in a bipartisan way, things that were seen as a valuable part of building a strong American society, well, the pendulum swung. In the summer of 2024, before Donald Trump was elected, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors made the decision to end that school’s DEI commitment. So, Janique Sanders went on doing her business, performing her work capably.
At some point in either late October or early November 2024, two young people came to her office at UNC Charlotte. They told her they wanted to do DEI work and wanted to know if there are any jobs available on campus. Janique Sanders told them no, we no longer have DEI work that’s available, but there are any number of important community service initiatives that we’re engaged in. She talked about UNC Charlotte’s program addressing local food banks to feed people who are hungry. But these two young people kept pressing her, “we want to do DEI work.” They kept using that phrase.