Town Worker Victim of Coworkers' Racist Joke

A Town of Hempstead employee was targeted in a cruel, racially-motivated joke by his coworkers, according to multiple reports.

When Jimmy Howard, 40, walked into work Monday morning, he was met with his coworkers' laughter. They asked if Howard wanted to "see his baby picture" and revealed a photo on a bulletin board of a baby gorilla with a handwritten caption, "Jimmy's baby picture," reported CBS New York.

"I felt embarrassed. It hurt me. I went home crying…I was insulted, humiliated," Howard told CBS.

Howard works at a highway facility in Levittown and has been a Town of Hempstead employee for eight years. He urged the culprit to "just come forward."

Town officials are rallying behind Howard and are demanding swift action against the culprits.

“As an African-American, the only one who serves on the town board, I am offended and I am repulsed by this action,” Councilwoman Dorothy Goosby told CBS.

“We will not rest here in the Town of Hempstead until the perpertrator [sic] is found. We will move to terminate that employee. There is absolutely zero tolerance for any kind of racial hatred,” Kate Murray told CBS, calling the incident a "disgusting act."

The 25 employees of the Levittown facility will be ordered to complete a diversity training, said the report.

This incident comes six years after two nooses were reportedly found in a Town of Hempstead garage building.

"After the investigation, whoever is found guilty, we call on their termination . . . because this kind of racism, whether it is with the LA Clippers, whether it is in America's largest township, cannot be allowed in 2014," Rev. Arthur Mackey Jr. of the Mt. Sinai Baptist Church Cathedral in Roosevelt told Newsday.