SAN FRANCISCO — A predominantly black group of East Bay women recently kicked off a Napa wine train “for being too loud” have filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the train company, the group’s attorney announced Thursday.

The group of 11 women seeks $11 million in damages from the Napa Valley Wine Train, claiming their ejection on Aug. 22 stemmed from racial bias and caused two plaintiffs to lose their jobs.

“The goal of this lawsuit is to ensure that this sort of racial discrimination does not happen to anyone else,” attorney Waukeen Q. McCoy said at a news conference. “These are highly educated, successful and well-respected women … and the treatment they received was disgraceful and illegal.”

Wine train officials have hired a former FBI agent to conduct their own investigation into the incident, a company spokesman said in response to the lawsuit.

“The Napa Valley Wine Train takes the allegations of discrimination very seriously,” company spokesman Sam Singer said.

Wine train employees evicted the women — book club members whose ages range from 39 to 85 — after telling them multiple times they were being too loud during a three-hour ride through Napa’s wine country.

The women, who hail from cities such as Antioch, Oakland, Pittsburg, Oakley and Richmond, intended to discuss a romance novel during the ride, but they say they never got the chance.

The train’s maitre d’hotel kicked the women off the train after asking them a few times to “tone down (their noise) level.” During the ejection, she walked the women through six train cars before exiting onto a dirt lot at the St. Helena station, where police waited with them until a taxi van arrived. The maitre’d also told police that the book club members “were unruly and aggressive,” according to court documents.

Lisa Renee Johnson, the book club’s leader, said the only thing the group was guilty of was occasionally laughing loudly together. She believes they were singled out because all but one of the 11 women are black, saying that other passengers also were noisy but were not admonished by train employees.

The suit also names the train’s parent companies and three employees, according to court documents. A major part of the suit involves a train employee’s Facebook post about the episode, since removed, which claimed that the women subjected staff to “verbal and physical abuse.”

The wine train’s chief executive officer has apologized for the ejection and the Facebook message, saying it was inaccurate and “made a bad situation worse.”

However, McCoy said the social media post was defamatory and damaged the reputation of his clients.

“Even though the Facebook post has been deleted, the statement continues to be reproduced in the media and its harm (to the women) cannot be undone and is ongoing,” the lawsuit complaint states.

Two of the women — a nurse and a bank/credit card company employee — say they lost their jobs because of news reports about the incident and comments made about them on social media.

The group’s only white member, Linda Carlson, said the book club would have been treated much differently had its members been all white. “I truly know now how it is to be a black woman and to be discriminated against in this society,” Carlson said. “What happened to us was wrong. It really saddens me.”

Bay Area NAACP leaders said Thursday they support the women and their lawsuit.

“We don’t ever want our mothers, grandmothers and sisters to be disrespected like that just because of the color of their skin or because they want to ride a train and read a book,” said Dan Daniels Sr., a San Rafael-based NAACP leader. “This is 2015. When is this going to stop?”

Contact Chris De Benedetti at 925-482-7958. Follow him at Twitter.com/cdebenedetti.