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Black mom confronts restaurant manager's racist 'dress code' after he refuses to seat her son

via Rex Chapman / Twitter

A Baltimore restaurant has released a public apology after refusing to serve a black woman and her son because of its dress code. In a video taken of the incident, the boy's mother, Marcia Grant, clearly points out that while her son, Dallas, wasn't allowed to be seated, a white child who is wearing a very similar outfit was eating in the restaurant.

The white manager at Ouzo Bay verbally ties himself into knots over why the black child cannot be seated in the restaurant but the white kid —who he can clearly see out the window — was eating with his parents.

The video shows that the black child is wearing athletic shorts, tennis shoes and an Air Jordan T-shirt. The white child, who appears to be just getting up and leaving the table after eating, also has on tennis shoes, an athletic shirt, and blue shorts that may or not be athletic in nature.

"I'm sorry, I would love for you to be able to come back and eat here," the manager said.

"So you're telling me my son can't eat here because he has on athletic stuff?" Grant pushes back.

"No, no, no, just the shorts," the manager replied. "It is part of our dress code."

The problem is that the manager is really sticking to his guns and splitting hairs over the two nearly identical outfits. He could have seen the similarities and let them sit down to eat, but he instead refuses service to them when he should have given them the benefit of the doubt.

At that point, it's nearly impossible not to see his decision as being discriminatory. Especially when he states that the white child's shirt wasn't athletic but also admits that he didn't get a "good look" at the shirt.

Plus, he's a child. It's not like his choice of dress is going to disturb other patrons.

"This was not about dress code it was about a black child being treated differently than a white child," Grant wrote on Instagram. "My 9yo was so hurt to see a white child that looked like one of his friends at school and somehow you adults can not seem to understand that this was not about dress code."

The restaurant's parent company, Atlas Restaurant Group, apologized for the incident and said the manager had been placed on indefinite leave. It also immediately changed its dress code so that children 12 and under will not have to adhere to one as long as they are accompanied by a parent.

The incident calls attention to the sometimes not-so-subtle dress codes at bars and restaurants that are aimed at specific ethnic groups. Some places specifically call out baggy clothing, Jordan shoes, flat-bill hats, facial tattoos, and doo-rags.

While others have codes that are ambiguous and allow the door person to make a judgements based on their personal prejudices.

Ouzo Bay's vague ban on athletic shorts invites the manager to project their own biases on the customers, allowing situations where black patrons are discriminated against and white are allowed to eat.

In the end, the sad news is that a nine-year-old boy had to face the ugly reality of racial inequality in America by seeing it in full view, first-hand. "He's 9 years old. It was so hard for him. He goes to a school that's about seventy-percent white," grant told Black News Network.

"They always teach the kids they are the same," she added. "It was really hard for Dallas to see a kid that looked like one of his friends at school sit and eat there and he couldn't."

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A tattoo shop's offer to cover up hateful ink went viral. People are taking them up on it.

Beth Cutlip, co-owner of Baltimore's Southside Tattoo parlor, was working one day when a man walked in with some unmistakeable ink.

A gang member in Los Angeles. Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images.

The man's face was covered in gang tattoos, Cutlip says, and he was there to have them covered up. He got them as a teenager while running with a rough crowd, but he was a grown man now. Married. Kids. Trying to make an honest career as an electrician.

The tattoos, Cutlip recalls him saying, made people nervous when he came into their homes to do work. He needed them gone.

But they were just too big.

"As much as I wanted to help him, I had to refer him to have them removed. But I don't think he had the money," she says.

Later, when recounting the story to her husband and co-owner, Dave Cutlip, she knew there had to be a way to help people like that.

"I said, 'Dave, these people made a mistake, changed their life, and they need to get these tattoos covered up,'" she says. "He looked at me and said, 'Are you asking me to tattoo people for free?'"

Dave agreed to set aside time in the shop, once a week, for people to come in and have hateful or violent tattoos covered up, free of charge.

Beth posted a small announcement on the parlor's Facebook page, thinking a few hundred people might see it and think it was a good idea.

Instead, the post went massively viral.

Sometimes people make bad choices, and sometimes people change. We, at Southside Tattoo would like to make a difference....

Posted by Southside Tattoo on Monday, January 16, 2017

Soon, messages poured in from all over the country and world. There were thousands and thousands of people trying to get rid of permanent ink that didn't reflect who they were anymore.

This man's gang tattoo became a rose. Photo by Southside Tattoo, used with permission.

Southside Tattoo is now completely booked with cover-ups, and Beth has been working with other parlors around the country to help people outside the Baltimore area.

They've even begun setting up a nonprofit to help pay for the work. Beth says some of the funds they've raised go toward helping people in more remote areas travel to somewhere they can have the work done properly and safely.

His arms said "white" and "power." Beth and Dave covered up the "white." Photo by Southside Tattoo, used with permission.

Beth says everyone she works with has a different story, but they all have one thing in common: They're trying to build a better life.

Along with gang tattoos, "I am seeing so many swastikas, Aryan Brotherhood, things like that," Beth says. Some get inked up in prison to fit in, for safety. Others are just trying to leave their old ways behind.

Either way, Beth and her husband are happy to help.

"The beautiful thing is I know I did something good for somebody," she says. "And they're going to leave here and they're going to do something nice for somebody else."

Together, Beth and Dave are helping people prove it's never too late to change. And that's a message we all need to hear right now.

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How do you document the Black Lives Matter movement? These 10 images are a powerful start.

These photos look past the chaos to see the people behind this impassioned fight for equality.

When Natalie Keyssar graduated from art school in 2009, she was convinced she wanted to be a photojournalist instead.

She didn't want to spend her time by herself in a studio. She wanted to be out in the world, among the people exploring whatever was going on at the time.

She also found while studying painting that subjects that related to current events, activism, and protest movements inspired her. The young artist was using a lot of photojournalism as reference for her paintings in art school.

Keyssar already knew about color and composition from studying art. She just needed to hone her photography skills. She took on internships to get that coveted hands-on experience.  

"I think in a lot of ways painting and photography are almost the same thing in certain ways — it's just a different tool," she muses.

Keyssar grew up in North Carolina. She says as a kid she was always very aware of, and outraged by, instances involving police brutality.

Then in the fall of 2014, a wave of societal unrest erupted, beginning with the shooting of an unarmed young black man.

On Aug. 9, 2014, Michael Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, just outside St. Louis.

"I had a sense that it was gonna be a really important moment in America, historically," Keyssar explains. She never gave it a second thought. She just had to go and cover the tragic shooting that would take her on a yearlong journey of documentation and discovery.

Here are 10 of the most powerful images by Keyssar from the #BlackLivesMatter movement:

1. Bishop Derrick Robinson is arrested on Nov. 30, 2014, in Ferguson.

Image by Natalie Keyssar, used with permission.

This particular image stands out in Keyssar's mind, she says, because it encompasses the unrest at the time. Robinson is a prominent leader of the Black Lives Matter movement. She remembers him peacefully protesting outside a Rams game in St. Louis at a public park.

"Riot police just went for him. I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a police officer, but as a journalist, I saw nobody break any kind of law," Keyssar says. "I just saw five men in full tactical gear tackle a clergyman to the ground and arrest him for peacefully protesting in a public park. That was profoundly disturbing to me, and honestly I think it should be profoundly disturbing to everyone."

2. Kids dance to music playing from a truck with the words "no shoot, no loot" on Aug. 19, 2014, in Ferguson.

Image by Natalie Keyssar, used with permission.

3. Carrie Chambers poses for a photo on West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson on Aug. 19, 2014.

Image by Natalie Keyssar, used with permission.

4. A protester is bathed in police lights after the Millions March on Dec. 13, 2014, following the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

Image by Natalie Keyssar, used with permission.

5. Thousands of protesters take to the streets in Baltimore on April 29, 2015, following the death of Freddie Gray.

Image by Natalie Keyssar, used with permission.

6. Police dressed in tactical gear enforce a curfew in Baltimore on April 28, 2015.

Image by Natalie Keyssar, used with permission.

Keyssar says she was used to seeing other issues abroad. "Seeing this sort of really, really militarized police landscape in this American, sort of traditional stereotypical American landscape was sort of profound for me."

7. "I love peace and harmony and joy," said 87-year-old Clara Thornton, pictured below. "I'm praying for both sides ... we're all children of God."

Image by Natalie Keyssar, used with permission.

8. Artist Dimitri Reeves performs Michael Jackson covers in Baltimore on May 1, 2015, after it was announced charges would be filed in the Freddie Gray case.

Image by Natalie Keyssar, used with permission.

9. A man in his car shows support to protesters with a gesture in Baltimore on April 28, 2015.

Image by Natalie Keyssar, used with permission.

10. Marcus Mopkins wipes off the sweat from his brow before posing for a portrait in Ferguson on Aug. 19, 2014.

Image by Natalie Keyssar, used with permission.

This last image is also profoundly special to Keyssar. Marcus was one of the first people she photographed when she got to Ferguson. It was brutally hot that day, but he was dedicated. She considers him her introduction to this powerful experience that began in Ferguson.

"My goal with my work is always to convey nuance and create a jumping off point for a complex and necessary conversation."

What Keyssar doesn't want is for her work to reinforce anyone's biased narrative.

She wants her images from Ferguson, Baltimore, and New York to show the breadth of people, the humanity of those involved in the Black Lives Matter movement.

"I really want people to see other people. I think that's the foundation."

Heroes

When these teens took on Baltimore over a garbage idea, the city actually listened.

True
Starbucks Upstanders

What do you do with your free time? 17-year-old Destiny Watford spends hers saving her neighborhood.

Destiny lives in Baltimore, a city where more people die from air pollution than homicide — and the homicide rate is nothing to scoff at.

This isn’t an exaggeration; it’s a reality. And the people who live there deal with it every day.

Why is the air pollution so bad? Well, Curtis Bay — a neighborhood in Baltimore — is home to a coal export terminal, the nation’s largest medical waste facility, and an animal rendering plant, to name a few reasons.

All images via Starbucks, used with permission.

In 2012, Destiny learned about a plan to build the country’s largest trash-burning incinerator in Curtis Bay just a mile from her school.

Destiny looked around at her neighborhood, polluted by factory after factory, and decided she’d had enough.

Watch Destiny's full story:

These students banded together and stopped what would have been the nation's largest trash incinerator from being built just a mile away from their school. A Starbucks original series.

Posted by Upworthy on Friday, September 23, 2016

You may wonder, how could the country so completely disregard the health of these residents?

There's a reason Curtis Bay and communities like it are often the proposed sites for these types of facilities (ahem, environmental racism). A study published in Environmental Research Letters revealed that factories using toxic substances and waste plants are usually found in poor neighborhoods — and those neighborhoods are often predominantly made up of people of color.

The phenomenon is nothing new. History has shown time and time again that poor neighborhoods are often used as dumping grounds. See the Flint water crisis.

The communities being affected often don’t have a voice to fight against this injustice. That’s why Destiny is so special.

Determined to stop the incinerator from invading their neighborhood, Destiny and her classmates started a movement.

"Curtis Bay is my home," explained Destiny. "I grew up here. I live here. My family lives here. My friends live here. If a development like this is happening that would be putting our lives at risk, I couldn't ignore it."

She and her peers started Free Your Voice, an organization aimed at stopping the development of the incinerator.

They found out that the Baltimore City Public School System would be purchasing energy from the incinerator and challenged that decision. They won — the school board changed its decision and backed out of the contract. 21 other businesses followed suit.

Then, something even bigger happened.

"We learned that the incinerator’s permit had expired," Destiny said. "This was a huge opportunity for us because with an expired permit, you can’t construct. But it would not matter unless the Maryland Department of the Environment said publicly, 'Your permits are expired.' Which they hadn’t."

Free Your Voice organized protests, with people standing outside late into the night, urging the department to enforce the law and stop the incinerator.

It took months, but eventually the state did declare that the permit was expired, effectively halting all operations.

The community united, and their unified, persistent voice was loud enough to be heard.

Thanks to Destiny and her peers, the future of Curtis Bay — and its air — is clearer.

And Destiny led the charge. Her passion for her community inspired positive change. If more communities follow suit, hopefully together, they can force the tide to change.  

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