Sabrina Pyle, who owns Azle Café in Texas, admitted that she didn’t exactly think her Facebook post through when she posted on the social media site on Monday that there would be a Martin Luther King Day special of chicken and waffles with a side of watermelon at her cafe.
“Yesterday I came up with this incredible, ingenious idea for what I thought would bring people in for lunch,” Pyle said on Tuesday, noting that she realized her mistake as soon as a friend brought it to her attention.
“After she brought it to my attention, I did take it down. But I didn’t realize it had already been shared,” Pyle said. “I just did something distasteful. I just didn’t think it through.”
— Woman charged with hate crime after posting racist Facebook rant —
But Brad Pelt saw the post on Facebook and took a screenshot of it to share online. “You have a responsibility on social media. You don’t just scroll past things,” he said. “You have to stop and go, ‘Wait, no, this is not okay.’”
Ever since the post went viral, Pyle has been inundated with backlash.
“Like the one I got today: You should know better, you racist scum, I will never eat there for free…You are going to hell, end of story,” she said of the messages she has received about the Facebook post.
Pelt said that he didn’t mean for the post to get out of hand and generate so much hate, however.
“I took the post down because I don’t want people harassing her, her nosiness, her family or her employees,” he said. “I still think you have to have communication to move forward. You can’t just say I’m sorry and move along.”
