Hampton Inn employee fired after calling police on Black family at pool

Anita Williams-Wright felt discriminated against and said the other guests did not have to prove they belonged there

Jun 30, 2020

A white Hampton Inn employee has been fired a viral Facebook Live video showed her calling the police on a Black family just for using the hotel’s swimming pool in Williamston, North Carolina.

In a nearly 10-minute clip, a white hotel employee and two Williamston police officers are shown approaching a Black woman who is with her children at the pool. They then ask the woman – who is later identified as Anita Williams-Wright – to prove that she’s staying at the hotel.

“I feel it’s discrimination. I have a room here,” Williams-Wright can be heard saying in the video, while holding up her room key. “This lady here is discriminating (against) me. I have a key to get in and I can show you that it works… I have a room here. I don’t have to give my name. I didn’t break the law.”

She then points out that the hotel employee didn’t approach anyone else at the pool demanding they prove they were hotel guests.

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CB7w6uEF4LF/

“It was two white people sitting over there and she said nothing to them,” she explains. “She said to me, ‘Oh, because it’s always people like you using the pool unauthorized.’ Who is people like me?”

“Hampton by Hilton has zero tolerance for racism or discrimination of any kind. On Saturday, we were alerted to an online video of a guest incident at one of our franchise properties,” Shruti Gandhi Buckley, the Global Head of Hampton by Hilton, said in a statement Monday. “The team member is no longer employed at the hotel.”

“I can’t believe this happened to me and my kids,” Williams-Wright captioned her video on Instagram.

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