June 30, 2020 - 3:02 PM
WILLIAMSTON, N.C. - A worker at a North Carolina hotel has been fired after she called police on a Black woman and her child who were guests there and swimming in the pool.
A woman identified on her Facebook account as Missy Williams-Wright said she was using the pool with her family at a Hampton Inn in Williamston last week when she said an employee approached asking for proof they were guests, news outlets reported.
“It was two white people sitting over there. She said nothing to them,” Wright told responding officers in a Facebook Live video posted Friday. “She said to me, ‘Oh because it’s always people like you using the pool unauthorized.’ Who’s people like me?”
The officers and the employee, who appears to be white, are then heard asking for proof she has a room at the hotel. When Wright showed them a hotel key card, the employee asked her what room they were staying in.
In the video, police and the hotel employee are heard asking for Wright’s name. She declined to give it, saying she didn’t break the law. The video then shows an officer doing a check on her car’s license plate.
About seven minutes after she started filming, Wright ushered her children out of the pool. Her narration suggested the worker followed her to an elevator as she went back to her room, but Wright refused to talk to her.
As of Tuesday, the video had been viewed more than 940,000 times on Facebook.
“Hampton by Hilton has zero tolerance for racism and discrimination of any kind,” Shruti Gandhi Buckley, global head of Hampton by Hilton, said in an Instagram post Monday. The post also said the worker who called the police was “no longer employed” and that the company apologized directly to the guest and her family.
News from © The Associated Press, 2020