A white employee at a Hampton Inn in North Carolina has been fired for calling the police on a Black family who was using the hotel pool.
In a viral video posted to Instagram, the unnamed hotel employee was seen with two cops questioning Anita Williams-Wright while her kids swam in the pool.
“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. “The team member is no longer employed at the hotel.”
Williams-Wright took the video as it was happening and posted it to Instagram with the caption: “I can’t believe this happened to me and my kids.”
The officers can be heard asking William-Wright to prove that she was staying at the hotel. At one point, she showed them her key, but it wasn’t enough for them.
“I feel it’s discrimination. I have a room here,” Williams-Wright said in the video. “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.”
“It was two white people sitting over there, and she said nothing to them,” she told the cops. “She said to me, ‘Oh because it’s always people like you using the pool unauthorized.’ Who is people like me?”
The employee said she “just wanted to make sure everyone who’s in the pool is supposed to be in the pool.”
The video ended with Williams-Wright and her children leaving the pool area and returning to their hotel room.
