Clubgoers are used to the whole velvet rope policy to get into popular clubs. They deal with being not allowed in because you're not wearing the right clothing or you don't fit what the club wants overall. Telling someone they can't come in because of the color of their skin however, and you might as well have wrapped that velvet rope around your neck. There's a spot called Mother's Night Club in Chicago that might have done just that. Black college students from out of town were getting ejected from the 41-year-old club, but were being told it was because of how they were dressed. The problem was the white students they came with that were dressed the same way were being let in - even when a black student and a white student switched pants! The club more or less fessed up when they said they had "security concerns" - you know, all those gangs in Chicago - the town that gave the world its most famous gangbanger, the oh-so-black Al Capone and our current president, the oh-so-white Barack Obama. Interestingly enough, as one of the flyers protesting the club show, Black women have been allowed in! The biggest problem is the fact that Mother's was called out in the past, but nothing ever came of the allegations. Something will come of this one. Yeah, they will do the denial routine, then comes the blacks that will defend the club saying no one knows what they are talking about, but in the end Mother's will stop doing this crap. That's all that matters.
Huffington Post
A popular Chicago bar is facing allegations that it denied entry to black patrons on account of their race.
Six black students at Washington University in St. Louis claim that bouncers at the Original Mother's bar on Division Street refused to let them in Saturday night because their pants were too baggy, even though similarly dressed white people were admitted.
| FLYERS PROTESTING MOTHER'S |
In a press release posted on the Windy Citizen, class president Fernando Cutz claims that a white student switched pants with one of the African-American students who was denied admission as "an experiment." According to Cutz, the white student wearing the supposedly offending pants was let in without any problems.
"I think it's because we were a group of predominantly black men and they felt threatened," senior Blake Jones told Student Life, a school paper.
Club representatives told the Tribune it refused to let the men in because of security concerns, citing recent gang activity in the area.
When called by the Huffington Post, a Mother's employee, who did not identify himself, said the company was waiting on its attorneys to make a statement and hung up.
An anonymous review of the bar on Citysearch from 2008 made a similar allegation of racism.
"The bouncers are ignorant and biased against people of color," the reviewer wrote. "They denied my husband access due to his wardrobe my husband changed his clothes and meanwhile they allowed a white man to enter even though he had on gymshoes like my husband did."
In response, the Washington University students filed a civil rights complaint with the Illinois attorney general's office and additional complaints with the Chicago Commission on Human Relations and the U.S. Justice Department.
