On Saturday, January 25th 2014, at 10:00pm myself and three of my friends (all African Nova Sotians) wanted to check into a hotel in Antigonish NS. We first went to the Homeward Inns of Canada located on James St. My friend went in to check to see if any rooms were available; she was in the lobby for about 15-20 mins then came back to tell us that the hotel rooms are booked up so the lady that was working there got us a room at a different hotel The Chateau Inn, ran by the same person a few meters up the road. The lady got in her truck and told us to follow her up so she could get us a key and situated. She gave us room number 109 and we paid and got all paper work done and keys handed to us. At around 11:30pm a knock came on the hotel door, we were kind of surprised because we werent expecting anyone. One of my friends answered the door and a stranger busted through the door and yelled OUT!!!!! we did not know who this man was because we had not seen him before. This took us by complete surprise, we then asked him who was he and why did he want us to go? and what did we do wrong? He would not speak to us just kept running back to his office. As we were gathering up our belongings and trying to wrap our head around what just happen, he comes back outside on a telephone asking for 4 cop cars to come remove these gangsters. We heard him say this and told him we did not cause any trouble and had no plans on doing so. He said I want you people gone we asked him was it because we were black? as to we ran out of reasons why else he would want us gone. He said its my hotel and I dont want your kind here. We stayed around for the police to come because we thought that if we fled the scene it would look like we did something wrong. The 2 policemen came a few minuets later one spoke to the owner and the other spoke to us, we told him our side of the story and I assume the owner told the other cop his version of events. The police were totally on our side thankfully, they examined the room to find no damage at all, one cop even stated there is not even a butt wrinkle in the sheets and also they said there were no reports of loud or disturbance. The police said that because he does own the hotel that he does have the right to say who can come and go within it, and yes we understand that but it still hurts that the only reason we werent allowed in the hotel was because we were African Nova Scotians, it feels like we are still living in the 1950s? And to top all that off, the hotel owner never gave us our money back, and charged us 150$ in damages. Right after MLK Jrs. Day, and a few days shy of African Heritage Month you would think this would never happen. Please help us make our story public and shed some light on this incident, and call this owner out has the terrible ignorant man that he is. This is Black History repeating it self ...
Posted on: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 14:02:34 +0000