The Forgotten Racial History of Red Lobster

new york
CNN
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Communities across the country are losing their Cheddar Bay Biscuits and all-you-can-eat seafood as struggling Red Lobster closes about 100 U.S. locations and looms another 135 closures.

But Red Lobster’s decline is a particular loss for its many black customers, who formed a loyal customer base for the brand and still make up a higher percentage of its clientele than any other major casual-dining chain, according to historians, customers and former Red Lobster executives.

“Red Lobster developed a black customer. It didn’t shy away from that demographic like other brands did,” Clarence Otis Jr., former CEO of Darden Restaurants from 2004 to 2014, when the company still owned the chain, told CNN.

After Ortiz became CEO, Sacramento Observer columnist Mardeo Cannon wrote that it was “a given” that Red Lobster would have a black CEO: “If there’s one restaurant in America that most African-Americans love, it’s Red Lobster.”

In a 2015 investor presentation, Red Lobster said 16% of its customers were black, 2 percentage points higher than the percentage of black people in the U.S. population. Red Lobster did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on its current customer statistics.

The chain has employed black workers and served black customers since its founding in the South in the late 1960s. Black celebrities like Chris Rock and Nicki Minaj worked there before they were famous. (Minaj later joked with Jimmy Fallon that she’d been fired from “all three or four” Red Lobsters where she’d worked, while tucking into “Lobsterita” drinks and Cheddar Bay biscuits.) And Beyoncé sang about police brutality, Hurricane Katrina, and black culture in America, and about taking her lover to Red Lobster in her 2016 song “Formation.”

Marcia Chatelain, a professor of African American studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Franchising: The Golden Arches of Black America,” which explored McDonald’s’ relationship with black consumers, said Red Lobster attracted both working-class and affluent black customers in the 1970s and ’80s, a time when many sit-down restaurants were not welcoming to black diners.

Red Lobster’s early locations near shopping malls also helped attract more black customers, she said.

“Red Lobster’s location near shopping malls coincided with the expansion of retail options for African-Americans following the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” she said in an email. “This style of restaurant was appealing to people looking for a fine-dining experience without the fear of how they would be treated at their local establishment.”

Founded by Bill Darden, Red Lobster was racially integrated when it opened in Lakeland, Florida, in 1968.

Hiring and serving black people was not a revolutionary step for Darden, nor was he the first to jump at the opportunity, but it was another indicator of racial progress for blacks in Lakeland and the changing South. In Lakeland in the early 1960s, local civil rights activists picketed stores and movie theaters that refused admission to black patrons, forcing blacks to integrate.

Red Lobster opened four years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, which mandated the desegregation of public facilities, but many schools and businesses remained segregated, and some chose to close rather than integrate.

Red Lobster has “always been very open and accommodating to us,” said Beverly Boatright, who was an active participant in the sit-ins in Lakeland while attending a black high school with her mother, a leader in the local NAACP chapter. “We’ve never had a problem with Red Lobster. There have been other places in the city where we’ve had a hard time.”

But Red Lobster was not an immediate hit with Lakeland’s black clientele, and Darden’s myth as a civil rights pioneer has grown in recent years and been exaggerated.

Red Lobster “wasn’t a place we went to very often” in the early days, said Harold Dwight, who graduated two years after Boatwright in 1968. Most black residents couldn’t afford to eat out, Dwight said. When they could, they went to black-owned establishments or to Morrison’s Cafeteria, the largest cafeteria chain in the South, which had been hiring more black employees for several years.

According to company legend, Darden’s first restaurant, the Green Frog, opened in Waycross, Georgia in 1938 and desegregated the restaurant. Darden has been described in various articles as a “social activist” and ” [stood] The Green Frog ran a slogan that said it “defied” segregation laws and that they “date all the way back to Jim Crow laws.” Darden Restaurants’ corporate website refers to the Green Frog and says its founder “welcomed all diners to its table.”

But black people who grew up in Waycross and remember the Green Frog, which closed in the 1980s, say the restaurant was not initially welcoming to black customers.

Former Waycross Mayor John Fluker said the Green Frog did not welcome black customers, even though black people worked in the kitchen.

Waycross resident Horace Thomas said “Green Frog” reflected racial norms in southern Georgia at the time.

“They weren’t open to black people,” he said. “That was the way it was.”

Black customers did not immediately frequent Red Lobster, but the chain gradually gained a following of black patrons as it expanded across the South and the country.

Red Lobster built a reputation as friendly and open to black customers, in part because it had black staff when it opened new locations, and then deployed a marketing strategy aimed at attracting black customers, historians and former executives say.

Walter King, who was hired to run Red Lobster restaurants in 1971, was one of the company’s first black employees and worked there for 36 years. Red Lobster later created one of its signature dishes, “Walt’s Favorite Shrimp,” which is named after him. King passed away last year.

“They were loyal to us and we were loyal to them,” Beverly Boatright said. “We went there because the food was good. It was the only place you could get good seafood. It was a luxury.”

Red Lobster’s food was also a big factor in its popularity with black customers.

Robin Autry, a sociology professor at Wesleyan University who studies race relations and recently wrote about how Red Lobster’s demise “would hurt” the black community, said outdoor fish fries, including catfish and crawfish, are a popular tradition in the black community.

Autry said Red Lobster brought “the outdoor fried fish experience” indoors, and for many Black people, going from an outdoor fried fish experience to sitting down with a menu and getting your food became a “status symbol.”