Adam's Mark Hotels & Resorts was a chain of upscale hotels in the United States. The company was headquartered in the HBE Corporation offices in Creve Coeur, Missouri, in Greater St. Louis. [1] [2] Fred Kummer founded the chain in the early 1970s, as well as its parent, HBE Corp. [3]
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Adams Mark faced several civil, state, and federal lawsuits for racial discrimination against Black customers. It was the first hotel chain, in its entirety, to face a United States Justice Department inquiry into racial discrimination for violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In the 1990s, Adams Mark settled multimillion-dollar racial discrimination lawsuits involving employees and consumers against individual hotels in Indianapolis and St. Louis. [4] [5]
In December 1999, five African–American hotel guests brought a class action lawsuit against the hotel chain after attending the Black College Reunion in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1999. The suit alleged that Adams Mark "charged black guests higher rates, required them to wear orange wrist bands and prohibited black visitors." Additionally, the claimants reported that "rooms rented to blacks had been 'stripped down' and lacked such basic amenities as telephones and maid service; pictures had been removed from the walls and room mini-bars were locked." [5] The Justice Department agreed with the claimants in a nonmonetary settlement, finding that Adams Mark engaged in racial discrimination by "charging Black customers higher prices than Whites and segregating Black customers in less desirable rooms as part of a corporate pattern of discrimination." [6]
The suit, and subsequent 17-month boycott of the chain called by the NAACP, was settled out of court for $8 million in 2000. [7]
In July 2015, new allegations of racism against Adams Mark surfaced. The Daily Kos reported, "A white hotel manager of the Adams Mark Hotel in Kansas City, hung a black slave doll from the doorway of the office with a garbage bag in an apparent mocking of the death of Sandra Bland." Tweets about the incident documented a photograph of the doll hanging by a "white plastic bag noose" around her neck. [8]
While once numbering more than 20 large hotels, the chain, because of financial difficulties and changing corporate strategies, sold all of its properties during the 2000s.
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The activists picket HBE Corp. in Creve Coeur to protest what the NAACP says are discriminatory practices by the hotel chain.
