Red Onion Will Pay $50,000 to End Bias Cases
The Red Onion restaurant chain, hit repeatedly by charges of discrimination, has quietly agreed to pay $50,000 to settle the claims of two former college football players that they were initially denied entry and then later thrown out of a Santa Ana restaurant because they were black.
Company officials said the settlement closes the book on the last lawsuit among several filed in 1986 when it was disclosed publicly that some restaurant managers had instructed employees to “clean up the crowd” when it became “too dark.”
Money Paid to Minorities
Based in Carson, the Red Onion chain has paid several hundred thousand dollars to minorities who brought claims through the state and Orange County courts, including $390,000 to a group of blacks and Latinos last year and $240,000 to a group of Iranians in 1986.
Under this latest settlement, the company has agreed to pay $25,000 each to Kevin Conard and Vincent Fudzie, two former football players at the University of Washington who were visiting Orange County in December, 1985, to play in the Freedom Bowl. Formal notice of the settlement was given in Superior Court in Santa Ana on Tuesday.
The company acknowledged no guilt in making the payments but decided a settlement would avoid the prospect of a more costly trial, said William A. Kurlander, an attorney for Red Onion who has worked on many of the discrimination claims. “It was a practical business decision.”
Kurlander, acknowledging that publicity over the issue has hurt the company in the past, said: “There was no corporate-level discrimination. Individual employees may have discriminated against patrons at the door years ago, but we think that’s behind us now.”
The firm has instituted various sensitivity training and hiring programs and scholarship funds to address minority concerns, Kurlander said.
The settlement figure in the Conard-Fudzie case falls short of the $40,000 that each of six Iranians got in their settlement, but appears higher than most of the other payments received by several dozen other claimants in the past few years.
Attorney Milton C. Grimes of Santa Ana, who represented the two in their suit, maintained that the settlement marks yet another convincing sign of systematic discrimination at the Red Onion.
“Fifty thousand dollars isn’t small change. They’ve paid out too much money by now to deny that they had a policy of discrimination,” Grimes said. Nonetheless, Fudzie, 24, who is now an accountant in Palo Alto, said the settlement does not satisfy him.
Citing a belief that he might not get a fair hearing if the case went to trial, Fudzie said in an interview that settling the case out of court seemed his “best shot.” But he added, “I think the problems that they caused us were worth a lot more than this. . . . This was blatant discrimination.”
An altercation between Fudzie, Conard and police at the Santa Ana Red Onion led to criminal charges against them and the eventual loss of their football scholarships at the University of Washington.
Fudzie and Conard said in their lawsuit that they were denied entry to the Santa Ana Red Onion, purportedly because they did not meet the dress code. Grimes said both were dressed conservatively. The two young men returned later and were admitted into the club but then were ordered by a manager to leave.
The altercation sparked a scuffle between the two football players and Santa Ana police officers when officers tried to escort the young men from the premises, and Conard required 10 stitches for his injuries.
Conard was charged with assault, but those charges were later dropped in part because of prosecutors’ concerns over the questionable reasons for which he was asked to leave the club.
Conard and Fudzie have a separate lawsuit still pending against the Police Department in connection with the scuffle.
