Satch Sanders: Basketball Player & Business Man

Part 4

This view of his restaurant bothers Sanders. He argues that he is running a business first and a sociology classroom, if it is that, second. He does not want to be viewed as a novelty. Yet, he says, if his restaurant is one of the few where blacks and whites mix comfortably in a city where roughly 15 percent of the population is black, then something is terribly wrong.

"Why should you be in a major city and not find this kind of phenomenon of blacks and whites together, in serious numbers, in a lot of other places all over the city?" he asks. "There's no question that it's a problem that hasn't been addressed, that it's something that hasn't been encouraged. I'm not saying that other places are racist in attitude. They aren't. It's just a matter of people going in and feeling comfortable. . . ."

Perceptions, says Sanders. You read about kids being murdered in Atlanta, and you don't want to bring your kids to Atlanta. You read about the Zebra killings in San Francisco, and you're not in a hurry to visit San Francisco. Who wanted to hurry off to Manhattan when Son of Sam was making his rounds? Indeed, who wants to hurry off to Manhattan as long as anyone owns a gun?

The same sort of thing is true of restaurants, says Sanders. A place gets bad marks for whatever reason, whether true or not, and people stop coming. If a place gets bad marks on race relations, real or imagined, then that affects the clientele.

"Say a person goes into a restaurant and indicates that he had to wait an hour and a half for service," he explains. "If the person is apprehensive about the fact that he is black and feels that he wasn't waited on . . . because they just didn't want to encourage him to come back and made him wait, then the word spreads. That's the kind of thing that becomes very real to a person. Now the possibility that the waiter might have just blown his station, just didn't realize that he was supposed to wait on that table, is a distinct possibility. But in the mind of the individual involved, they did it because he was black."