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Wow! Did he really say that?
July 23rd, 2008 by Scott

What a polarizing comment… Mayor Holley of Portsmouth:

He said the Renaissance hotel and the Lucas project would attract two different groups of people.

The city needs a hotel that targets blacks, he said.

“It’s got my black picture in the lobby, but it’s a white hotel,” Holley said of the Renaissance. -=SOURCE=-

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3 Responses  
  • Lorraine writes:
    July 23rd, 2008 at 09:16 am

    See. it’s this kind of thinking that bugs me. If I said something like this – I’d be labeled a racist.

  • Michael Tefft writes:
    July 23rd, 2008 at 10:58 am

    Mayor Holley took a pounding for those comments in the comments to the story in HamptonRoads.com, and deservedly so. What an amazingly racist thing to say. How exactly do you build a hotel that targets blacks? I cannot even begin to imagine what he had in mind. I hope Mayor Holley’s days as the Mayor of Portsmouth are coming to an end soon. Portsmouth deserves better.

  • Peter Stinson writes:
    July 23rd, 2008 at 11:49 am

    My parents visited recently, and I got my parents a room at the Renaissance. My mother happened to comment that it was the first time since living on the Navajo reservation that she’d felt like a minority. When I’d checked them in, I noticed that there were several events going on at the hotel, including a function for a historically black sorority. Frankly, as a resident of Portsmouth, it didn’t even register for me. For my mother, of a different generation and living above the Mason/Dixon Line, it did register.

    I guess the sorority didn’t get the message from the mayor that while his “black picture” is “in the lobby,” the hotel is “a white hotel.” Funny, I’ve always thought it was a hotel. That catered to people. No matter the color of their skin.

    I wonder what he would say if I suggested we built a hotel in Portsmouth that targeted white people. Maybe that’s what he was talking about when he said we need 25 projects like this in Portsmouth. One for whites. One for blacks. One for Japanese. One for Russians. One for… oh, hell, you get the point.


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