A couple years ago, a fellow writer friend asked if I could cover a story about The Moor, a Black-owned hotel here in New Orleans from Homage Hospitality. It was for a publication by a company that’s been slowly killing New Orleans and other cities, but I needed the money and it was important to me that I, as a Black HBCU grad, share the stories of two other Black HBCU grads.
The Moor got a lot of coverage during Essence Fest, but all those articles sounded the same. Largely because a lot of it was fluff by bloggers who are more like influencers than journalists. No diss, we all gotta eat.
But with my decade in feature journalism, I wrote out some thoughtful questions I was sure they’d never been asked; I shared some cool things about the building and its prior residents that I’d found doing archival research. The interview went great and I even got to be in some photos for the feature. When I was taking my notes, I could feel exactly what the story would develop into: a story about The Moor being a hotel for everyone, but with a “Black nod” and zero “Black tax” for Black patrons.
So imagine my shock when I, a Black writer, covering The Moor, a Black-owned hotel in New Orleans, a Black city, gets told in so many words that the story is too Black. Of course they didn’t use those words, but we know what “sounds too much like the author’s opinion” and “sounds a little negative” means.
I could have made the story a little lighter (pun intended), but I refuse to have my name attached to anything fake. Like Dr. Eve L. Ewing taught me at the 2019 Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat, “PROTECT YOUR BYLINE.”
My original story on The Moor, Damon Lawrence, and Marcus Carey is posted below:
Hed: Black Nod to the Big Easy
Subhed: Homage Hospitality Gets a Refund on the Black Tax
By: Megan Braden-Perry
Homage Hospitality founders Damon Lawrence and Marcus Carey know what it feels like to be unwelcome because of their race, and now they are flipping traditional black defense mechanisms on their side in order to ensure all guests know there’s room for them at Homage Hospitality properties. In the black community, there are certain adages you acquire from racial lessons learned over time. “You have to work twice as hard to get what you want,” “You’ll often be treated as lesser,” “You’ll be uncomfortably pandered to,” “Your business won’t survive if people know you’re black.” These are phrases black people keep in mind constantly, things that are learned as early as childhood and are often reinforced through experience.
Lawrence and Carey were children the first time they were treated poorly because of their black race. Lawrence was 12 years old when he was followed around an Altadena, California bookstore where he and friends had been regular customers. “She just followed us around the whole time and we’d never really experienced that,” Lawrence says. His mother told him and his friends they were never to return. Carey was a teenager working as a golf club bag room manager in the Detroit suburbs when he was demoted back down to a caddy because of gossip and microaggressions from his white colleagues. He called his mom and said, “I thought they were my friends. I thought they were cool.”
Lawrence and Carey, however, have found ways to use the shared story of the black community to help them create lodging experiences to make everyone feel welcome. One way they do this is by filling the spaces with black art, black furniture, black tapestries, black literature and black personal care products by Shea Moisture. But it’s not the pandering often found when big non-black companies try to diversify, which usually includes tossing around purple, gold, Kente cloth not made in Africa, Afro-wearing silhouettes and outdated slang. Fellow members of the black community find themselves represented at The Moor and know they are seen and welcome. It’s like the “black nod” given in majority non-black settings, between black people. The design of The Moor says to black guests, “Yes, I see you out here and I acknowledge and respect you.” To non-black patrons, it’s just a lovely space with beautiful furnishings and quality personal care products.
Carey says he and Lawrence decided early on that they wanted people to know Homage Hospitality is a black-owned company, but that they wanted to be strategic about it. “We wanted to say it without saying it. We just represent it. We show up, we share that we’re the owners and we create beautiful spaces for everybody,” Carey says. “And you can see what it’s inspired by. But we decided that we don’t need to say it. Not not saying it in an effort to hide it, just not saying it to not be overkill.”
Lawrence and Carey both know black business owners who hide their identity in an attempt to help the businesses. “We’ve seen that a lot where people will create a business and hide their own identity because of the fear of what that will do to the business, a fear that people won’t take them seriously,” Lawrence says. “I think that really is rooted in insecurity. For us it’s like there’s no way that we create a product like this and then hide who we are, because that’s what makes it so special. When you look at the hotel landscape, you see a whole lot of people that don’t look like us dominating it, and here we come about to wreck it.”
In fact, when the black community learned Homage Hospitality’s The Moor was black-owned, thanks to The Shade Room, 150 guests booked stays just three days after opening. There was also a boost from Essence Festival guests, as a huge part of Essence Festival is supporting black-owned businesses. From opening in July 2018 through December 2018, The Moor’s clientele was majority black. Now it’s about half-black, half-everything else. Homage Hospitality has still never spent money on advertising or marketing. “One of the things we realized is that we’re doing something so unique, there’s no one else that we’re competing with. So when our story gets out, it’s gonna be one of those stories that really translates so deeply,” Lawrence says. “And we don’t have to pay for that kind of advertising. It can happen organically.”
Homage Hospitality also hopes to combat gentrification, a growing problem in New Orleans and several other communities. The Freeman in Treme, named for the free people of color who built, lived and have owned property in the neighborhood for generations, will consist of two 50-room hotels – one next to the Carver Theater and one music-themed hotel at the old Rip’s studio – and will include management of the Carver Theater. Unlike The Moor, The Freeman will have onsite employees. To help combat gentrification, Lawrence has a specific hiring plan for The Freeman. “We’re definitely going to have employees at The Freeman and our first goal is to hire locally. We want to employ as many people locally, really in the Treme, as possible and then branch out from there,” Lawrence says.
“We talk about creating businesses that combat gentrification; it’s really about uplifting the existing community and making sure that those people are able to exist with the changes happening in the neighborhood. The Treme is about to go through a renaissance, I can tell. And we might be on the front charge of leading that. But I think it’s important to make sure that the people who have represented that community for such a long time are able to exist there, see the fruits of the changes that happen and have high paying jobs that allow them to stay in their neighborhood.”
Carey and Lawrence are both graduates of Howard University, a Historically Black College or University (HBCU), and they are eager to hire HBCU students and work with HBCUs whenever possible. “We come from that HBCU world and we’d like to bring our brand to that world where it makes sense. And we’re in super early discussions with trying to bring something to Howard,” Carey says. “But beyond that, a lot of HBCUs have hospitality programs and a lot of them have stood by their hospitality programs in the middle of higher education deciding to cut that from their curriculums, and so we want to create a pipeline to feed in our business and to help develop hospitality professionals to support the universities. We’re already are in talks with the Dillard University Ray Charles program.”
Homage Hospitality also plans to open what they call “aspirational properties,” properties in places where not everyone has traditionally felt welcome. “There are aspirational locations around the world that feel exclusive, yet we’re all on Instagram so we see the beauty of places and what’s fun about them and why people go, but they often feel like they aren’t welcome to certain groups of people, like people of color, the marginalized communities,” Lawrence says. “All types of folks don’t feel welcome per se in places like Napa and Aspen Colorado and Martha’s Vineyard and parts of the Caribbean, Tahoe and Catskills in New York. Separate from what we want to accomplish in places like New Orleans and Oakland and Brooklyn, where we want to combat gentrification, in those aspirational locations we want to make it more comfortable for those that aspire to go there.”
What’s next after opening The Freeman in New Orleans’ Treme, The Town in downtown Oakland, the other gentrification-combatting properties and the aspirational properties, Lawrence and Carey say, is rooted in faith as their entire journey has been. “My definition of faith is just assured expectation of realities unseen. And when I think about that, I think about in my mind I’ve already seen the end result of what this is going to produce,” Lawrence says. “And I feel like every step that we take, we’re further cementing ourselves in the conversation of being one of the leaders in the hospitality industry. So I feel like I’ve visualized what it looks like to get to that place, and every single step, every single accomplishment is really just encouragement to keep going and to see it all the way through.”