Keisha Lance Bottoms shouldn’t rebuke Black businesses like Toast on Lenox
Last week, a photograph nearly cost two Atlanta entrepreneurs everything they have built.
Tamara Young and Virgil Harper turned Toast on Lenox into one of Atlanta’s signature brunch spots.
Then Rick Jackson, the Republican nominee for governor, stopped in, took a photo with Young, and praised her success. Within a day, there were calls to boycott the restaurant.
Then, the owners felt forced to declare that they endorse no candidate. Not to make a political point. To protect their employees.
I know that pressure. I have run a jewelry business in metro Atlanta since 1994, built the same way theirs was: serving every customer who walks through the door, no matter who they voted for. A business is not a party precinct.
Boycotts shouldn’t be about grievance politics
My family’s story is woven into this city’s civil rights history. My uncles were arrested more times than I can count standing up to Jim Crow.
In their day, the boycott was a weapon the powerless used against the powerful, to demand a seat at the lunch counter.
They did not sacrifice so that, two generations later, a Black woman who built her own tables could be threatened over who sat at one.
That is not activism.
It is grievance politics, and it only hurts our own.
When a smiling photo becomes a firing offense, the first people hurt are not candidates.
They are the line cooks, servers, and hostesses whose paychecks depend on full tables.
Metro Atlanta leads the nation’s 100 largest metros in its share of Black-owned businesses, four years running. Statewide, 1.4 million small businesses employ 1.8 million people, four in 10 Georgia workers. We do not deserve a political litmus test at the register.
Bottoms has a history of calling out businesses
Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had a simple opportunity. One sentence from the Democratic nominee for governor, that no Georgia business should be punished for serving a customer, would have ended it.
Instead, on July 17, with the boycott calls at full volume, she posted a video warning minority-owned businesses against welcoming Jackson.
Any owner who opens their doors to him, she said, “has made a calculated decision based on the benefits and the risk of doing that.”
That is a warning. Every business owner knows what that means from someone who wants power over your permits, your taxes, your livelihood. She was handed the chance to call off a pile-on against a Black-owned business. She blessed it instead.
And this is not the first time. In 2021, she framed Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star Game out of Georgia as a deserved consequence of an election law she opposed and predicted more dominoes would fall. But they did not fall on legislators.
Instead, they fell on Cobb County hotel rooms, vendors, restaurant tabs, and hourly shifts, $100 million worth. In 2022, after a Buckhead-area restaurant turned her away under its dress code, she named and tagged it to hundreds of thousands of followers. When it happened again in 2024, she declined to identify the restaurant. Her stated reason: The last time she named one, people called and threatened the staff.
She knows exactly what her voice does to a business. She spared a restaurant that inconvenienced her personally. She would not spare a Black-owned restaurant on Lenox Road for seating a customer.
Candidates should be able to visit any business in Georgia
Small business owners remember 2020, too. When she ordered Atlanta back into Phase 1 closures, the fight over how long our doors stayed shut went to court. Plenty never opened again.
But here is what actually happened at Toast on Lenox. A candidate for governor walked in, enjoyed the food and told a successful entrepreneur that her story inspires him.
In a healthy state, that is a Tuesday, not a scandal. I have watched Rick Jackson do the same in barbershops across Georgia, treating Black business owners as what we are: job creators. Not props.
Georgia’s small businesses do not check voter registration at the door. Our leaders should never ask us to. The next governor should defend a business owner’s right to serve everyone, not call it a risk.
Bruce LeVell is the managing partner of Dunwoody Diamonds USA and LeVell Properties. He also serves as public and private partnerships director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and previously served as an adviser to President Donald Trump on small business issues. He wrote this guest opinion column in his personal capacity.
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