Your Friendly Neighborhood Hooters

In the fall of 1995, three decades after the March on Washington, the sports bar and restaurant chain Hooters staged a march of its own. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (E.E.O.C.) had accused Hooters of illegal hiring practices, as part of a four-year probe during which staff were “tripping over federal regulators and investigators in our restaurants,” as Mike McNeil, then the company’s vice-president, complained to the Los Angeles Times. The problem was men: Hooters declined to hire them as bartenders or servers, and the commission was demanding that the company create a fund of twenty-two million dollars to be disbursed among victims. Citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Marcia Greenberger, an attorney for the National Women’s Law Center, told the Times that the law permits