A former GBH News colleague of mine has gotten caught up in a mess involving a Cambridge coffee shop in which he was told he’d been mixed up with another Black man who’d reportedly caused trouble.
Phillip Martin, an award-winning journalist who retired earlier this year, told The Boston Globe (sub. req.) that he was refused service at a Caffè Nero in Central Square last Thursday after he attempted to order a cup of tea. Martin said he was there to meet another journalist. Globe reporters Nick Stoico and Alexa Coultoff write:
A woman working at the counter told Martin that her boss instructed her not to serve him if he came into the cafe again, according to Martin. He said he told her she must be mistaking him for someone else, but the woman insisted, “No, we have you on video.”
Martin and the employee each called police, he said. After officers spoke with Martin and the cafe worker separately, they told Martin that he was allowed to stay.
In addition to his work as an investigative reporter for GBH Radio, Martin would also pop up on various GBH-TV shows, including “Basic Black” and “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” on which I was a regular panelist until it was canceled in 2021. I thought Phillip brought a particularly erudite sensibility to the program.
More recently, I spoke with Martin this past summer for a story he was working on about the dangers posed by so-called pink-slime news outlets — that is, websites that appear to be legitimate sources of local news but that are actually part of a politically motivated network, and that are increasingly powered by AI.
I posted about the Caffè Nero incident on Facebook Sunday evening, and Martin added a comment that I quote here with his permission:
I’m not personally boycotting Caffe Nero or encouraging anyone else to. It’s not my favorite coffee but that’s not the point. The only thing I was trying to accomplish is for the cafe to be held accountable and aware of potentially discriminatory practices and policies. Distributing a video of someone who is identified as a miscreant without some type of training about racial and other common forms of misidentification is a recipe for disaster. And I also thought it important to emphasize that no one should be fired over this.
According to the Globe, a Caffè Nero spokesperson said by email that a person closely resembling Martin had recently been “abusive to the staff” and had relieved himself inside. “While it is not acceptable to confuse any customer with another, the prior incident was traumatic for the barista involved and it triggered her response,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying. “Everyone at Caffè Nero is deeply sorry for the behaviour towards Mr. Martin, which should not have happened, even though it was a genuine error driven by a recent prior experience.”
Martin has reportedly filed complaints with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and the Cambridge Human Rights Commission.
In 2021, The Boston Globe Magazine published a personal essay (sub. req.) by Phillip in which he recalled the culture shock of coming to Boston in the 1970s to fight racism. He was so bruised and battered by the experience that he returned home to Detroit — only to come back a year later and stay. He wrote:
Boston was a 1970s version of 1960s Birmingham, Alabama, in my view, with white grievance over desegregation and voting rights updated as white protests over school desegregation through court-ordered busing. That history was precisely why I enlisted, somewhat naively, to go to Boston in the summer of 1975: to fight against racism.
We like to tell ourselves that Boston has come a long way since then, and perhaps it has. But Phillip’s encounter at Caffè Nero shows that we still have a long way to go.
