On August 7 in Siler City, the new soul food restaurant A&I’s Chicken Shack posted on its Facebook page that it had received a threatening racist letter, barely three weeks after opening its doors.
In a story that has taken several twists and turns, from questions over the post’s authenticity to the deactivation of the restaurant’s social media accounts, some news outlets, in a hunt for fresh angles, have brought the owner’s minor—and irrelevant—criminal record into the narrative.
Signed “White Nationalists,” the letter demanded A&I’s leave town—“or we will help you [leave town]”—and also showed ardent support toward the president, stating, “We are doing all we can to Make America Great Again” and “When we re-elect our president it will be an all out war against [racial epithet] people like you.”
Owner Andre Chaney, an African American, initially received an outpouring of support from community members: Some offered encouragement via online comments, while others flooded into A&I’s for a meal, causing such a surge in business that the restaurant ran out of food on Saturday night and had to close until today to restock, Chaney told the INDY on Tuesday.
But, according to Chaney, with the support came accusations that the letter was a publicity stunt. He insists that it’s not a hoax.
“So many people think, ‘It’s not real, it’s made-up, they just want more business,’” Chaney says. “But that’s actually not what we want.”
The Chatham County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI are investigating the incident. Sheriff Mike Roberson told ABC11 that authorities will be “looking at everything that we can to solve this crime,” crediting the letter to larger scale racial issues that have “become more and more prominent.”
Chaney speaks favorably about the officers in Chatham County, but he says he has taken issue with some media outlets’ coverage.
“Somebody like the news media can give us a voice,” Chaney says. “But instead, they want to take that voice and smear it. They always want to paint everything in a bad light when something happens to someone of African-American descent.”
Chaney says that during one recent interview, a Spectrum News reporter asked him about his criminal record (the story that appears on the Spectrum News website does not include that line of questioning). By Tuesday, CBS reported that Chaney currently faces felony charges for failing to return a rental car. Chaney told the INDY that a year ago, he failed to return an Enterprise rental in Durham within the thirty-day allotment, but he says he extended the rental and eventually returned the car. (Enterprise claims otherwise). Chaney said that the Chatham County police investigation of the racist letter subsequently uncovered the warrant for Chaney’s arrest.
“Even the deputy said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this—usually something like that goes to court,’” Chaney says, referring to the warrant for his arrest that was issued over a rental car dispute in lieu of a court summons. Because of the warrant, however, the deputy officer took him in. Chaney says he spent about thirty minutes at the Chatham County Sheriff’s Department before he was released and allowed to returned to the restaurant.
Chaney describes A&I’s as a “small mom-and-pop restaurant.” Even before the letter incident, he says, they’ve had “the best customer support any business can get” and were already planning on hiring more servers to accommodate the growing number of patrons.
“When we posted the letter on Facebook, we were just trying to say to the person: We’re not going anywhere, we’re staying right here in Siler City, you’re not gonna run us off,” he said.
Chaney says he’s received calls from a handful of Trump supporters telling him that the letter is “making Trump look bad” and reassuring him that this isn’t what most Trump supporters are like. One man, Chaney says, called to profess that he and his family of Trump supporters had the right to come to A&I’s and eat the food, just like everybody else.
By Monday afternoon, Chaney said the restaurant’s Facebook and Instagram accounts were deactivated. It was unclear whether the accounts were deactivated by Facebook as a result of its algorithm detecting sensitive content, or whether this was a hack or something else.
“We have no idea what happened,” Chaney says. “Some people are gonna think that we took it down. I don’t want to say somebody hacked it, but that could be a possibility.”
He says he sent multiple messages to Facebook and Instagram without any response, and that he’s paid Facebook to advertise daily specials on the restaurant’s business pages. Everything is gone.
“Every time I try to go on Facebook, it tells me it’s disabled,” he says. “Every time I try to put in my password, it tells me no such account exists.”
Chaney’s only wish now is that everything would just return to normal.
“We don’t care what political parties you’re with,” Chaney says. “All people are welcome in our restaurant. It doesn’t matter if you’re white or black, Republican or Democrat.”
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