Former NAACP Leader Removed From AMC Theater Over Seating Issue

Rev. William J. Barber II said that an AMC theater in North Carolina "chose to call the police rather than accommodate my visible disability," during a press conference Friday.

A disabled civil rights leader was escorted out of an AMC theater in Greenville, North Carolina, by police over his disability accommodations earlier this week.

On Tuesday, Rev. William J. Barber II, 60, and his 90-year-old mother went to see ‘The Color Purple.’ Barber brought his own chair to the theater because he has a rare form of arthritis known as ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory disease that makes it hard for him to sit in or rise from low chairs. Barber said he placed his chair in a section for guests with disabilities, but theater employees deemed it a “fire hazard,” he said during a press conference Friday.

“Our plans were interrupted when the managers of the AMC theater here in Greenville chose to call the police rather than accommodate my visible disability,” he said.

According to NBC News, a Greenville police supervisor arrived at the theater after receiving a call about trespassing and a patron who was “arguing with employees, and they wished to have them removed from the business.”

During the press conference, Barber emphasized how using words like “arguing” and “trespassing” to describe a Black man “could have had bad results in the wrong hands.” While he believes it “should have never been a police escalation situation,” the former president of the North Carolina NAACP said that the police officer handled it well upon arrival.