In 1991 protesters launched a series of boycotts against Cracker Barrel after company policy resulted in the firing of numerous LGBTQ+ employees. The firings and boycotts became national news and eventually grew into a larger debate about shareholder influence on company employment policies and the lack of legal protections for LGBTQ+ workers.
Firing of Employees
The first Cracker Barrel restaurant was founded in Tennessee in 1969 by Dan Evins, who aimed to capture his small-town, childhood memories in his family restaurant. Expanding rapidly, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc. owned over one hundred stores by 1991, mostly in the Southeast. In January of that year, Cracker Barrel headquarters issued a memorandum to all their stores about a new corporate-wide policy: all employees who failed “to demonstrate normal heterosexual values” would be fired.
While the precise number of fired employees is unknown, as many as sixteen people came forward stating they were fired due to their sexual orientation. At least two Georgians were dismissed, including Cheryl Summerville, a cook at the Cracker Barrel in Douglasville.
News outlets across the country reported on the new policy and covered the stories of fired workers. Civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force quickly condemned the policy. At the time, however, there were no federal protections against employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and few states and cities had such laws. Legally, the dismissed Cracker Barrel employees had little recourse to seek compensation or justice.
Nevertheless, the public backlash was swift, and by the end of February 1991, Cracker Barrel issued a statement saying the company had “re-visited” its thinking about the policy. Still, the company did not reinstate fired employees or offer severance pay, nor did it make a clear statement against the discrimination of LBGTQ+ workers. Days later Evins declared to The Tennessean that Cracker Barrel would hire gays and lesbians if they “[did] not perceive that it would disrupt [their] business,” particularly in rural communities.
Boycotts and Protests
Activists saw Cracker Barrel’s and Evins’s responses as insufficient and called for a nationwide boycott of the restaurant chain. The Atlanta chapter of Queer Nation, an LGBTQ+ rights group, planned protests at Cracker Barrel locations across north Georgia. Lynn Cothren, the chairman of Queer Nation Atlanta as well as an official at the King Center and longtime assistant to Coretta Scott King, was responsible for much of the organizing.
Meanwhile Cheryl Summerville and her partner had talked with several LGBTQ+ and civil rights organizations. Summerville, an out lesbian, had enjoyed working at Cracker Barrel for the previous three years. Her dismissal came as a shock, and the management at her store reluctantly fired her in accordance with the new policy. At her partner’s suggestion, Summerville attended a Queer Nation Atlanta meeting and quickly became the movement’s figurehead.
Throughout the rest of 1991 Queer Nation and other groups across the country held regular protests outside Cracker Barrel stores. They also held “sip-ins,” where they ordered a single cup of coffee and held table space for hours. The Lithonia Cracker Barrel was frequently the site of protests due to its proximity to Atlanta. In October over 300 protestors showed up at the opening of a Cracker Barrel outside Detroit, Michigan. Cothren, whose work with the King Center prepared him for leading peaceful protests, was publicly arrested several times, as was Summerville, who made appearances on shows such as Oprah, 20/20, and The Larry King Show. Activists also pointed to racist hiring and firing practices to show that Cracker Barrel’s discriminatory employment policies went beyond sexual orientation and that bigotry was endemic to the company.
Cracker Barrel Shareholders
Concerned about how negative publicity might affect Cracker Barrel’s stock price, the New York City comptroller, who managed the city’s pension fund, which owned about $3 million in Cracker Barrel shares, wrote directly to Dan Evins in March 1991. Evins responded that sales had not been affected, but city officials remained unsatisfied. The comptroller requested that the company institute a new policy prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. Evins did not respond.
Around the same time Carl Owens of Queer Nation Atlanta began spearheading what became known as the “Buy One” campaign. He called for gays and lesbians to buy single shares of Cracker Barrel stock to demonstrate the collective buying power LGBTQ+ shareholders could wield and to burden the company with the expense of mailing one cent quarterly dividends to shareholders. By July 1991 protestors were seen holding signs that read “I am a Stockholder.” Though the value of these shares was relatively small, the campaign succeeded in noticeably changing the makeup of Cracker Barrel stockholders.
In a 1991 shareholders meeting, these new shareholders were blocked from attendance, though Queer Nation continued to protest outside. The New York City comptroller’s office was allowed to attend, however, and requested that shareholders be allowed to vote on a resolution banning discrimination against gay and lesbian employees. Cracker Barrel leadership refused the request.
Over the next year, New York City and other municipal shareholders continued to press for a vote on the resolution. Cracker Barrel argued that allowing shareholders to vote on employment practices was intrusive to the business. Shareholders argued that they had a right to determine corporate policies that could negatively affect the value of the company’s stock. In November 1992 Cracker Barrel requested that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) determine whether the proposed resolution should be allowed at the next shareholder meeting. The SEC ruled in favor of Cracker Barrel, thereby denying shareholders a chance to vote on protections for gay and lesbian workers. For years major shareholders pressed to have their resolution recognized.
Protests effectively stopped with the dissolution of Queer Nation in 1994. Although Cracker Barrel maintained that the protests had not affected the company, activists believed they had exposed the lack of federal legal protections for gay and lesbian workers, as well as Cracker Barrel’s discriminatory policies.
Outcome
In 1998 the SEC finally allowed New York City to again offer the shareholder resolution prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ+ workers. Though the resolution was initially defeated, it passed four years later, in 2002, when 58% of shareholders voted to add sexual orientation to the company’s equal employment policy.
The Cracker Barrel shareholder proposals set a precedent for the use of shareholder power to change company hiring policy. They continue to be studied for their legal significance, and shareholder proposals are regularly used to create protections for workers at other companies. In 2020, in Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court ruled that sexual orientation was included in the prohibition of sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This offered federal employment protection to LGBTQ+ workers and made it unlawful to discriminate against workers based on sexual orientation.
