A man who was in the middle of asking his girlfriend to be his wife was stopped by security personnel at the Angry Orchards cider brewery in New York on Sunday—and the couple said the interruption was because they are black. Cathy-Marie Hamlet and her fiancé, Clyde Jackson, say they drove with friends from New York City to the Angry Orchard farm in the upstate village of Walden. Hamlet told NBC News they were sitting at a table outside a gift shop when a security guard accused Jackson of stealing a T-shirt and asked him to empty his pockets. “My boyfriend then emptied all of his pockets, while still trying to keep the ring box hidden from my sight,” Hamlet said. “She then walked away, and my boyfriend and I sat down at the table and he began his proposal speech.” But the speech was interrupted by the guard, who then wanted to search Hamlet’s purse, she said. They were approached for a third time—immediately after she accepted Jackson’s proposal—by security personnel demanding to search their friends’ bags. “I couldn’t help but wonder if she kept coming up to us because we’re black,” Hamlet said. “We were the only black people there, besides three of the friends who came along with us.” A spokesman for Boston Beer Co., which owns Angry Orchard, told NBC News it had reached out to the couple “to try to make things right and prevent something like this from happening again.”
