The dethroned king of pizza, John “Papa John” Schnatter never left the hot seat after his remarks towards the social injustice and police brutality protests within the NFL:
The NFL has hurt us… We are disappointed the NFL and its leadership did not resolve this…. Leadership starts at the top and this is an example of poor leadership.
As if pizza sales are more important than black lives…
Digressing, in a recent conference call aimed at cleaning up his political image, Schnatter said “Colonel Sanders called blacks niggers,” in what appears to have been an attempt to show that he was maybe less of a racist because he then admits in a radio interview that he did say it, and that he only was “talking the way the Colonel talked”, but it’s not a word that he uses.
Well the Colonel’s family is not happy with this blame deflecting at all. The Courier Journal spoke with a few of the late KFC founder’s family members about the matter. Trigg Adams, Sanders’ grandson, says Schnatter’s statement is “an absolute lie”.
He’s a weasel. Because he’s prejudiced, he’s trying to say somebody else was, too. [Sanders] had absolutely no prejudice against anybody.
The Journal goes on to report that Adams worked in his grandfather’s stores in Corbin in the 1950s, and said Sanders had black employees working in his kitchens, and he never saw or heard Sanders treat them poorly. Adams also goes into detail about the Colonel’s ethnic charitable contributions, and how he used the word “negro” in the past, until he found out it was offensive. He ends with:
There was no racism in him. To him, all people were equally children of God.
Cindy Wurster Sjorgen, Colonel Sanders’ great-grandaughter also said in a statement:
[Sanders] was known to throw around a few cuss words but never a racial slur. For Mr. Schnatter to use the colonel as a scapegoat for his own horrible, disgusting mouth and racist beliefs is inexcusable.
Papa John should have just taken the offer to work with Kanye to patch up the little image he had left, but as more days go by, “tarnished” is an understatement.