Instead, sobbing with humiliation and rage, she sat outside the Wal-Mart in Eagan. As police and onlookers lingered, Bryant made up her mind that nothing like this would happen again.
Store employees had accused the Ramsey County social worker of using a bad check to buy $92.69 worth of bottled water and household goods. They called police, who waited for her to leave the store and then stopped her for questioning.
Ultimately, Wal-Mart agreed her check was good and offered $1,000 for her trouble, blaming the incident on an over-alertness for fraud but admitting that employees hadn't followed policy.
Bryant says it was triggered by something else: She's black.
"It's what you feel. It's an internal gut feeling. Race is the last card I pull," she said. "But I know if I went in there and had been white, this never would have happened."
In fact, it's happened before, she said. A bakery store clerk in Mankato, Minn., seven years ago refused to put change directly into Bryant's hand. And, many times, she has been stung at the indignity of being trailed by salespeople in department stores as she shopped.
Wal-Mart's refusal to accept her check April 3 was the last straw.
"It was the worst experience of my life," she said. "I'm out there alone in the middle of the night, essentially being flogged in front of my community."
Bryant, 40, spurned the company's offer and filed complaints with both the Minnesota Department of Human Rights and the St. Paul branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Wal-Mart and the Eagan Police Department say that race played no role in the incident and that the company has comprehensive anti-discrimination policies in effect.
"We have apologized. We are actually trying to continue to make contact with her and make (this situation) right," corporate spokeswoman Sarah Clark said. "We do not feel that this has been handled properly."
The company remains in conversation with Bryant over resolving the dispute. A corporate spokeswoman with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in Bentonville, Ark., said it investigated the circumstances once but is looking into it again.
The company's Office of Diversity director called Bryant; so did other representatives and a claims investigator. All apologized. An Eagan store employee has since been "severely" disciplined, Clark said.
Bryant is pushing the retailer for a larger monetary settlement and wants the company to retrain employees on diversity. She is holding out the possibility of filing a lawsuit or a nationwide appeal to NAACP offices.
"We want Wal-Mart to handle this, to take care of this. They have assured us that they are taking this matter seriously," NAACP-St. Paul branch president Nathaniel Khaliq said. "We are encouraging both parties to get together to try to resolve the issue.
"If that doesn't happen, we will notify our regional and national office. They then will notify branches throughout the country to see if there have been other similar complaints against Wal-Mart dealing with discriminatory complaints and policies," he said.
A LONG NIGHT
Bryant had gone to Wal-Mart to buy an ottoman and bathroom accessories for her townhouse in Eagan, the first home she has ever purchased.
She was excited about her move to the suburb, one of many St. Paul-area locales she has lived in since she moved from the Detroit area to Minnesota in 1996. She attended graduate school at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and has worked in St. Paul for five years as a social worker for developmentally disabled children.
In Mankato, she spoke out in the Free Press newspaper about the racism and isolation she felt living in such a predominantly white community and started a diversity consulting firm, Creating a Better World.
Mondays are her days off, so she made an evening out of picking out new furnishings that Sunday. She went first to Target, but couldn't find quite what she was looking for, so she headed to Wal-Mart.
She brought her checks — preprinted starter checks that her bank, Affinity Plus Federal Credit Union, gave her after it misprinted her last batch of checks. Those checks were missing the customary security lock symbol on the front and a watermark on the back.
Bryant hadn't had any trouble with them before. In fact, she wrote a check for $196.97 at the Wal-Mart in Inver Grove Heights two weeks earlier. The cashier didn't even ask for her driver's license for verification.
On April 3, although Bryant's check was approved at the register by the SCAN service — which verifies the checking account — the cashier called over other employees and asked to see her driver's license, she said. The employees — two cashiers and the store's assistant manager — then told her they couldn't authorize her check, and left her waiting in the store for about 30 minutes while they took her check and went into a back office.
She said no one asked her to use a different form of payment or told her they did not believe that her checks were real.
The assistant store manager finally told her that though he couldn't get authorization for her purchase, he would take her check as payment, Bryant said.
"I was set up," she said of what happened to her after she left the store. Three Eagan police officers were waiting in the parking lot to arrest her on suspicion of theft and using a counterfeit check.
"Allowing someone to leave the store is the general operating procedure for theft and shoplifting. If (employees) think there is fraud, they can call us immediately," police Lt. Jeff Johnson said.
The employees followed Bryant out to the parking lot, and a police audio recording of the incident reveals assistant manager Axel Rabell insisting that her checks were phony.
"(He) is watching all of this. He's accusing me of making those checks. As this is going on, people in the store and employees start to come out. Everyone knew what was going on except me," Bryant said.
After Bryant's criminal history check came up empty and she talked with the officers, they decided not to arrest her and let her go home. She returned the merchandise first.
"(Rabell) laughed at me when I asked for a receipt. He said I didn't need one because he knew it wasn't a real account," she said. Rabell did not return phone calls seeking comment.
'DISPARATE TREATMENT'
Racial profiling is "rampant" but rarely reported, said Myron Orfield, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and the director of its Institute on Race and Poverty.
Orfield knows nothing about Bryant's situation and would not comment on it directly, but said people in white communities often aren't aware they are pr ofiling someone.
"Studies show stunning levels of disparate treatment. And it's a hard thing for people to come to grips with. A large part of racial prejudice is overt, but so much is ingrained and covert," he said.
A 2003 institute study of racial profiling among 65 law enforcement agencies found that black drivers were stopped about 214 percent more than should be statistically expected.
Little other concrete evidence of the phenomenon in the state exists, however.
"It's hard to quantify. Unfortunately, I hear about this much more frequently than I'd care to," said Lester Collins, executive director of the Council on Black Minnesotans.
Although Bryant said she believes she was singled out because of the color of her skin, the Eagan Police Department also is emphatic that race played no factor in the incident.
The only factor was what her checks looked like, police said.
"Wal-Mart called us. We'd respond to any call for service," Johnson said.
Employees were on the lookout for fraud because a customer with fake checks had duped Wal-Mart only the night before. Everyone's guard was up when Bryant came in with her printed starter check, he said.
But the mess-up was "absolutely not" race-related, Wal-Mart's Clark reiterated.
"It is clear that we did not follow our check-cashing policy as we should have. This was a mistake, rather than common practice," she said.
Wal-Mart first offered Bryant a $50 gift card, then increased the settlement offer to $1,000.
Taking neither, Bryant said she wants Wal-Mart to reaffirm its commitment to diversity issues and make its policies on check cashing crystal clear.
She also is waiting to see what will happen with her state human rights complaint, which may take more than a year to resolve. Of nearly 1,200 cases the Department of Human Rights resolved last year, 47 claims were settled and the department found probable cause that discrimination occurred in 44 instances. The rest were largely dismissed or dropped.
"It's about the principle. You cannot do something like this in 2005 and get away with it," Bryant said.
Clark, however, said both anti-discrimination and check-cashing policies are in place and posted, and Bryant's Eagan incident was a mistake of procedure, not process.
The NAACP's Khaliq holds little stock in that response.
"This is one of most egregious cases of racial profiling and discrimination that we've seen in a while," Khaliq said. "There is no rhyme or reason to why they would put her through what they did after the company's own check system approved her check."
