Nigerian Lady Sent Home From Work In US For Wearing Hijab (Photos)

Chicken Express employee says she was told to leave because of her hijab

A fast-food restaurant in Texas is apologizing after an employee was asked to leave because she was wearing a hijab. Stefanae Coleman, 22, told CBS News on Thursday that she felt "disrespected" when her manager and her co-workers at the Chicken Express restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas, asked her to take off the hijab.

"You shouldn't have to retrain people to respect people's religion because that's something people should already have knowledge of," she told CBS News

Coleman said she converted to Islam in August and was hired by Chicken Express in October. She said she told her co-workers she would start wearing a hijab soon. But when she started wearing it on Monday, she said, she was not welcomed by her co-workers.

She said her manager told her she could only wear "Chicken Express-branded" clothing. She said she took off her jacket and purse, but her manager called her into his office. In a video she posted on Twitter on Tuesday, a manager told her the hijab did not follow the company dress code. "Your job is your job," the manager told her in the widely-shared video.

Coleman told CBS News that he told her if she didn't take off her hijab, she would have to leave. But she said "I was saying, 'what you're doing is wrong, you're sending me home and and the reason is invalid.'"

Coleman said that a friend told her to upload video of the incident to Twitter. "This is discrimination at its finest! I will not tolerate this at all," Coleman wrote in a follow-up tweet.

In a statement to CBS News, Rhett Warren, an attorney for the Chicken Express franchise owner, said they had apologized to Coleman and the manager's comments were due to a "lack of training."

"The manager was using a strict interpretation of the company policy that does not allow derivations from the standard employee uniform, and he unfortunately did not take religious liberty into consideration," Warren said.