(nnpa/an) Grace Salvant, a 19-year-old public relations student at Howard University, needed a job. Trying to help her parents pay her college tuition, she went to reapply for her old server’s job at a Ruby Tuesday restaurant in the heart of Washington, D.C., where she worked just last year. But Salvant was shocked by what she was told upon reapplying for her old job at the restaurant in China Town in mid-January. She said she was told by a Black manager that Ruby Tuesday’s corporate policy would require her to remove her braided hair style in order to be rehired. She said she was told it was an ''image'' thing. “There’s no reason why they should have such a policy like that that discriminates against people who look like me,” says Salvant. “We have been braiding our hair for centuries. And it just seems as if that was directed toward us as a race, as my gender…I feel like a larger majority of my race and my gender are being excluded because of the way that we choose to represent our culture.” A dancer and a dance coach, Salvant says she wears braids 90 percent of the time because of the convenience and that she has never chemically treated her hair. “It just doesn’t make sense to me. It hurts me. It hurts me,” she says. The college sophomore took action. She called the Ruby Tuesday Corporate headquarters in Maryville, Tenn., and complained, only to hear a corporate employee defend the policy. Then she collected approximately 500 names of Howard students, faculty and staff in protest of what she had been told by the restaurant management was an anti-braids policy at Ruby Tuesday, which has more than 925 restaurants across the nation. And she sought media attention. A spokesman for the Ruby Tuesday corporate headquarters in Maryville, Tenn., initially confirmed the anti-braids policy in a tape recorded interview with NNPA on Thursday, Feb. 21. “It does say that our servers can’t wear multiple braids. That’s true of any gender or any race,” said Ruby Tuesday spokesman Richard Johnson. “Our policy for our dress code says that multiple braids are not acceptable as part of the dress code. It’s actually been in place for some time. I can’t give you the exact date that it started, but it’s not a brand new policy.”