Opinion articles provide independent perspectives on key community issues, separate from our newsroom reporting.

Letters to the Editor

Has an ugly era returned?

When the New York Knicks played the St. Louis Hawks in the mid-1950s, three African-American team members were not allowed to stay in the same St. Louis hotel as the white players. In that same period, black musicians touring in the South were routinely turned away from hotels, restaurants and barber shops.

Are we now entering a new era of discrimination in which restaurant owners, bakers and county clerks can decide which citizens they will serve and which will be turned away?

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family go to a restaurant to eat a meal, but are told to leave because of Sanders’ politics.

NFL players are denied First Amendment rights to protest racial injustice, Muslims are banned, refugee children are taken from their parents and white supremacists are called fine people.

Is there no end to hatred, bigotry and discrimination?

Shirley Baechtold

Richmond

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