The Utah team was staying at the Coeur d’Alene Resort after it was selected to play in the NCAA Tournament hosted by Gonzaga University. As team members walked from the hotel to a downtown restaurant, they were followed by a driver in a truck who was shouting racial slurs at them.
When they left dinner to return to their hotel, the driver and others who were recruited to harass the team followed them back to the hotel, revving their trucks’ engines and harassing them further, according to a police report.
Cecil Kelly III, a longtime resident of Coeur d’Alene, was not shocked by what happened, but he is saddened.
Kelly remembers in the 1960s there were agreements between the business community that “you would not rent a room to a Black person.”
“And you would not feed a Black man,” he said.
Yes, this is shocking. Something happening “all the time” does not make it less shocking, it numbs the appropriate reactions of the audience.
The event is still shocking and horrifying