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.
Is this a big problem in Utah specifically?
I remember the basketball player Donovan Mitchell seemed to take issue with this sort of stuff when he was in Utah.
Although Mormons can be assholes, there is very much a cultural part of Mormonism of being a nice person. Seriously, Mormons are the nicest people you will ever meet even if they support or do terribly evil things.