42nd Street Bagel Incident Sparks Letters to Local Paper

Race is a touchy subject, more so in Claremont than in many places. Just ask Scripps College Dean of Students Debra Wood. Or former Claremont McKenna College visiting professor of psychology Kerri Dunn. And then there was the matter of Pomona College's decision to not have the school's Alma Mater sung at this year's commencement.

And then, too, Claremont has had some real incidents of people being the targets of violence because of their race.

So, we intentionally held off commenting immediately on the the recent incident at the 42nd Street Bagel restaurant on Yale Ave. in the Claremont Village until we had more information.

We first learned of it when a letter appeared in the Claremont Courier from a person who said that the were in shock after "witnessing a blatant racist attack" there on an elderly "woman of color" by a "large, older man wearing a 'David Duke for President' T-shirt. The letter writer felt that the restaurant's employees seemed to favor the man rather than the woman.

After that first letter, the elderly woman involved in the incident wrote in to the Courier asking for a public apology from the store's manager. In response, the management of the 42nd Street Bagel wrote in to apologize.

There were also a number of letters in support of the woman, as well as calls to have the matter referred to the city's Committee on Human Relations, and other calls to boycott the bagel place for its coddling of the alleged racist and its insensitivity to the elderly woman.

Now other letters have appeared in the Courier saying that there was more to the story than was originally reported. The letters included one from the co-founder of 42nd Street Bagel and another from the David Duke-shirt wearing man at the center of the controversy. There were also some from a witness or two who supported the man's account of the matter.

If we can dig up some video, we'll try an delve more deeply into this bagel business later. For now, a word to the wise: in matters of race, use some commonsense. Claremont is usually better off counting to ten and then looking into things. We don't need another witch-hunt in Claremont. The obvious racially-motivated crimes, such as the stabbing of the African-American man by four men on their way to a White Power rally in Los Angeles are a completely different category than the hyped up melodrama of these other incidents, and they deserve to be treated differently.