A shopper at a Colorado antique shop said something clearly didn’t belong — a set of “White Only” and other discriminatory signs, according to reports.
Nicola Shanks, a stay-at-home mom with an African American daughter, spotted the signs at the Antique Corral in Cortez.
The signs bore messages such as “Public Swimming Pool — White Only” and “We Serve Colored Carry Out Only” printed in white capital letters on a black background, according to CNN.
“I think it was disbelief at first, that I was actually seeing these signs in a store,” Shanks told the network. “It’s something I would expect to see at the Jim Crow museum, not in a local antique store.”
She tried for months to reach the owner, Cheryl Dean, but to no avail, so she decided to stop by the store and confront Dean, she told local station KDVR.
“She told me to go back to England where I came from,” Shanks told the outlet.
But Dean told the station the signs are a piece of history and she’d been selling them for years without complaint.
“I’ve lived in a small town my whole life,” she said. “I don’t even know what the word [racist] means. There’s been black people in the store and we laugh about it. There’s people that collect that stuff. It has nothing to do with racism. It’s part of history, like, ‘Look how far we’ve come.’”
But Shanks said Dean’s argument doesn’t hold water.
“That’s the thing she says over and over: ‘It’s history. You’re trying to erase history,’” the angry customer said. “I shared with her that history belongs in a museum and that these things are made for profit and you’re profiling a very horrible time in this country’s history.”
“The thing that was even more upsetting to me is the fact that they’re not antiques, they’re replicas,” she told CNN.
Meanwhile, Dean told KDVR she’s been bullied and threatened online as stories about the signs started circulating.
“They’re horrible,” the store owner told the station. “They’ve threatened to burn down my store. They’ve threatened to kill me.”
Still, all of the signs recently sold out because of the publicity, Dean said. She said she won’t purchase any more — but doesn’t regret getting them in the first place.
“I don’t have any regrets at all,” Dean said. “Not at all. I never thought anything about it. It’s just crazy how so few people can cause one person so much misery.”