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Letters to the Editor

Reader planned to participate in protest

I’d like to begin this letter by thanking Ty Flynn for his courage to step out and say we can make Elkins/Randolph County a better place to live for everyone, to Willa McWhorter and Michael Good for their messages to City Council, to David Parker for his letter to the editor so well stated, and to City Council for beginning the process of formulating a statement in response to what happened Sunday, June 14 at the City Park. Ty made the correct decision in postponing the BLM march because of inclement weather. It turned out conditions were fine, but such is life in the mountains. ...

Upset by photo of guns brought to rally

For The Inter-Mountain to feature gun-bearing anti-protesters on the front page is an insult to peaceful protesters. Where is the photo of the peaceful protesters? Images can be very powerful. Of course we have the right to bear arms in our country, but doesn’t it go a bit far to pose with a rifle in public as a deterrent? Is this even legal? Citizens bearing guns have no place in peaceful protests on either side of a political issue. Joan Crawford Bowden

Resident: Police brutality is common

Police brutality is not only a black offense, it occurs in our area against white poor people. I’ve seen people who were arrested without any marks on them, but somehow when they got to the jail they were beaten up. Yes, we have some good police, but we also have some punks, My son was arrested at my home and I told the deputies what was going on, that he needed help, and they told me that they would see that he got help. Instead, they put handcuffs on him and when they put him in the patrol car they smacked his head into the car roof. I guess the deputy man wanted to ...

Official: Labor unions support BLM

North Central WV Labor Council, AFL-CIO, represents over 5,000 working men and women who are union members living in seven counties in north central West Virginia. We, as a labor council, support our black sisters and brothers in this fight for racial equality and justice. Racial and economic inequality has plagued the black community for far too many centuries. With the ease of cell phone video, and the recording of horrid and tragic situations affecting people like Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin, the persistent ...

Delighted with an Unsung Hero article

This morning my wife, Nancy, pointed out a wonderful Inter-Mountain article on Facebook about a dear friend, Larry Ferguson. Larry is a wonderful person and certainly deserves to be recognized. I met Larry at Walter Reed General Hospital, Walter Reed Army Medical Center in mid 1962. We were both employed by the United States Army. We worked in the Registrar Division located in the main building. We became very good friends: I visited Larry’s home in Elkins and Larry visited my home in Stratford, Connecticut. We have attended the Mountain State Forest Festival a number ...

Elkins councilman discusses racism

In June of 1992 I was on a flight to JFK that had departed Dakar, Senegal the night before. It was morning in New York when we landed. Twenty-four hours earlier I had flown out of Spriggs-Payne Field outside of Monrovia, Liberia on the West Coast of Africa. The Liberian civil war was still a terrible everyday reality. As I was disembarking in New York I had a powerful urge to prostrate myself on the tarmac. It was like someone else’s newsreel footage running through my head. The United States was then and remains a great country. A decade prior to that homecoming I had lived in ...