Sun-Times Picks a Fight
They told Slezak that the restaurant where their party of six went for breakfast was slow to seat them, slow to take their order, and slow to serve it–and the eggs arrived cold. Stopping at a mall, Brawner picked up a ski hat and asked what it cost. “You can’t afford it,” said the saleswoman. “We never thought it was about our color,” Ranger told Slezak. The twins are black.
Though Slezak tells me Wians didn’t ask these questions, it’s true that she didn’t contact either the store or the restaurant. It’s also true that once Wians got the names of these two places from Ranger, neither did he. All that really mattered to anybody was what went on at Lambeau Field.
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(I asked Slezak to contact Ranger for me for this article, but I didn’t hear from her.)
Naturally Slezak wouldn’t give Ranger’s unlisted phone number to Wians–not without her permission. “We brought the story to light. That’s what we owed the police,” says Bill Adee, who’s Slezak’s editor. He assigned her to the story, and he told her it wasn’t her duty to help the police check it out.
“We’re treating this as though it did happen, even though we couldn’t substantiate it,” says John King, who’s president of the Northeast Wisconsin African American Association and one of the men who made the trip with Wians to the Lincolnwood mall.
