Mayhill Convenience store in Mayhill, New Mexico, has sparked outrage for continuing to display racially inflammatory language on its store signs.
For more than a year, Mayhill Convenience has had signs up with phrases, such as “Bullets Not Ballots” and “Kill Obama” (with the word “care” minimized under it), according to the Huffington Post.
Members of the community add that the store has displayed signs with language like “Obama & Muslims not welcome here” for years.
The store had also reportedly directed racial slurs at NFL star Colin Kaepernick who kneeled instead of standing during the U.S. national anthem to protest the multiple cases of police violence against Blacks last year.
A former employee of the store told local station KOB that the owner of the shop occasionally urged passersby to stop and read the signs on display, with Marlon McWilliams, a former worker, adding, “If you go in there and you offend him, you can’t go in there no more. He turns lots of people away.”
Photo Credit: Twitter
Other racially inflammatory language displayed by the store sign includes “Obama Loves the U.S.A. Like O.J. Simpson Loved Nicole” and “Russia Has a Leader, Al Qaida Has a Leader. Where the Hell Is Ours?”
Another sign compares President Obama to toilet paper.
The store owner and his offensive signs have been widely condemned by users of various social media platforms.
On Saturday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim-rights advocacy group, issued a statement through its spokesman calling on the store owner to take down the offensive signs in the name of common decency:
While everyone has the First Amendment right to free speech – even offensive speech – we urge the store’s owner to remove the sign in the interest of common decency and of our nation’s unity at a time of increasing divisions.
Some suspect that the store owner had hoped to increase his popularity within White supremacist groups or the Alt Right Movement by promoting his business with racially charged language.
If that is the case, though, that plan hasn’t worked out well since the store is now up for sale (its listed phone number is reportedly no longer in service) and is probably battling insolvency.
There has been an explosion in racially inflammatory language directed at African Americans and other minority groups in the United States since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential elections last November.
