Texas bookstore owner shares letter from customer claiming mask requirements will lead to new 'Jim Crow'

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A bookstore owner in Texas shared a letter on social media from an anonymous customer who claimed that COVID-19 mask requirements like the business' will lead to a new form of "Jim Crow."

The anonymous customer, who identified herself as a librarian from Austin, wrote a letter to the owner of the Painted Porch bookstore in Bastrop, Texas expressing her disappointment of leaving the bookstore due to their mask requirement.

"I seek to support local businesses, especially bookstores, because they seem like a dying breed," the letter reads. "However, I can no longer tolerate the theater that is ‘the mask.’"

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The librarian wrote argued that COVID-19 is "being used as a political tool to divide and polarize people, family and communities."

"The general population of benevolent, kind hearted and caring people is being purposely manipulated in order to destabilize society, shutter local economies and small businesses such as your own, eliminate access to broad and sweeping ranges of legitimate information, and to upend life as we know it," she continued.

"I found your window book display ironic, because before long, if we allow this bizarre agenda to manifest into complete fruition, there will be a new form of ‘separate but equal’, a new form of segregation, a new version of ‘Jim Crow,’" she added.

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The librarian wrote that she had to write her letter anonymously because of the "hate and derision" as well as the "many accusations and ugly assumptions made about those who do not believe in the ‘mask,’ or the safety of the not FDA approved ‘vaccines.’"

"Please seek the truth, because both it and humanity are right in front of you, not behind a mask or government mandate; and we are all trembling in our boots and looking at each other sideways," she ended the letter. "Just like the powers at be desire."

In May, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order barring schools and state government entities from requiring mask mandates.

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Currently, businesses in the Lone Star State are not required by law to have a mask mandate, but business owners are not prohibited from imposing one of their own within the bounds of their business.

Painted Porch owner Ryan Holiday, told Fox News in a Wednesday email that the store has a mask policy "because we have two young children who cannot yet be vaccinated and because we would be devastated if anyone caught COVID-19 in our bookstore."

"We provide masks at the door for anyone who doesn't have one and have spent countless hours volunteering in Bastrop country's vaccine clinic.," Holiday continued. "We feel we owe it to ourselves and our employees and our fellow human beings to take this basic precaution."

Holiday said that a "number of great Texans" have visited the bookstore over the last year, "including Chris Bosh and Manu Ginobili, and that the pair "had no problem maskin gup for their fellow citizens."

"I'm surprised to hear this lady took such a minor request so harshly," Holiday said. "In any case, the positive response from neighbors and fans all over the world has been uniformly positive."

"Like everyone else, we look forward to the days when the pandemic is behind us," he added. "While it's here, and while Bastrop County is barely 40% vaccinated, we want to do our part to fight it and if that means losing a few customers, so be it."