The Rev. Willie Wilson called me up a last month to complain about a column where I described his boycott of an Asian shopkeeper in his neighborhood. I wrote that the market owner had “supposedly disrespected” an African-American customer, who he had “suspected of stealing.”

Wilson wanted to set me straight. The longtime leader of Anacostia’s Union Temple Baptist Church said the shopkeeper had brandished a pistol at an elderly woman, for no good reason. He said she had suffered a heart attack and successfully sued the market owner.