A tiny Alabama newspaper has made some staffing changes after its publisher went viral for writing that it was “Time for the Ku Klux Klan to ride again” in an editorial.
The Democrat-Reporter of Linden, Alabama, announced Friday that Elecia R. Dexter will take over as publisher and editor from Goodloe Sutton, who has run the 140-year-old paper since the 1960s.
Dexter, 46, told The Associated Press that Sutton will retain ownership of the newspaper, which has a circulation of about 3,000, "but I will handle everything else."
The AP also notes that Sutton, 79, has a history of writing racist nonsense for the weekly paper in the five-plus decades that it's been under his supervision. Dexter, who as a black woman is about as far from an Alabama good ol’ boy as one can get, told the AP that she hopes her leadership will remind the community that the Democrat-Reporter is “everybody’s paper.”
The rambling and factually-incorrect editorial, entitled “Klan needs to ride again,” was published on Valentine’s Day without a byline.
Time for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again.
Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats are plotting to raise taxes in Alabama.
They do not understand how to eliminate expenses when money is needed in other areas. This socialist-communist idealogy (sic) sounds good to the ignorant, the uneducated, and the simple-minded people.
People who do not understand the constitution (sic) do not like to be responsible.
Slaves, just freed after the civil war (sic), were not stupid. At times, they borrowed their former masters’ robes and horses and rode through the night to frighten some evil doer (sic). Sometimes they had to kill one of two of them, but so what. (sic)
This is the same so what used when Democrats got us into World War I and World War II. Then they got us fighting in Korea. Next when the industrial northeast wanted more money, they got us in the Vietnam war, and now into the Middle East war.
If you haven’t noticed, they did away with the draft so their sons would not have to go into battle.
Seems like the Klan would be welcome to raid the gated communities up there. They call them compounds now.
Truly, they are the ruling class.
Four days later, Sutton confirmed to the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser that the word vomit came from him, and stood by his KKK proposal, and then some.
"If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we'd all been better off," Sutton said.
Asked to elaborate what he meant by "cleaning up D.C.," Sutton suggested lynching.
"We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them," Sutton said.
When asked if he felt it was appropriate for the publisher of a newspaper to call for the lynching of Americans, Sutton doubled down on his position.
"... It's not calling for the lynchings of Americans. These are socialist-communists we're talking about. Do you know what socialism and communism is?" Sutton said.
He then equated the KKK with the NAACP, and insisted that the KKK was neither racist nor violent, since “they didn’t kill but a few people.”
The Advertiser reinforces the AP’s assertion that the paper has a history of publishing horrifically bigoted stuff.
A review of archived print editions reveal headlines such as "Homosexuals take black spotlight" and an editorial which stated "Slavery was a good lesson for Jews."
[...]
The paper also regularly republishes what appear to be old editorials from the 1930s and 1940s, which include multiple instances of racist slurs.
Justin Coleman, a 38-year-old who calls the Linden and Demopolis area home, said the Democrat-Reporter has "called for violence against minorities for years."
This time, however, was different. The University of Southern Mississippi and Auburn University both rescinded honors they’d previously bestowed upon Sutton for his investigative reporting in the 1990s. The Alabama Press Association censured Sutton and suspended the paper’s membership. Alabama elected officials from both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Doug Jones, demanded Sutton’s resignation.
Sutton remained unfazed, telling AL.com that “the Democrats have been terrible,” and “the KKK are the nicest.”
He does not regret writing the controversial editorial.
“It got me about $10 million in free publicity. I know I would do it all over again.”
[...]
As for the “liberals” offended by the editorial, Sutton had a message: “It’s not their country. It’s our country and if they don’t like it, they can go to hell.”
Wow.
As Chip Brownlee, who first surfaced the story on Twitter, wrote for the Alabama Political Reporter, the depth of racist content in the paper’s archives seem to be “more the racist ramblings of a single man rather than the thought-out opinion pieces that normally grace the columns of newspaper editorial pages.” But those ramblings are horrific.
Racism is not the only content that has made its way into the Democrat-Reporter over the years, Sutton has called for public hangings and bombing Muslims, written anti-Semitic tropes and advocated for a return to the times when women weren’t allowed to speak in church.
Thankfully, Sutton’s lost his platform.
New publisher Dexter is a local to Marengo County, where Linden, with a population of less than 2000, can be found near the Mississippi border. She only recently began working at the Democrat-Reporter and claims she had a solid “working relationship” with the paper’s bigoted owner, and that she’d critiqued his KKK editorial herself.
“I told him there were some different ways you could have made your point.”