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| Goodloe Sutton (Montgomery Advertiser photo by Alvin Benn) |
Goodloe Sutton has worked at the Democrat-Reporter in Linden since 1964 and inherited the paper from his father in the 1980s, Melissa Brown reports for the Montgomery Advertiser.
When the Advertiser interviewed Sutton about the editorial, he told them "If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we'd all been better off." When asked to clarify what he meant by "cleaning up D.C.," Sutton said "We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them."
Sutton told the Advertiser he was calling for the lynchings of socialist-communists, not Americans, and compared the Klan to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The Klan, he said, "wasn't violent until they needed to be" and "didn't kill but a few people." Sutton said he welcomed comments, calls or boycotts of the paper, Brown reports.
It's not Sutton's first time in the spotlight. "Sutton and the newspaper received national acclaim in the 1990s for their reporting on a corrupt local sheriff," Brown reports. But in 2015 he landed the paper in the public eye for a different reason, after running a headline titled "Selma black thugs murder Demopolite Saturday night."
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| Linden, Ala. in Marengo Co., pop. 2,123 (Wikipedia map) |
Felicia Mason, executive director of the Alabama Press Association, told the Advertiser that the APA doesn't agree with Sutton's stance, but noted that the "APA is not a policing agency. We simply have no authority over what our member newspapers publish."
The editorial first began getting attention on Monday after student journalists from Auburn University posted photos on Twitter. Alabama Democratic officials swiftly denounced the editorial.
"On Monday night, Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who prosecuted two members of the Klan for their role in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four young girls, called the editorial 'disgusting' and demanded Sutton’s immediate resignation,"Antonia Farzan reports for The Washington Post. "Echoing the call for Sutton’s resignation was Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.), who wrote, 'For the millions of people of color who have been terrorized by white supremacy, this kind of ‘editorializing’ about lynching is not a joke — it is a threat.'"
from The Rural Blog http://bit.ly/2ImqH1u Small-town Alabama newspaper publisher's editorial calls for KKK to 'night ride' against some Democrats - Entrepreneur Generations
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