Black editor, hired to replace Alabama newspaper editor who called for KKK to night ride again, steps down - Entrepreneur Generations

After small-town Alabama newspaper editor Goodloe Sutton was widely criticized last month for an editorial calling for the Ku Klux Klan to "night ride again" against some politicians, he agreed to step down and hand over control to a black woman who had recently been hired as the paper's front office clerk. "The new editor and publisher, Elecia R. Dexter, said she wanted to make the newspaper, The Democrat-Reporter, more reflective of the community it serves in Linden, a small town in western Alabama that is about 59 percent white and 41 percent black," Sarah Mervosh reports for The New York Times. "But now, after only a few weeks, Ms. Dexter has stepped down."

Even after giving Dexter the reins, Sutton continued to try to assert control over the paper's content, which he still owned. He emailed an altered version of the Feb. 28 paper to local news outlets and advertisers which replaced an article about his retirement with one that defended the editorial and criticized The Montgomery Advertiser for its coverage, Mervosh reports. Sutton also interfered with the March 14 paper, which Dexter said obliged her to put out a press release saying that the issue didn't reflect her "views or thoughts."

Dexter's departure "complicates the future of the weekly newspaper, which was once hailed for its journalism, and reflects the thorny reality that healing from racially hurtful acts is rarely a once-and-done process," Mervosh reports.

"You can be mad at him, but we can’t keep making this about him . . . People like him will exist. That’s just the reality of life," Dexter told Mervosh. "The point is not to give those people all the energy."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2Tepb1B Black editor, hired to replace Alabama newspaper editor who called for KKK to night ride again, steps down - Entrepreneur Generations

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