Pressure Mounts On Alabama Newspaper Publisher

Alabama elected officials and journalism organizations condemned as hateful on Tuesday a small town newspaper’s editorial calling for the Ku Klux Klan to “ride again,” as pressure mounted on the publisher to resign.

According to Reuters, the widespread rebuke of the editorial published last week by The Democrat-Reporter of Linden, a town in western Alabama with a population of about 2,000, came after a student journalist tweeted an image of the piece on Monday, calling attention to its language.

Goodloe Sutton

“Time for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again,” said the unsigned editorial, which mainly aimed its ire at Democrats, accusing them of “plotting to raise taxes in Alabama.”

The Ku Klux Klan was a white supremacist group that terrorized blacks in the U.S. South and later targeted other minority groups, following the Civil War and the emancipation of African-American slaves.

“The rhetoric displayed by the Democrat-Reporter is disturbing, disgusting, and entirely unacceptable,” U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, said in a statement on Tuesday. “I urge the newspaper to issue an apology and the publisher to resign from his duties.”

U.S. Representative Martha Roby, a Republican from Alabama, also on Tuesday urged the publisher to resign, calling the newspaper’s language “hateful” in a tweet.

Goodloe Sutton, 79, the publisher of the weekly newspaper, told the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper on Monday he had written the editorial.