The new editor, Elecia Dexter, is taking over The Democrat-Reporter, a weekly newspaper serving Linden in western Alabama, at a “pivotal time,” the newspaper said in a statement.
The newspaper’s longtime editor, Goodloe Sutton, stepped down this past week amid widespread criticism of an editorial he wrote railing against “Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats” and calling for the return of the most infamous white supremacist group in the nation’s history.
In an interview with The Montgomery Advertiser, he went even further, suggesting that the Klan “go up there and clean out D.C.”
The editorial made national news. The University of Southern Mississippi and Auburn University rescinded past honors given to Sutton, and the Alabama Press Association suspended the membership of The Democrat-Reporter and censured Sutton.
The editorial also stung the community in Linden, a city of roughly 2000 people — 59 per cent white and 41 per cent black — about 160 kilometres west of the capital, Montgomery.
On Saturday, Dexter said she had started working at the newspaper only a few weeks ago as a clerk in the front office, after moving to the nearby town of Sweet Water, Alabama. She has a background in human resources, she said.
After the editorial was published, she said, she and Sutton had a “very open and direct dialogue.” She was debating whether to stay in the job when he offered to turn the newspaper over to her, she said.
The Democrat-Reporter, which has served Linden since 1879, had been in Sutton’s family for decades. But the newspaper, which has a circulation of a few thousand, had dwindled to what amounted to a one-man show in recent years.
The Democratic-Reporter has served Linden in west Alabama since 1879. Source: Alvin Benn/Montgomery Advertiser
Mr Sutton, 80, a fixture of public life in Linden who inherited the newspaper from his father, was once widely hailed, along with his wife, for exposing corruption in the local sheriff’s department in the 1990s.
More recently, Mr Sutton has published editorials that were racially insensitive and “very hurtful,” said the mayor of Linden, Charles Moore, who is white.
