Elecia R Dexter takes reins of Democrat-Reporter from Goodloe Sutton, who called for return of Ku Klux Klan

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A small-town Alabama newspaper that drew condemnation for an editorial which called for the Ku Klux Klan to “ride again” has named an African American woman as its new editor and publisher.

Alabama lawmakers condemn publisher who wrote KKK 'needs to ride again' Read more

Elecia R Dexter took over the Democrat-Reporter, a weekly print-only paper in Linden, on Friday. She replaced Goodloe Sutton, 79, the longtime owner of the paper who wrote the editorial that prompted rebukes from elected officials and the public and made national and international headlines.

Sutton, who led the publication for 50 years, initially refused to apologise or back down. He told the Montgomery Advertiser he wrote the editorial, which called for a return of the Klan and railed against Democrats, who it said were “plotting to raise taxes in Alabama” and who it blamed for US entry into the first world war, the second world war, the Korean war, the Vietnam war and war in the Middle East.

“If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out DC,” he told the Advertiser, “we’d all been better off”.

Asked to elaborate, he alluded to lynchings, saying: “We’ll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them.”

In a subsequent interview, he was quoted as saying: “Lady, I don’t give a shit. I’m quitting.

“You can tell everybody you ran me out of the newspaper business.”

On Friday, listing previous offensive editorials published by Sutton’s paper, the Alabama Political Reporter quoted him as saying he was now “going to drink beer and sex young women. I am not going to do anything with it [the paper]. I’m going to be a deadbeat – an out-of-work deadbeat.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Goodloe Sutton has led the publication for the past 50 years. Photograph: Mickey Welsh/AP

The Klan began as a white supremacist group that terrorised black people in the US south in the mid- and late 19th century, following the civil war and the end of slavery and with the aim of quashing the black vote.

Initially suppressed by the federal government, then surpassed by Jim Crow laws, it rose again in the 20th century to participate in an epidemic of lynchings, extra-judicial murders of black Americans and attacks on other minority groups. In the 1960s, it opposed protests in the name of civil rights and legislation to enshrine such legal protections.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a not-for-profit which monitors extremist groups, the Klan remains active although it has been “greatly weakened by internal conflicts, court cases, a seemingly endless series of splits and government infiltration”. The SPLC estimates membership to be between 5,000 and 8,000.

“Good riddance Goodloe,” Alabama senator Doug Jones, a Democrat, tweeted in response to the news of Sutton’s exit. “His dangerous views do not represent Alabama or the small-town papers in Alabama that do great work every day.”

The Democrat-Reporter, which is nearly 150 years old and does not publish online, had a circulation of about 3,000 in 2015, according to the Montgomery Advertiser.

In its statement announcing its new editor and publisher, the paper said: “The Sutton family devoted this newspaper to integrity and excellence in journalism which has been led over the past 50 plus years by Goodloe Sutton and his wife Jean.”

Sutton and his wife won acclaim in the 1990s for a series of articles in the Democrat-Reporter that detailed corruption in their local sheriff’s department. Jean Sutton died in 2003 from cancer, according to her obituary.

The Democrat-Reporter said Dexter was a graduate of Eastern Illinois University, Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, in Chicago, and Argosy University, a national and online institution.

She has “strong roots and a rich history” in the area, the paper said, adding that she will continue the paper’s journalistic tradition while moving it in a new direction.

“Ms Dexter is coming in at a pivotal time for the newspaper,” it said, “and you may have full confidence in her ability to handle these challenging times.”