After Alabama newspaper editor Goodloe Sutton published an editorial calling for the Klan to ‘ride again’, Dexter explains how she ended up taking over his role

Elecia Dexter figured she would just resign.

Black female editor takes over Alabama paper at center of KKK furore Read more

She had only been working at the Democrat-Reporter, a small town weekly in Linden, Alabama, for a couple of months when the editor, Goodloe Sutton, 79, made national headlines for publishing an editorial suggesting that the Ku Klux Klan – the nation’s most infamous white supremacist organization – ought to “ride again”.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Dexter, a black woman. “I was in shock. I couldn’t think of a single reason why a person would use that group to promote … anything!” Dexter said she hadn’t read her boss’s screed before it was published and made sure he knew how strongly she disagreed.

Images of the startling headline triggered a media firestorm, and one Sutton added fuel to in subsequent interviews. “If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out DC, we’d all been better off,” he told the Montgomery Advertiser.

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.”

As the widespread condemnation seemed destined to sink the paper, which had a small circulation of a few thousand and no online presence, Dexter said she planned to finish up the last of her tasks – she had been working in an administrative role – and would offer to leave. Instead, Sutton approached her to take over the paper that had been run by himself and before that, his father, for more than 50 years.

“I wasn’t prepared at all. He’s looking at me, saying: ‘I want you to take over everything’ – be the publisher, editor, all of it.”

She accepted. On Wednesday she published her first edition with her own editorial titled: “I am Alabama too!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elecia Dexter’s editorial in her first issue as editor of the Democrat-Reporter. Photograph: Courtesy of Elecia Dexter

Dexter told the Guardian she found the editorial hard to square with what she knew of Sutton, her boss of a few months, who she said had been nothing but warm and complimentary to her in her brief time as an employee.

“I wasn’t working in a hostile environment, I wasn’t working in a demeaning environment,” she told the Guardian. “I’m careful because I don’t want people to feel like I’m sticking up for him. I’m just saying, I can’t make him into something that he wasn’t.”

Still, after the controversy erupted, Dexter said she began to learn more about how the paper had run a number of equally racist editorials from Sutton in recent years, including the 2015 headline “Selma black thugs murder Demopolite Saturday night”, and an editorial referring to former president Barack Obama as “Leroy Obama” and saying the mayor of Baltimore “displayed her African heritage by not enforcing civilized law” when “the other blacks in town rioted”.

It wasn’t always this way. Sutton and his tiny newspaper drew national attention two decades ago for their reporting on corruption by a local sheriff, receiving a congressional citation and being discussed as a potential Pulitzer prize contender.

Dexter said she discovered, from talking to people in the community, that the turn may have been reflective of Sutton’s declining health. Sutton has had three strokes in recent years and, according to Dexter, routinely tells her that his “mind ain’t what it used to be”.

“The paper started off as a very community focused-on paper,” said Dexter. “They had pictures up when people got married, pictures of things going on in the town. Then a lot of people stopped putting those stories of stuff like that in the paper because of the things that were being said.”

Dexter, who has no news background but family roots in the town and region, said she hopes to revive the paper by getting back to those community-oriented roots. Sutton will remain the owner and, technically, Dexter’s boss, but has ceded editorial control to her. She said she will continue to rely on him as she learns the technical aspects of putting out a newspaper.