US paper slammed over call for KKK to ‘ride again’

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

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.

“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 terrorised blacks in the US 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,” US 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.”

US Representative Martha Roby, a Republican from Alabama, also 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 on Monday that he had written the editorial.

“If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we’d all be better off,” Sutton said. — Reuters