An Alabama newspaper editor called for mass lynchings and for the KKK to return and 'clean out DC'

• The editor of a local Alabama newspaper called for the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, so that they could lynch Washington, DC, lawmakers en masse.
• Goodloe Sutton wrote an editorial last week urging the KKK to "night ride again," while accusing politicians of conspiring to raise taxes.
• When confronted about the editorial by a Montgomery Advertiser reporter, Sutton said he wanted the Klan to "go up there and clean out D.C." and "get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them."
• Student journalists at Auburn University highlighted Sutton's comments, and unearthed a trove of other racist, sexist, and homophobic editorials at the newspaper.

A small-town Alabama newspaper published an editorial last week calling for the "Ku Klux Klan to night ride again" and "raid" politicians' communities, after accusing lawmakers in both parties of plotting to raise taxes.

Goodloe Sutton, the editor and publisher of the Democrat-Reporter in Linden, Alabama, later confirmed to the Montgomery Advertiser that he was the one who wrote the editorial — and that he stood behind the sentiments.

"If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we'd all been better off," Goodloe Sutton told the Montgomery Advertiser.

When asked what "clean out" meant, Sutton responded that he meant lynchings.

"We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them," he told the newspaper.

Read more: An Alabama judge has overturned a law protecting Confederate monuments from being taken down

Sutton then denied that the KKK was a violent organization and compared it to civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), according to the Advertiser.

"A violent organization? Well, they didn't kill but a few people," he said. "The Klan wasn't violent until they needed to be."

He said he wasn't "calling for the lynchings of Americans."

"These are socialist-communists we're talking about," he said. "Do you know what socialism and communism is?"

'What rock did this guy crawl out from under?'

Already, Sutton's editorial and his comments to the Advertiser sparked a flurry of condemnation and calls to resign.

"OMG! What rock did this guy crawl out from under?" tweeted Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, a Democrat. "This editorial is absolutely disgusting & he should resign -NOW!"

Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama also demanded Sutton apologize and resign.

"For the millions of people of color who have been terrorized by white supremacy, this kind of “editorializing” about lynching is not a joke – it is a threat," she tweeted.

The Democrat-Reporter, which publishes only print editions of its weekly newspaper and has no official website, is a family-owned publication with a circulation of 3,000 as recently as 2015, according to AL.com.

Sutton and his late wife, Jean Sutton, achieved national acclaim and received several awards in the late 1990s after investigating corruption allegations at the Marengo County Sheriff's Department.

The journalism prompted the FBI to investigate Sheriff Roger Davis, who later pleaded guilty to extortion and was sentenced to 27 years in prison, according to a glowing 1998 New York Times profile of Sutton and the Democrat-Reporter.

The February 14 editorial first drew backlash when a pair of student journalists at Auburn University, Chip Brownlee and Mikayla Burns, tweeted out photos of it in print.

Brownlee, the editor-in-chief of The Auburn Plainsman, delved into the newspaper's archives and found a slew of racist, sexist, and homophobic editorials that frequently lauded slavery, advocated for public hangings, and derided Jews, people of color, women, and LGBT people.

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