Lynching would not have thrived as it did had the press not been willing to excuse its terrorism. “All right-thinking people deplore lynchings,” the paper wrote, but “as long as there are attempts at rape by black men, red men or yellow men on white women there will be lynchings. Founded in 1829 as the Planter’s Gazette, the newspaper was the “leading newspaper of the new Confederate states by 1861,” according to its history. Krift said that what reporters found in the archives showed how feelings of racial superiority had bled into the coverage. But the newspaper says that its coverage of the civil-rights movement, such a central part of Montgomery’s history, was similarly tone deaf and misguided.

Source: Washington Post April 27, 2018 06:11 UTC