The editorial board of the Montgomery Advertiser issued a public apology for its disgraceful coverage of white violence against Black Americans in the past.
The board delivered the apology on Thursday, April 26, which was the same day as the official opening of the Legacy Museum. “We take responsibility for our proliferation of a false narrative regarding the treatment of African-Americans in those disgraceful days,” the newspaper wrote. “The Advertiser was careless in how it covered mob violence and the terror foisted upon African-Americans from Reconstruction through the 1950s. We dehumanized human beings. Too often we characterized lynching victims as guilty before proven so and often assumed they committed the crime.”
The newspaper was founded in 1829 and hired a Confederate veteran as editor. The Advertiser’s executive was “clearly complicity” and “wrote stories with loaded words.” The two main derogatory articles discussed lynching glorification and dehumanized victims of the lynchings.
“We were making assumptions about what was going on. That’s fundamentally what you’re not supposed to do as a journalist. You’re supposed to be non-biased,” Krift said in an interview according to the Associated Press.
“We are supposed to hold people accountable for their wrongs, and not with a wink and a nod… We propagated a world view rooted in racism and the sickening myth of racial superiority,” the paper wrote.