Oklahoma’s governor, at the urging of protesters, has called for multiple county officials to resign after they were recorded talking about hanging Black people and killing a journalist.
As NBC News reported on Monday:
The governor of Oklahoma has called for the resignations of the sheriff and other top officials in a rural county after they were recorded talking about “beating, killing and burying” a father/son team of local reporters — and lamenting that they could no longer hang Black people with a “damned rope.”
Gov. Kevin Stitt called for McCurtain County Sheriff Kevin Clardy, county Commissioner Mark Jennings, sheriff’s investigator Alicia Manning, and Jail Administrator Larry Hendrix to step down after the McCurtain County Gazette-News published an article over the weekend about what was captured on the recording.
As of Wednesday afternoon, only Jennings had resigned.
In one of the recordings, an official identified by The McCurtain County Gazette-News as Jennings bemoans the job of modern-day sheriffs and speaks fondly of a time when, he says, officials could mete out harm against Black people.
“If it was back in the day … when Alan Marshton would take a damn Black guy and whoop their ass and throw him in the cell? I’d run for f—— sheriff,” Jennings says, according to the Gazette-News.
A man identified by Gazette-News as Clardy, the sheriff, responds that “it’s not like that anymore.” Jennings then appears to take things a step further:
“I know. Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got.”
Evidently, local officials being recorded saying embarrassing or bigoted things is becoming a more common occurrence.
In another recording, Jennings and other officials can be heard discussing hit men and the potential repercussions of harming local journalist Chris Willingham, who previously reported on a man who died at a hospital after McCurtain County…
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