An Oklahoma county commissioner caught on tape reminiscing the good ol’ days when a sheriff could just up and lynch Black people has resigned.
McCurtain County Commissioner Mark Jennings has stepped down in the wake of the release of the recording at a March 6 county commission meeting, and after Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt called for his resignation and for the resignations of Sheriff Kevin Clardy and two other sheriff’s department employees.
The conversation, recorded by the publisher of the McCurtain Gazette-News, Bruce Willingham, caught the group – including Jennings and Kevin Clardy, the county sheriff – discussing their knowledge of hit men and the location of two big holes in the context of complaints about two local news reporters.
Jennings, in the recording, tells the group that he knew “where two deep holes were dug, if you ever need them,” to which Clardy responded, “I’ve got an excavator.”
Jennings later added that he knows “two or three hit men” in Louisiana, adding that “they’re very quiet guys.”
Later in the recording, Jennings recalled how a former sheriff “would take a damned Black guy and whoop their ass and throw them in the cell.”
“Yeah,” Clardy replied, according to the newspaper’s account of the recording. “It’s not like that no more.”
“I know,” Jennings said. “Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damned rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They’ve got more rights than we’ve got.”
Clardy’s response to the stunning revelations is to claim that the recording had been altered, and that it was made illegally, and could lead to felony charges against the Willingham, who had left a voice-activated recorder in a county commission meeting room on March 6 because he said he suspected the public body would continue to conduct county business after the meeting had ended in violation of the state’s Open Meeting Act.
The threat to prosecute Willingham elicited this response from Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
“It’s outrageous that officials caught on tape plotting to murder journalists and complaining about lynching being illegal are focused on prosecuting the person who recorded their despicable remarks,” Stern said. “All they should be doing right now is resigning in disgrace. It feels trivial to consider the legalities of such an absurd situation, but there seems to be no doubt that officials unlawfully ended their public meeting while fully intending to continue conducting public business. The suggestion that public officials have any privacy expectation at a meeting they illegally closed in the first place is laughable.”
Share
Chris Graham
