The Editorial Board of The New York Times has been quite explicit in advocating an end to any statues or fort names that honor the "traitors" that fought for the Confederacy. So if we're going to cancel that, what about The New York Times? At The National Pulse, Raheem Kassam and Nick Regan wrote an eye-opening article on the family that's owned the Times for more than 100 years.
New York Times Owners Descended From Slave-Holding Family, Published Pro-Lynching Articles Claiming ‘Republican Party Committed Great Public Crime’ When Giving Blacks The Right To Vote
They noted Michael Goodwin at the New York Post reported the Times published an editorial in 1900 saying the Democratic Party “may justly insist that the evils of negro suffrage were wantonly inflicted on them.”
Goodwin noted Adolph Ochs, who bought the Times in 1896, went further in his support for those Confederate traitors by making large contributions to memorials such as the Stone Mountain Memorial in Georgia that celebrates Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson.
The donation was particularly noteworthy as at a cost of $1000 (around $31,000 today), he could include his late mother’s name on the founders’ roll of the memorial, along with a letter that stated “Robert E. Lee was her idol.”
The Times published a profile of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in 1908 on the 100th anniversary of his birth, defining him as the “the great Southern leader.”
His mother, Bertha Levy Ochs, actively assisted the Confederacy throughout the civil war, a commitment shared with her uncle, John Mayer. “Prior to the Civil War, it is believed Bertha lived with Mayer in Natchez until 1853.” Records show that in 1860, Mayer reported that he owned five slaves.
The mother of the New York Times owner, Adolph Ochs – whose family still owns the paper – embraced the fight to retain slavery. She was a charter member of a Daughters of the Confederacy chapter and requested that a Confederate flag be draped across her coffin, which it was.
Kassam and Regan added to that sad spin:
“The Political Future of the South,” lamented the “negro vote,” referring to the “horrors of negro rule,” and blasted Republicans for promoting and passing legislation that went onto become the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which states that “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” cannot be used to stop someone voting.
“The Republican Party committed a great public crime when it gave the right of suffrage to the blacks,” the Times roared on page six, calling “barriers against negro suffrage” a consequence of “wiser counsel.”
According to the Civil War Times, Adolph Ochs pledged his newspapers would advocate for the South:
“I concede to no newspaper publisher in the South a more loyal, sincere, enthusiastic and industrious advocacy of the best interests, welfare and prosperity of the South than I have shown in the Chattanooga Times and The New York Times. I am confident that all to whom I am known will attest that the South, its interests and its welfare have been and are part of my religion and profession and hobby.”
So will the Times remove its bust to Adolph Ochs from its lobby?
