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An Alabama Mayor Allegedly Made A Racist Remark On Facebook After Losing To A Black Woman

By Aaron Homer
Published on: 03:40 PST, Aug 26, 2016

An Alabama mayor appears to have made a racist remark on Facebook after losing an election to an African-American, an accusation the mayor is denying, The Dothan Eagle is reporting.

In a Facebook post that his since been deleted, Patsy Capshaw Skipper, the mayor of Midland City, Alabama (population: 2,300), was asked about the outcome of the recent mayoral election. Her response can most charitably be described as “impolitic.”

“I lost. The n****r won.”

Only she didn’t use asterisks.

To be fair, Skipper claims it wasn’t her that used that word, but more on that in a few paragraphs.

Skipper had been the mayor of the small Alabama town, about 120 miles north of Tallahasse, FL, since February 2016, according to Alabama Today. She was voted into the job of interim mayor when her husband had to resign due to health reasons. She was running in the general election to keep the job, but instead lost, in a three-way race, to former assistant city clerk JoAnn Bennett Grimsley, who will become the town’s first African-American mayor.

By the way, the tweet posted above is not from the actual Donald Trump, but a parody account.

Speaking to a Dothan Eagle reporter, Skipper denied having anything to do with the racist tweet. She says that she’s recently undergone heart surgery and has been so caught up in her recovery that she hadn’t even been campaigning.

“My Facebook has been messed up for several weeks and I haven’t been using it. I think I’ve been hacked… [Facebook] has been the least of my worries.”

Raw Story writer David Ferguson dug a little deeper into Skipper’s Facebook history to see if there was any other evidence of racism. He didn’t find much to go on; only posts from 2015 are available publicly, and those are pretty mundane. One post showed an image of the White House with the caption “”I want a White House that honors God. Share if you agree!” Another quoted Ronald Reagan: “We are never defeated unless we give up on God. Share if you agree!”

This is not the first time a Southern lawmaker has faced accusations of racism.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, in 2015, Desoto, Mississippi lawmaker Gene Alday caused a ruckus when he made a racist statement about the African Americans in the community.

“I come from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call ‘welfare crazy checks.’ They don’t work.”

Alday later apologized for his remarks, according to The Christian Science Monitor.

Similarly, in 2015, The Daily Kos reported on the story of Airway Heights, Washington mayor Patrick Rushing. The mayor of the suburban Spokane town posted a virulently racist remark about the Obamas, and refused to apologize for it.

“Gorilla face Michelle, can’t disagree with that. The woman is not attractive except to monkey man Barack. Check out them ears. LOL.”

Rushing tried play it off as back-and-forth banter between himself and his Facebook buddies, and resisted calls from his colleagues to step down.

And in February of this year, WDRB (Louisville) reported that Scott Ellis, mayor of Shepherdsville, Kentucky, allegedly used racial slurs to refer to African Americans.

“Every n****r born should be injected with Cycle Cell [sic] so that they could not reproduce.”

The lesson learned from Midland City mayor Patsy Skipper’s plight is this: politicians (and everyone else) would do well to remember that you shouldn’t post anything on social media that you wouldn’t post on a billboard on a busy highway. And if you’re concerned about your Facebook account being hacked, be sure to use a secure password.

[Image via Shutterstock/JaysonPhotography]

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