The College Fix

Annual M. Stanton Evans Symposium on Money, Politics and the Media at Troy University hosts Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalism professor and leader of Civil Rights Cold Case Project in lecture that recounts press’ historic and ongoing role in civil rights movement 

Racially motivated murders and other abuses that took place against blacks during the civil rights era are akin to terrorism.

That from Professor Hank Klibanoff, a veteran journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who gave a speech recently at Troy University to mark Black History Month.

At the beginning of the presentation he showed an image of Osama Bin Laden and said Americans associate that with terrorism. He then produced an image of a KKK member and asked: Why not associate this group with terror?

“Everyone knows who this is, the face of terrorism, Osama Bin Laden,” he said. “And we know that. We instinctively feel that.”

Klibanoff, who is white, then went on to tell students true stories of blacks murdered by Klu Klux Klan members and others during the 1950s and 1960s, saying: “I am sharing this with you to show we had terrorism in our midst.”

Klibanoff, a journalism professor at Emory University, helps oversee the Civil Rights Cold Case Project that “uses multimedia reporting to investigate unsolved racial murders that took place during the modern civil rights era in the South.”

“Today in the American South, scores of civil rights murders remain unsolved, uninvestigated, unprosecuted, and untold,” the cold case website states. “Those two legacies of violence and silence still haunt the region and continue to damage race relations in the United States.”

“History is in our own reach,” Klibanoff told students.

Klibanoff recalled some success stories, including the story of James Ford Seale, a KKK member who abducted and beat to death two young black men in the 1960s. He escaped jail and was finally convicted for murder in the mid-2000s after journalists’ investigations brought to light new evidence.

Klibanoff co-wrote The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, which describes many cases of cruelty toward African Americans during Jim Crow South and about how press coverage of the civil rights movement helped jolt the American conscience, because he wanted to tell the story from a journalist’s perspective, he said.

Many historic cases had evidence to support foul play in the crimes, but the criminals were never convicted for a variety of reasons, he added.

“I hate not having conclusions,” he told students. “I hate that justice has not been served.”

He said researching cold cases gives meaning to the victims’ lives and closure for families.

“Trust your gut and verify,” Klibanoff said. “Get the resources and documentation. There are some things you cannot know or can ever prove, but there are some things you can.”

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