Hank Klibanoff

• Host
• Buried Truths podcast
• https://www.wabe.org/shows/buried-truths/

Hank Klibanoff, a veteran journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in History in 2007 for a book he co-wrote about the news coverage of the civil rights struggle in the South, is the creator and host of Buried Truths, a narrative history podcast produced by WABE (NPR) in Atlanta.

The podcast https://apple.co/33XvDkL, which has won Peabody, Robert F. Kennedy, national Edward R. Murrow and American Bar Association Silver Gavel awards, is drawn from the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project (coldcases.emory.edu), which Klibanoff directs and teaches at Emory University in Atlanta.

A native of Florence, Alabama, Klibanoff joined Emory at the close of a 36-year career in newspapers in Mississippi and at The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he was managing editor for news. He is a professor of practice in the Creative Writing Program at Emory, where he teaches non-fiction.

The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project engages undergraduate students in examining Georgia history through research into unpunished racially motivated killings that occurred in the state during the modern civil rights era. By using primary evidence – including FBI records, NAACP files, personal archives, medical records, family photographs, old newspaper clippings, court transcripts and more – and by immersing themselves in the scholarship of historians, journalists and memoirists, students come to see and understand a history that is little known or long forgotten.

He also teaches a course, Fifty Shades of Grey: Journalism and Non-fiction Ethics to undergraduate students. The class focuses on the ethics of journalism and photojournalism, documentary filmmaking, memoirs and book-length work, and long-form narrative podcasts.

Klibanoff and his co-author, Gene Roberts, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in history for their book, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation, published by Knopf (2006), Vintage (2007) and Brilliance Audio (2007). The Race Beat explores news coverage of civil rights from the 1930s through the late 1960s, particularly the impact of the black press, the Northern press, the Southern liberal and segregationist press, television and photojournalism.

Buried Truths, his podcast, focused in Season 1 on Isaiah Nixon, a black farmer in Alston, Georgia, who was killed by two white men on Election Day in 1948 after he voted in defiance of threats. The second season was about A.C. Hall, a black 17-year old who was shot in the back and killed by two white police officers in Macon, Georgia, in 1962 after a white woman misidentified him. Season 3 went outside the modern civil rights era to examine the shooting death last February of Ahmaud Arbery of Brunswick, Georgia; he was jogging through a neighborhood when he was shot and killed as three white men in two trucks chased him.

Klibanoff serves on the John Chancellor Excellence in Journalism Award Committee at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the advisory board of the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowships and the content advisory committee of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta.

In Spring 2021, Klibanoff was nominated by President Joe Biden to the newly created Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. The five-member board will examine all records held by the federal government related to civil rights killings from 1940 to 1980 and determine which records can be released to the public and the level of redactions.

Klibanoff spent six years as a reporter in Mississippi, three years at The Boston Globe and 20 years at The Philadelphia Inquirer, three of which were as the Midwest correspondent based in Chicago. Between Mississippi and Boston, he took a year to backpack in Europe and the Middle East. He joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as managing editor for news in 2002 and left the paper in 2008, after which he joined Emory.

At Emory, Klibanoff was selected in 2020 to receive the Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. He’s been inducted into the Atlanta Press Club Hall of Fame. Klibanoff earned his bachelor’s degree in English at Washington University in St. Louis and his masters in journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Both universities have honored him as a distinguished alumnus.

Klibanoff and his wife, Laurie A. Leonard, who is a speech therapist, have three daughters: Caroline, Eleanor, and Corinne.