381 Days

As I said last week, the Columbus Public Library, 3000 Macon Road, has a Smithsonian Institution exhibit called "381 Days," which tells the story of the Montgomery bus boycott.

At 7 p.m. Thursday, the Muscogee County Friends of Libraries, is bringing Hank Klibanoff to speak about his experiences as a newspaper reporter during the Civil Rights movement.

I got this bio on Klibanoff from Linda Hyles of the library.

He co-wrote "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation," which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for history.

"The Race Beat," written by Klibanoff and Gene Roberts, former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of The New York Times, explores news coverage of the civil rights movement in the South. The book looks at the impact and involvement of the black press, the Northern press, the Southern liberal and segregationist press, television and photojournalism from the 1930s through the late 1960s.

Klibanoff was born in Florence, Ala., and grew up in the South. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, and his master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

He began his reporting career in Mississippi in 1972 and, for six years, was the statehouse bureau in Jackson for the Sun-Herald on the Gulf Coast and the Delta Democrat Times in Greenville.

He also worked at the Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Inquirer crushed the vitality of rural towns in the Midwest.

Klibanoff had many jobs in his 35-year newspaper career, including sports, national, metro and business. He was also an editor.

For six years, Klibanoff taught a course in journalism issues for the urban studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1995-1996, he was a fellow at the Freedom Forum’s Media Studies Center at Columbia University.

He joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a managing editor in October 2002 and served in that capacity until this summer when he resigned. He serves as a director on several boards, including the Associated Press Managing Editors Association (and was winner of its 2007 meritorious service award), the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism; and VOX Teen Communications, an Atlanta non-profit youth development organization that, through a monthly newspaper and a Web site (www.voxrox.org), encourages and helps teens develop the skills and resources to express themselves on issues important to them.

Two newspaper projects in which he was deeply involved have been named finalists for Pulitzer Prizes: In 2006, when he was managing editor for news at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the newspaper was a finalist in the breaking news category for staff coverage of a downtown Atlanta shooting spree by a defendant who seized a deputy’s gun and killed a judge and three others; in 1995, when he was deputy metro editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, that newspaper was a finalist for the Public Service Award for a metro staff investigation into an extensive absentee ballot vote fraud that tipped the balance of power at the state Capitol; the newspaper’s disclosures led a federal judge to overturn the election.

Klibanoff has been awarded the Georgia Author of the Year in the history division in 2007, presented by the Georgia Writers Association; and the Clarence Cason Award in Nonfiction Writing this year, presented by The University of Alabama College of Communication and Information Sciences.

He was inducted this year into the Hall of Achievement at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, and was given the Distinguished Alumni Award at Washington University in St. Louis.

Klibanoff has lectured and written widely in the past several years on "The Race Beat," journalism and race relations.

Klibanoff and his wife Laurie have three daughters: Caroline, who is a freshman at Georgetown University; Eleanor, a junior in high school; and Corinne, who is in the eighth grade.

This sounds like something that everyone should go to. I'm going to try to be there.