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Published Saturday, February 26, 2011 in Local

Journalists' work solving cold cases from Civil Rights era

By Winston Skinner

The Newnan Times-Herald

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author says unsolved murders of Civil Rights activists in the 1960s are being re-examined and -- in many cases -- solved.

Hank Klibanoff talked about the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, which he oversees, at the Georgia Press Association Editorial Conference on Thursday in Atlanta. Speaking in the Floyd Room at the James H. "Sloppy" Floyd State Office Building, Klibanoff told newspaper management and journalists from across the state that journalists are taking the lead in solving the decades-old cases.

"Every single unsolved Civil Rights murder that has been opened or reopened and prosecuted or reprosecuted in the last 20 years has been because of a journalist," Klibanoff said.

He also said most of the initial work has been in Louisiana and Mississippi. "Georgia is ripe for this type of examination," Klibanoff said.

"There are many families across the South who don't know what happened to their father, their uncle, their brother, their aunt," Klibanoff observed.

Klibanoff, an Alabama native, was a journalist for more than 35 years -- working for the Philadelphia Inquirer and serving as managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He and Gene Roberts won the Pulitzer for their 2007 book, "The Race Beat: the Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation."

Klibanoff now lives in Atlanta and teaches journalism at Emory University.

The Civil Rights Cold Case Project has a website -- coldcases.org. Charlotte Atkins, editor of the Rome Tribune and chair of the GPA editorial-education committee, said the cold case project is bringing together resources from reporters, filmmakers and others "to fill in history's huge gaps."

She noted the work done by participants in the project can lead to both "racial reconciliation" and "to criminal prosecution."

Klibanoff said he is sometimes asked "why dig all this stuff up." The quest is part of the journalist's search for truth. Reporters are sifting through old documents and interviewing witnesses to events that happened decades ago in an effort to get at the truth about what happened to Civil Rights activists -- black, white, male, female -- almost a half century ago.

The goal of putting the evidence together is not so authorities "can drag an 85-year-old man out of the house in handcuffs," Klibanoff said, though that sometimes happens.

The Civil Rights Cold Case project is run on a shoestring budget and relies on the work of reporters and editors across the region -- reporters and editors who cannot neglect the day-to-day requirements of community newsgathering but who nonetheless find time and resources to look into the cold cases.

"We have no money. We have small grants here and there," Klibanoff said.

He noted that the work of diligent reporters -- often from small dailies or weeklies -- is bringing closure to families. "Sometimes it's the simplest reporting that gets the biggest results," Klibanoff observed. He recalled the family member of a killer who apologized in court and later got a hug from the brother of the victim.

Klibanoff talked about a Civil Rights related murder in Anniston, Ala., 39 years ago. A retired Alabama state trooper confessed to an Anniston reporter that he was the killer. "He confessed in court a few weeks ago and is prison," Klibanoff said.

He also talked about Stanley Nelson, a reporter with the weekly Concordia Sentinel in Louisiana. Nelson has extensively chronicled the murder of Frank Morris, a black merchant burned to death in his shoe shop in Ferriday, La., in 1964.

Klibanoff said Nelson has many responsibilities at the Sentinel but has continued to follow leads in the Morris story. "Every reporter's facing the realities of having to do many things," Klibanoff said.

Klibanoff said the cold case stories are not just stories for "liberal" newspapers. They are compelling stories that readers want to read. He said the Sentinel, which gets new readers and more Internet "hits" when there is coverage of a cold case story, is owned by a someone who is "so conservative he's challenging Glenn Beck's birthplace."

News reporting is "important and honorable" work, Klibanoff said.

"I think it's the noblest profession there is," he told the GPA group. "Let's not apologize for carrying out the sacred trust of our profession," he said.

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