Hank Klibanoff to Discuss 'The Race Beat' during 2006 Roy Reed Lecture

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of news for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and co-author of “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation,” will deliver the 2006 Roy Reed Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 5, in the Janelle Y. Hembree Alumni House at Razorback Road and Maple Street. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Klibanoff, a native of Florence, Ala., grew up watching the evolution and dissolution of race relations in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Washington University in St. Louis and his master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

He began his professional reporting career in 1972 in Biloxi-Gulfport, Miss., as a reporter for The Daily Herald, an afternoon paper that circulated along the Gulf Coast.

In 1978, Klibanoff took a year to backpack in Europe and the Middle East. He wrote occasional freelance travel stories for The New York Times and The Washington Post, then returned to the U.S. and joined The Boston Globe as a reporter. In 1982, he moved to The Philadelphia Inquirer as a reporter assigned to the city desk.

In 1984, he was named the newspaper's Midwest correspondent, based in Chicago and responsible for a 12-state region. He covered a wide range of stories, including the administration of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, but his focus for much of the next three years was the troubled farm economy and the rapid decline in the number of family-owned farms, businesses and rural towns.

He returned to Philadelphia in 1987 to serve as deputy national editor and then as deputy city editor. During the 1995-96 academic year, he was a fellow at the Freedom Forum’s Media Studies Center at Columbia University. In January 1997, he returned to The Philadelphia Inquirer as business editor. In June 2000, he was named Sunday editor, and in August 2001, he became deputy managing editor.

He joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as managing editor in October 2002, where he oversees news coverage by a staff of more than 500 journalists.

His presentation is part of a lecture series named for Roy Reed, a journalism professor emeritus in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Reed, formerly a national and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, taught journalism at the University of Arkansas from 1978 until 1995. When he retired, journalism faculty, alumni and friends created a lecture series in his honor.

Klibanoff and Gene Roberts, former editor of the Inquirer and former managing editor of The New York Times, together wrote “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation,” due to be published by Alfred A. Knopf in fall 2006. The authors show how an intrepid band of courageous editors, correspondents and photographers from print and television reported - and, in doing so, influenced - one of the most extraordinary American news stories of the 20th century: the civil rights struggle in the South.

The black press came first, digging out stories the white press ignored after World War II. A handful of white editors took brave, progressive stands with little impact until a wave of Southern-born reporters working for Northern newspapers and for a few wire service bureaus began exposing the inhumanity of state-sanctioned racism that took hold even before the landmark Brown v. Board ruling in 1954.

“The Race Beat” also shows how white segregationist editors and reporters worked furtively together and with white separatist organizations to resist the tide of desegregation and battle their colleagues in the Northern press.

Based on first-hand interviews, private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, memos in archives and previously unpublished articles, Roberts and Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines of the news coverage. In the book, they follow journalists who race across the South, covering rural lynchings and Brown vs. Board, the Emmett Till trial and interposition, and conditions in Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, Little Rock, Richmond, Greensboro, Albany, Ole Miss, Birmingham, Jackson, Atlanta, Neshoba County, Selma, Memphis and scores of towns in between.

Roberts and Klibanoff reveal how the editors, reporters and photographers with the front-row view of the struggle - whether aboard a Freedom Ride bus or on the ground, beaten by a mob - were themselves “shocked and shaken” by the cruelty they saw.