Featured Speaker: Hank Klibanoff

Hank Klibanoff is 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. He is also the creator and host of Buried Truths, a narrative history podcast produced by WABE (NPR) in Atlanta, which has won Peabody, Robert F. Kennedy, Edward R. Murrow, and American Bar Association Silver Gavel awards, and which is drawn from the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project, which Klibanoff directs and teaches at Emory.

Klibanoff and his co-author, Gene Roberts, won the 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.

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.

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.

At Emory, Klibanoff was selected in 2020 to receive the Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. He has 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 grown daughters.