Hank Klibanoff's experiences lead him to Journalism

The last thing Pulitzer Prize winner Hank Klibanoff told my public affairs reporting class during his professional-in-residence visit to the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications was that everyone has their own reasons for getting into this business. Some of us want to be story-tellers. Others want to take on the role of watch dog for our fellow citizens. The motivations for becoming a reporter are many and varied, but after looking at Klibanoff’s past, it is not a mystery why he chose this business.
Klibanoff grew up in Florence, Alabama, a northern city he described as being enriched by cultural influences that leaked in from Huntsville, a city about 70 miles east of it. Klibanoff explained that Tennessee Valley Authority brought a lot of industry to the area due to its cheap electric power. In addition, German scientists resided in Huntsville to work on projects for NASA. The Germans brought culture to the area, Klibanoff said. They wanted a symphony, and they got one. Klibanoff’s mom started two theaters in their home town.
“This artistic environment brought about progressive influences on issues of race,” Klibanoff said.
Although Klibanoff heard progressive ideas from his parents, he recognized the restrictive and prejudiced views of his town.
“We were living in a fairly rigid atmosphere of Jim Crowe.”
So rigid, in fact, that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, allowing segregation in schools, did not affect Klibanoff’s school until 12 years later, during his junior year in high school.
Klibanoff credits this to the “massive resistance” the South was engaged in against integration.
While working as a paper boy in 1963, Klibanoff noticed the lack of coverage of the violence against black demonstrators in nearby Birmingham, according to an article in the Washington University of St. Louis magazine, Klibanoff’s alma mater.
In college, protests against the Vietnam War caught Klibanoff’s attention. He woke up and saw that people were deeply disturbed by what was going on, he said. He read the newspapers and began to work as a reporter for his hometown newspaper in Alabama. He attended the School of Journalism at Northwestern University, earning his master’s degree.
Klibanoff worked as a reporter for five years in Mississippi. He then decided to backpack throughout Europe and the Middle East for 11 months, sleeping on trains and in hospitals, Klibanoff recalled. He had never seen the world, and this was his opportunity.
Upon return to the United States, Klibanoff began to work at the Boston Globe as a reporter. Later, he went to the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he became a national correspondent over a 12-state region. He also was named deputy managing editor. In 2002, he joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a managing editor until the summer of 2007.
In 1994, Klibanoff was invited by fellow journalist, Gene Roberts, to co-write a book chronicling news coverage of the civil rights movement in the South from the 1930s to the 1960s. Their book, The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation earned Klibanoff the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2007.