Bonus: A Conversation with Hank Klibanoff
Note: This transcript has been generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers. It may contain errors. Whenever possible, we strongly encourage you to listen to the Buried Truths audio.
| Announcer: | 04:04:56 | Welcome to a special extra episode of Buried Truths. For those of you who’ve had questions about our host, Hank Klibanoff, how he got interested in civil rights cold cases, why he wanted to tell this story, what led to the creation of this podcast, we thought we’d take a moment to fill you in. WABE in Atlanta produced the podcast, and one of their reporters, Ross Terrell, recently spoke with Hank. Here’s the conversation. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:05:20 | Hey Hank, thanks for joining us to sit down to talk about the backstory behind the Buried Truths podcast. How are you doing? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:05:25 | I’m doing great today, thank you. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:05:27 | So, to get started, tell me a little bit about your interests in these cold cases. What got you started in this podcast and wanting to tell these stories? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:05:34 | You know, it’s like anything. It’s sometimes hard to know when it all really began. In recent years, it began when journalists across the South began investigating a bunch of these stories. Now there’s one journalist in Jackson, Mississippi, Jerry Mitchell, he’s been doing this for 20, 25 years, and has had a hand in the reopening of the Medgar Evers … the killing of Medgar Evers, and the Birmingham Church bombing, and another fellow named Ernest Avants, convicted of killing Ben Chester White. There have been … and Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg. So, he’s done quite a few. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:06:11 | But as time has gone on, other journalists got interested in it and saw there were great opportunities to ultimately bring justice, or at least to bring closure to families. And so, several of these journalists went to the Center for Investigative Reporting, now Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting in California, and said, “Can you help get us some support?” And they were able to get some financial support, and they called me and asked me if I would help coordinate the various journalists across the South. At the time, I was managing editor of the AJC, and I really didn’t have the time. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:06:47 | But, when I left the AJC, almost exactly 10 years ago, I called them back up and said I would be interested, ’cause I just think these are compelling stories. So, I worked with journalists over in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama … no one was looking at Georgia. I decided that I would do that myself in some way, form, or fashion. That way, form, or fashion became sort of concentrated in a course that I teach at Emory University. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:07:21 | Which is titled … |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:07:23 | The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project. And so in 2011 I had applied to Emory for a endowed chair position, and was quite fortunate to get that position. One of my pitches was that if I ‘d come to Emory, I’d like start teaching history in a different way. And it’s through these … teaching history through these unpunished, unresolved racially motivated murders that took place in Georgia history. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:07:55 | So you talk about your teaching background and your students help out with this podcast, how does your teaching background play into telling these stories, when you mix that with journalism? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:08:06 | Well, if anything, I have a journalism background more than teaching. I was a reporter and a editor for 35 years, 36 years, in Mississippi, at the Boston Globe, Philadelphia Enquirer, and here at the Atlanta Journal Constitution. So, I knew a lot more about journalism than I did about teaching. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:08:28 | I was fortunate to pair up at Emory with a professor, Brett Gadsden, who was in the African American studies department, and later also the history department, and he and I decided, let’s teach it as a course together. It was a magical combination in many ways, ’cause he brought to it all the knowledge and skill of a classically trained historian…his bachelor’s and his masters, and his PhD in history … and I, at the same time, had written a book of history, and I had learned a lot of the history, but I would never have called myself a historian. I was a journalist. So, I brought to the class some journalistic writing techniques and journalistic reporting techniques that meant developing resources that perhaps a classic historian wouldn’t always know. There were plenty of things he brought to the classroom that I didn’t know. And it was a real nice duet that we had going there for several years. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:09:37 | What role did your students play in this? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:09:40 | Well, it evolved. The first class we had was only five students, let me just say that. And the second class we taught was only six, but over time it caught on, and the next thing, we had 11 students, and 14. And now we … we cap it at 16, 15 or 16. We’ve had that for years now. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:10:01 | The students come in knowing very little. They may have broad brush knowledge of civil rights, or of African American history, or Southern history, but this is all new knowledge to most of them. Our textbook, almost inevitably
… and I mean, case after case, is records that I’ve obtained from the government, from the federal |
| government, through the Federal Freedom of Information Act. And so, I will hand them, the students, on opening day, 230 pages of redacted pages from the FBI case file on the James Brazier case, a man killed in 1958 for driving a brand new car. Or I hand them 200 pages, or 119 pages on this case, or that case. Sometimes it’s redacted, sometimes not. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:10:54 | And then there’s a method after that to how we bring the students up to speed. They have to read that. They have to read it thoroughly. They build a timeline of everything that happened, and it’s an evolving timeline. They’re adding to the timeline pretty much the first half of the semester, and developing character studies, and trying to figure out what do we know, and what don’t we know, and what do we want to know that we don’t know. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:11:18 | And that becomes … they sort of figure out the path from there. It’s the same thing I learned in a newsroom, and I maybe had forgotten a little bit. In the newsroom, I learned as a reporter to trust my own instincts, and was fortunate to have editors who went with me on that. As an editor, I learned to trust my reporters’ instincts. I think the reporters would say that. They might disagree. And I’ve learned, at Emory, in the classroom, how to trust the students’ instincts. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:11:50 | I want to go back to the title of this podcast, Buried Truths, specifically the word Truth, why do you call it that? Why do you call it Buried Truths? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:12:00 | Well, there is a truth that has eluded recognition, and reckoning. You know? You can go and look at the whole case of the one, the first season, Isaiah Nixon. You learn that Isaiah Nixon was shot and killed in September of 1948, on election day. And by, according to the sheriff, according to eye witnesses, according to other people, he was killed because he voted. He was active in the NAACP. It was the same day that the head of the NAACP was brutally beaten. And others were warned. He ultimately was killed late that day. According to the testimony, and the sheriff, and others, the two white men who showed up said, “We have two questions. Did you vote?” “Yes, I reckon I did.” “Who did you vote for?” And he told them.
And it wasn’t the candidate they wanted. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:12:54 | So, the truth never had its day. The truth never had its reckoning. And this is a way of bringing truth. As you’ll hear in the podcast there are others, including one very surprising person who absolutely agrees that justice was denied because the truth didn’t come out. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:13:16 | This is … for people who may not know it … a lot of investigative journalism, but in a podcast form. And when you talk about having a class, and having those students, sometimes younger minds can perceive stories a lot differently. How do you try to use that to your benefit, when looking at these civil rights cases, when you have people growing up now in the age of a number of Black Lives Matter, and a number of perceived civil rights violations?
How does that help you in telling these stories? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:13:47 | That’s a really good question. I started this course with Brett in 2011, which is before Trayvon Martin. And Brett Gadsden was terrific at this as a partner. If I refer to Brett in the past tense, it’s only ’cause he’s moved to Northwestern, and he’s teaching there. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:14:05 | Okay. So, he’s still with us? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:14:06 | He’s still with us, right. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:14:08 | Okay. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:14:08 | Right. This was before this sort of eruption of cases, of African Americans coming under attack for seemingly minimal or no misdeed … or, put it another way, in which excessive force was used in these cases. So, this was not about … this was not a response to any of that. This was just looking … this was a history course … not necessarily as a historian would look at it, but as a journalist would look at it … or the two of them in combination, which is a better way to put it. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:14:45 | I, actually, studiously avoided bringing up these cases as we went forward into the other semesters to see if the students would. And it would come up occasionally, toward the end of the semester, but at that point, no one had to connect the dots. I didn’t have to connect the dots for them. It’s there. You can not hear the story of A.C. Hall in Macon, killed in 1962, by two police officers, without immediately thinking, if you know this case, of the Chicago case of Laquan McDonald. That was the one where the police withheld the video for, I think it was over a year, and denied they shot him in the back. And then you look at the video, and they said he turned to the right, and they thought he had a gun while he was running. He turns toward them. They thought he had a gun, so they shot him. But the video discredits that claim. But, you can not think of
… learn about A.C. Hall without thinking of the Laquan McDonald story. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:15:43 | The one pattern that I’ve seen with students is that they come in, they are fascinated, first of all, to be sitting there with a textbook that is old FBI records. And it’s an insider |
| glimpse that they’re getting. And I think the students just had no idea how…the details of what went on…they have a broad brush understanding what racism was like, and sometimes it does get reduced to that iconic image of two water fountains with white and colored signs over them.
And in fact, when I make my presentations, I say, “You know, you gotta dig beneath that. That’s just a quick and easy symbol. That’s a lollipop for understanding. It’s inviting you to go deeper, and so that’s what we’re going to do.” |
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| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:16:32 | Most of these cases, the records just become mesmerizing to the students, and then they start finding records that I’ve never seen, you know? How’d you find? I mean one student went down, on one case, to the National Archives Atlanta, down in Morrow, and found 2,000 to 3,000 pages that we had not known existed of transcript from a civil trial. And it was unbelievable. It was Indiana Jones discovering whatever that thing was with all the gold, right? Because the Q and A of the transcripts, the question and answers, the examination, and cross-examination just revealed so much, not just about the case, but about the life and times of these people. I’m not … without going into detail in the story, I mean, these white cops were insanely jealous that there was a black man who could afford a brand new car, and they couldn’t. They kept harassing him, harassing him, and ultimately killed him. Sure enough, you find during the trial … during the testimony, reading the transcript, that indeed, he did make more money than they did. He was working five jobs. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:17:49 | Looking at that, I mean … you grew up in Alabama. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:17:51 | Mm-hmm (affirmative). |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:17:52 | I grew up here in Georgia. Are there truths happening now that you think are being buried, that 10 years, 20 years down the line, somebody will have to come back and look at more than just that iconic photo and actually dig deeper and find out what happened? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:18:07 | Boy, I tell you … I have to say, the verdicts that we’ve seen come down … from afar, I haven’t read all the testimony.
I’m not live streaming the cases. You know? But, from what I read … and I read … I get three newspapers a day, still, and I read a lot online, and I follow it … and almost each and every time, I am astonished at the acquittals. I am astonished when, in most cases, police officers are found not guilty of what they did. If you listen to the first season of Buried Truths, you see what that was about. You can see how, in the 1940s, there was just this presumption of black criminality. It was just part of everything … I, I was born something like six months after Isaiah Nixon was killed, so |
| I’m raised in that … I’m marinated in that culture, to believe that blacks were inferior, that … you know, I have childhood books to look at, which just make fun of black people. And even though my parents were saying, “Don’t believe that stuff,” okay? And they were very open-minded, and didn’t want me to ever disrespect anybody, but they were always a counterpoint to what was out there. And so, if you’re predisposed to believe in black criminality, and you’re faced as a juror in a case in which two white police officers claim that they did something in self-defense, there’s a tendency to believe it, especially when the attorneys played on their whiteness, and on their white heritage, and would say … I mean, you can look at the transcript of what the lawyers said, defending the two white men who killed Emmett Till, and they both said … they appealed to the juror’s Anglo-Saxon heritage. You know, “Don’t abandon your heritage. Your forefathers will spin in their graves if you can’t bring back a verdict of not guilty.” And they used those languages. They used those words, you know like “birthright,” and “heritage,” as code words. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:20:24 | What I don’t know about today is whether the lawyers are … I mean, the juries are never going to be all white today, anymore … but, I’m not sure what it is that they’re saying, that’s triggering these verdicts, these exculpatory
verdicts, for the white police officers. I believe it has a lot to do with the fear that they felt, and they didn’t know, and it was not … they weren’t intending to kill anybody. They were … whatever it was, in the heat of the moment, and defending themselves. I would believe it’s still a self- defense alibi. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:20:59 | And mentioning growing up and having those books, and your parents as a counterpoint, I mean, the obvious in telling these stories when you talk about civil rights cold cases is you are a white man. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:21:09 | Mm-hmm (affirmative). |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:21:10 | Did you find it difficult to discover information, or to get people to talk, or want to share stories with you, having your race being the first thing they see, and why isn’t a black man telling these stories? Did you ever feel some type of animosity? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:21:26 | I would say that I, in the cases that we’ve looked into, have never faced any animosity. I’ve almost always faced … from the African Americans now … I’ve almost always faced an openness, in the Isaiah Nixon case, the case … season one of Buried Truths that this episode is tied to.
The families, the descendants, of the African Americans who so boldly decided they were going to vote, and organize people to vote, and did so, and who paid a price |
| for it, they were totally open, totally available, and totally appreciative that they were going to learn something. I mean, it’s not as if back in 1948, the FBI came around to the home of Dover Carter, or Isaiah Nixon, or John Harrison and said, “Well, we’re going to tell you what we found here.” They didn’t. And that happens in case, after case, after case, that I’m familiar with across the South. There was never any attempt … the FBI … even conscious FBI agents didn’t feel a need to then circle back and tell the families of the victims what they found, or what they didn’t find, or the status of the case. So this is all new information for most of these families. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:22:47 | There is hostility from some whites, and I’ve seen it. Generally, it’s no longer expresses itself as hostility, but a real charming, gentlemanly response, “Well, let me see what I can find for you on that … ” and then never try. Call them, “Did you find anything?” “No, we’re still looking.” “Okay, did you find?” “No, we’re still looking … ” you know? Just doesn’t ever happen. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:23:08 | You hit on the 50% of history is stories, telling stories. But, the other half, I think, is history is our version of a time capsule, and how that’s captured, and talking about years, and archives, and how we look at things, why is it so important to tell these stories now? I mean, is the timing perfect because it’s 2018, or should these have been stories that were told 10 years ago? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:23:35 | Well, I think they should’ve been told 70 years ago. I think the story of Isaiah Nixon, and Dover Carter, and John Harris should’ve been told in 1948. I mean, the killing of Isaiah Nixon wasn’t even mentioned in the local newspaper in his hometown, because black people weren’t news. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:23:53 | When you talk about wanting to inspire students, ignite something in them, at the end of the podcast connecting the dots, having the voting rights, do you think this has been successful? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:24:05 | One thing we discover is we want to ignite the students, but it’s not about igniting their passions. Not at all. Although you can’t help it, you hear these stories and you can’t help do that. But, it’s about igniting their brains. The distinction is that when students are handing in their earliest papers, and they … I call it, there’s a sudden excess of … the sudden flurry of adverbial excess, you know? They just…using “outrageously” all the time, you know? And then, “when James Brazier outrageously was stopped for a fifth time in two weeks,” you know? Or, “when Jim A. Johnson outrageously pulled out his gun … there’s a lot of emotion that they pump into those first papers. And we just |
| sit there and scratch those words out and say, “That is not what we’re doing here.” | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:24:59 | And when students get off on their soap box, that is not what we’re doing. We are writing history here, and if you want to … history can be persuasive. History can be … is to clarify, and illuminate, and elucidate, and if you think the truth … you have an angle on the truth, which our podcast seems to have, then you can present it that way. But, you’ve got to support everything you say, and everything you write. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:25:28 | I like to see them come at it with passion, but I’m real clear to them, “I need you to do the brain work here.” And they do. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:25:37 | Now, this next question is going to sound like a therapist and “how does this make you feel,” but I want to look at then, the point of, when you’re seeing these civil rights cases that played out, and like you said, the murder that’s not even in the paper, and when you see the students who are putting this emotion into it, and it’s hard to look at those, and look at what’s happening now, knowing history repeats itself, in a lot of ways … when you see everything that’s happening now, and when you were growing up, and what happened then, how do you feel when you walk away from this podcast? When you go home, and you just reflect on all the files, all the things that were buried, what type of emotions do you experience? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:26:19 | Some of that comes through in the podcast, when I found myself … and under the incredible direction and tutelage of Dave Barasoain, the producer, and sometimes I would have to say, under his great restraint, just to let me riff. And some of that riff, you hear in the opening meditation, as I’m walking through the woods on the farmland that Isaiah Nixon’s family still owns. And I ask that question, “Who were we? Who were we as a people that we allowed this to happen?” I get emotional about these things. I get emotional about the cases, about the instances of what happened, about all that stuff. I get emotional when I think about the broad brush of history that kind of swept these people up, and no one was there to take the time to record their lives, and the meaning that they had. That’s why the remarkable turn of events in episode five in which students discover something the family had lost for 67 years, and that’s Isaiah Nixon’s gravesite, when that happened… it’s unbelievable how emotional that is, for everybody. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:27:42 | And yet, the most important discovery is not what you found, but what you learned. It’s not what you came upon, but what you walked away with. And I’m not just being glib with that. I mean, that’s … I’m overjoyed by that discovery. |
| It reconnected so many people. It’s what got the family of the men who killed him to want to talk with us. And it changed the lives of those students who did it. I’m hoping that we all walk away realizing, this was just an unspeakably horrible time in history, and we were, as people, and I’m talking about our forebearers, and there was unspeakably horrific actions by people who thought they were doing the right thing. For what? I don’t know.
White purity? And they were getting leadership at the top of the government, throughout … not necessarily the national government, but the state government … that this was okay. |
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| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:28:46 | I’m hoping the students will be ignited to keep looking at history, and see what the patterns are. You’ll see in this podcast, we reveal a lot of patterns. There’s a pattern to the way white people responded to black people. There’s a pattern to the way black people responded to white people, and yet, it was a different pattern, from what the white people said it was. The white people said, “Oh, the black people are responding violently to us,” and there was so little evidence of that. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:29:18 | I would say it’s the same today, this whole idea of voter ID, The reason that we are told we need voter ID, and all these other limitations, is because of pervasive voter fraud. And there’s just been no evidence of that. And look, I say this having led an entire newsroom, a 600 person newsroom, into an investigation of voter fraud in Philadelphia, that changed the outcome of an election, led to a federal judge overturning the election, and that fraud was perpetrated by Democrats. I mean, it was just an egregious example of the Democrats trying to steal elections, to take control of the state government in Harrisburg. I know it can happen. But, other than that one, I have not seen any others that are significant enough. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:30:11 | So, what I’m trying to say is, I hope students learn to be extremely inquisitive and demanding, and almost prosecutorial in their questions about what public figures say. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:30:26 | When you talk about Isaiah Nixon, Emmett Till, MLK, and even today with Trayvon Martin – all lives that, to us, we say were cut short, but that’s one thing that they have in common is they left a legacy of some sort. What do you want the legacy of this podcast to be? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:30:44 | I think, you know, different constituencies I sort of want to come away with different messages. I think for white people it’s an opportunity to look quite closely at who we were, and try to draw any parallels to today, and ask themselves is that what we want? The greatest parallel |
| that one might look at it is whether we follow blindly, whether we’re following blindly, and just buying into what someone says without questioning it, without, as I say, having a prosecutorial approach to it. I don’t mean a cynical approach, but to go at them skeptically. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:31:24 | So, that’s the universal message I think we can all come away from, because I think if people had asked those questions back in the 1940s, “Wait, are you saying all this about black people? And this, and this … ” I think if they had looked closely, they would realize they’re being had. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:31:41 | For the people who are listening to this podcast now, what do you want this to do for them? Is it to inspire change? To make people more aware? To educate? How should the response to this podcast look? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:31:52 | You know, I have no agenda. I didn’t come at this … I don’t come at this class that I teach with an agenda. It’s a way of awakening in young minds something that I wished had been more awakened in me, and that is a love for history, and an appreciation for history. And, an understanding that history can lead to incredible stories. These are incredible stories. If listeners listen to Buried Truths, and if they like the stories, all they’re hearing is history, you know? They’re not hearing anything more than history. Now, presentation matters. I know that. There’s some fabulous historians … extremely wonderful historians, who have trouble telling stories. Okay? There are also journalists who have trouble telling stories. Okay? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:32:48 | So, it’s something that can, no matter how much history you learned, and how much history you teach, it can fall flat. And I wanted to teach a class that was different, that didn’t fall flat. I wouldn’t know how to teach history the way a classic historian teaches it. The only way you can do it, is by involving people who can go off and learn it, and bring it back in. I think that’s a great way to learn, to let the students go find things. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:33:14 | And, they’re learning … you know, one of the first notes I got from a student, about the podcast, is … I don’t want to call him a kid, he’s not now. He graduated in I think 2011, or 2012, and he went to Detroit, and he’s in the mortgage business. He sent a note saying how much he loved the class. He says, “I have gone into the mortgage business, and it’s unbelievable what I learned in your class as far as research skills that have advanced my career.” How to come at a problem believing the answer is there. And in the cases of a history question, that the answers are lying in some file, in some attic, in some closet. And so, that was my … my goal was to ignite that … what ignites me, to |
| discover there’s an archive somewhere that has an answer that … you know. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:34:16 | So, I don’t have an agenda, a political agenda on this. At the same time, there are times when we do connect the dots, as you’re saying. We do that in this podcast, at the very end, we connect dots. This is a voting rights case. No one would’ve called it that way, by the way, in 1948. You wouldn’t hear the phrase “voting rights” but that’s exactly what it was. A man’s killed for voting. This is, what 17 years before the Voting Rights Act passed? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:34:47 | That was not my goal, but now that I see how history’s turning out, and I see that what, 20 states are making moves to suppress the vote even more, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that. I think it would be irresponsible if we didn’t mention that there are echos in history, and there are echos in the history of voter suppression that are worth mentioning. |
| Ross Terrell: | 04:35:12 | Well, Hank, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for coming in and sitting with us, and discussing some of your motivations, and your background in Buried Truths. We really appreciate it. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 04:35:21 | Thank you, Ross. I sure appreciate it, as well. |
| Announcer: | 04:35:23 | CREDITS: That was Buried Truths host Hank Klibanoff in conversation with WABE reporter, Ross Terrell. Remember, please go to surveynerds.com/buriedtruths to take our survey. Follow us on social media. We’re @BuriedTruthsPodcast, to see documents, photos, and videos related to Isaiah Nixon’s story. And if you haven’t already reviewed the show on Apple Podcasts, please take a moment to do so. It’ll help more people find us. Thanks for listening. Buried Truths is a production of WABE Atlanta. |
