- [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club forums on Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(upbeat music) (suspenseful music) (gong ringing) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy, so cherished and so endangered now, thrive.

It's Friday, June 24th, and I'm Joy Roller.

I'm a proud member of the City Club and I'm delighted to introduce our speaker today, Hank Klibanoff.

He's an old friend of mine, a Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award-winning journalist, a professor of Emory University, and recently appointed by President Biden to the US Civil Rights Cold Cases Review Board, work he's going to speak with us about today.

There's an oft-quoted line about history from a William Faulkner novel.

"The past," he wrote, "is never dead.

It's not even past."

When it comes to so-called cold cases, this is very much the case.

Klibanoff comes to his work on the Civil Rights Cold Cases Review Board after years directing the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory and hosting the "Buried Truths" podcast.

Produced at WABE, the podcast provides a platform to delve into unresolved and unpunished racially motivated killings.

This is work Hank has been doing for decades.

In 2007, he and co-author Gene Roberts won a Pulitzer Prize in history for "The Race Beat: the Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation."

I met Hank in 1979, shortly after he arrived there to work as a reporter at The Boston Globe.

Neither of us remember how or where we met, but I do recall that he introduced me to the concept of the beach house, which was great fun, and that he stood out as an intensely bright, committed, and passionate about truth and justice among my group of political reporters, campaign workers, and law students.

In addition to his work at Emory, Hank has devoted himself to that passion by working in journalism as a reporter and editor for more than 35 years in Mississippi for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Atlantic, and excuse me, the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

We lost touch, as friends do over the decades.

But one day I was searching for a podcast and I came across the intriguing title "Buried Truths."

As soon as I heard the mellifluous Southern drawl of my friend Hank, I was hooked.

The stories are upsetting, but told with such humanity, you can't stop listening.

I told my sister Jan about the podcast.

As soon as she heard it, being a former president of the City Club, she plotted to get Hank here to Cleveland to share his truth.

I couldn't be prouder of my old friend and delighted to introduce him to you today.

If you have questions for our speaker, you can text them to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet them @thecityclub.

City Club staff will work to get them into the second half of the program.

Members and Friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Hank Klibanoff.

(audience applauding) (footsteps clomping) - Hi, y'all.

(audience laughing) "Mellifluous."

(laughs) It's so good to be with you.

I am Hank Klibanoff and I don't remember how Joy and I met and I said, "Here, I study all these cold cases, I dig back in history and learn all the truths, and yet I can't even dig into the truth of my own life to remember where we met," you know?

I'm glad to be back in Cleveland.

I have two important, to me, links to Cleveland.

My uncle was the rabbi at Fairmount Temple and Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, who was a rabbi for many years.

And I came here once for his son's, Michael's Bar Mitzvah, and it was the first time I saw a frozen body of water any larger than an ice cube.

(audience laughing) And it was Lake Michigan, Erie, and I thought, "It looks like I've landed on another planet."

I was in awe.

The other one, and I was gonna do a contest, but we don't have time for that, okay?

The other link is that I was at a very important location on a very important date in Cleveland history, but it has nothing to do, it didn't happen in Cleveland, okay?

It happened April 17th, 1960 in Memphis.

Very quickly, can anyone remember what it was?

Hmm?

All right, it was the day the Indians traded Rocky Colavito.

(audience laughing) And I happened to be in Memphis with my father and uncle and cousin because it's worth remembering, this is for the younger people, and I teach younger people, and they're astonished to learn this, there were no pro sports in the South in my childhood.

Not a single pro team.

No New Orleans, no Atlanta, no Tampa Bay.

Tampa Bay was nothing growing up, you know?

Nowhere.

Memphis, come on, you're kidding.

They all came in 1966, '67 were the first ones.

And I went to Memphis because there was an exhibition game between two pro teams, the Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Indians.

And that was the day when Rocky Colavito, to his memory, as he was standing on first base, is made aware by the first base coach that he's just been traded, okay?

I hope he used that great Southern expression we use when you learn something that you just can't believe.

"The hell you say," you know?

Okay.

Okay, so today I'm gonna talk about cold cases and I'm gonna talk fast, okay?

Because we have a little time, and I got a lot to say, okay?

I've been a learner more than a teacher in all this stuff.

I am just amazed what I didn't know in my many years on this planet as a Southerner, as a journalist in the South, and elsewhere, but as I had the privilege and the opportunity to work on "The Race Beat" here, which, I knocked this thing out in 12 years, I think.

(audience laughing) And my co-author had it for three years before that.

And then again, as an instructor at Emory University, where I pitched to them this idea that I wanted to teach history through stories of unpunished racially motivated killings.

And guess what?

They fell for it.

I mean, they went for it, okay?

And that's what I've been teaching for 11 years now, okay?

And what I've discovered is beyond belief, okay?

Not to mention what my students have taught me is where I'm going with this.

And then again, when I got to do the podcast, started doing the podcast, learning even more, taking the research even deeper.

I start with the premise that it's never too late to learn and never will be too late to examine these stories, okay?

Even if all the perpetrators are dead, maybe even especially if the perpetrators are dead, and even if there's no hope for criminal justice, I teach because, and in our cases, all the perpetrators are dead.

They can't be prosecuted, okay?

I teach it because there's another judgment that's really important and that's the judgment of history, okay?

And history can adjudicate these cases and history can render a verdict on these cases.

The records are there and you can find out what happened and you can find out who did it.

Now, I am clear with my students, we're not just here to learn who done it.

Because in many cases, it's clear.

We learn that in the first three weeks, okay?

It's the why.

It's the why, it's the patterns, okay?

And we have a sort of a motto, a mantra that we use, particularly on the podcast.

"When we understand who we were, we can better understand who we are."

We started doing our first class in 2011 even before Trayvon Martin, okay?

And as time has gone on, I have just come to see, I'm studying historic cases that are replicating, that are replicated today again and again and again.

And I don't have to tell you what those cases are, you know.

So I just keep going through all these cases with the students and they're just making some amazing discoveries.

I wanna give you, quickly, some of the lessons I've learned, okay?

Through my students.

I wanna talk to you about A.C. Hall, 1962 in Macon, Georgia.

17 years old, goes to a club, teen club.

'62, for those of you who are of a certain age, was the summer of the first big Otis Redding song.

And you'll get to hear it if you listen to the podcast, okay?

♪ These arms of mine ♪ Okay, that's it, don't walk out, okay.

And A.C. Hall is out walking with his girlfriend.

Little does he know that a white woman has seen what she refers to as a colored man.

That was the vernacular at the time, y'all, I hope you'll allow that, walking out, getting out of her husband's car.

And then they go in the car, and they look at the car and they see a gun is missing.

They call the police, they go looking with the police.

The police say, "Yeah, get in the car," to go look for a man with a gun that you don't know, but they do.

And they come across A.C. Hall and his girlfriend, Eloise, and the headlights go up on them, and the white woman says, "That's him there."

And A.C. Hall starts to run and the police start to shoot their guns, okay?

And the narrative from the police later was, "Oh, as he was running," and if anybody knows the Laquan McDonald story, "as he was running it looked like he reached into his pocket, it looked like he had a gun.

It looked like he turned and was gonna shoot us," okay?

Well, the research shows A.C. Hall could never have been there at that, stealing the gun.

He was not there.

He didn't have a gun, though a gun was found the next day.

I can tell you where it came from.

I mean, it was like a rare German gun, right?

You know, that had, I'm guessing, came outta the evidence locker, but I can't swear that.

But the patterns here are the slam dunk reliability of the self-defense argument that white police officers or white people would make.

They'd say, "Yes, he pulled a gun, He pulled a knife," and again, and again and again, that worked.

It worked because juries were all white, lawyers were all white.

They could appeal to the white jurors by, you know, "Your ancestors would roll over in their grave if you were to rule against these white police officers."

There was also, and there still is, but there was also this pervasive belief among white people in the criminality of Black people.

And when you combine that with the claim that he had a gun, white people in my time, and I was born at the very last minute of 1949, not literally, but, and so lived through the fif, I can tell you all this was true.

It was all there, that people felt this way.

It was so pervasive that here's the privilege that the state of Georgia gave police to make sure that everybody knew that they were right, no matter what, they were right, and that is if you were a police officer and you're accused of something, you got to go and sit in front of the coroners inquest and listen to all the testimony against you, you got to go into the grand jury that's looking into you as the target, and you got to hear all the testimony against you.

And then guess what?

You got to give the last word.

You got to stand up and give a speech.

The last thing that coroner's jurors are gonna hear, the last thing the grand jurors are gonna hear.

And you got to do it without being sworn in and without being cross-examined, okay?

So you want privilege?

That's privilege, okay?

And that's what happened in this case of the two white police officers who killed A.C. Hall, okay?

And the flaw was that in the midst of the coroner's inquest, and in a minute, we're gonna go to an audio clip here in just one second from this, not from the inquest, but an interview that I had later.

During the inquest, the flaw was that the medical examiner came in and his reports show that A.C. Hall had been shot dead-on in the back.

That there was no way he could have been turning, this, that, and the other, okay?

Well, the two officers are dead.

And I tried to reach the family of the two officers, and I finally got a hold of the son of one of the police officers.

And it was an interesting conversation we had because, as you'll hear, he's being asked to reassess something he's believed to be true since 1962 that he'd heard from his father, okay?

And so why don't we go ahead and play this clip and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more.

- [Kenny] My dad was a fine, upstanding man, a good, honest man, and he worked every day of his life to support his family.

And I know what kind of man he was, and I just don't believe that, I just don't believe he done anything wrong.

I talked with him later in life after I grew up, and I think what he done, he done in the line of duty.

I don't think he done anything underhanded.

He was protecting his life is what he was doing.

- [Hank] As that last statement suggests, the story that Kenny Durden got from his father is roughly the same story you've been hearing from the police and the hoppers, with a few important differences.

In Kenny Durden's version, A.C. Hall had a gun and the shooting took place while officers Durden and Brown were chasing A.C. on foot.

- [Kenny] The lady that the gun was stolen from, she identified the guy, and when he ran, they got in a foot pursuit with him.

And that's when my dad said that he pulled the gun out and that's when he was shot.

I really believe what he told me to be the truth and nobody will ever make me believe otherwise.

And I don't think I'm being biased just because he was my dad, I just know him.

- [Hank] But now there was something I needed to tell Kenny Durden, something he didn't know.

And it concerned that report from the medical examiner.

Was when the medical examiner came in with his report and it showed that the young man had been shot right in the back.

- [Kenny] Huh.

- [Hank] Then Kenny Durden repeated the version that he'd long believed to be true, the version in which A.C. Hall precipitated the shooting.

But Durden seemed to be searching for something that could explain how A.C. came to be shot in the back.

- [Kenny] Well, my dad said that he was running and that he reached in his back pocket like he was reaching for a gun or like he was turning to shoot or something, and that's when they fired.

So, I don't know.

(melancholic music) - [Hank] Let's not gloss over that last remark, "I don't know."

I mean, I don't wanna make too much of this.

After all, this is probably the first time Kenny Durden's ever heard a version that countered his dad's account.

But he's clearly thinking about this alternative version.

And then he says something that makes me wonder if he's wrestling, even struggling with this new information.

- [Kenny] If the young man lost his life any other way than that, I'm terribly sorry.

I mean, I'm sorry the young man died anyway.

- To me, that was an important moment for us because we're all having to come face to face with these hard, hard truths.

The one thing that I also say during this podcast, and by the way, we were able to, after five years, to get the woman who was in the car and kept her on the phone for nine minutes.

Whew, man, I felt that was an accomplishment.

But she said she didn't want to talk about it, but I still kept her on the phone nine minutes, even though she said she didn't wanna talk about it.

One thing that we come upon is, you heard in the introduction, this is about racially motivated killings.

I looked at the lives of what I could of the two officers who killed A.C. Hall, and I cannot tell you that they were racially motivated, okay?

Candor makes me tell you I cannot tell you if they were racially motivated, but I know, and I can tell you, and I'm comfortable telling you, they were racially conditioned to shoot and kill A.C. Hall when they would not have killed me, okay?

And I say that as having been raised in the South, of having gone into the bookstores.

My favorite bookstore, we got newspapers from all over the South, and my home was in Florence, Alabama.

Not the biggest city in the world, and I'd go in there and you'd see all the pulp fiction of the scantily clad woman kneeling coyishly in front on the front of the cover of the book.

And behind her is a large Black man stalking her.

And you thought that there was a purpose for that.

That was to make me afraid of Black people.

And anyone who saw that, you know?

It's everywhere.

It was in the jokes, it was in the music, it was in just the everyday banter, okay?

That we are conditioned to not trust Black people and to not believe them and to not respect them and who they are.

And so I'm completely comfortable saying these men were racially conditioned to shoot and kill A.C. Hall.

And this comes up again and again.

And by the way, in many of these cases, unjustified death came to innocent people not only because of the behavior of white law enforcement or white thugs, but often because of the callous indifference of the white elite, the white leadership, political leadership, and, quite frequently, white medical doctors, okay?

I'm gonna tell you about Clarence Pickett, 1957 in Columbus, Georgia, had recently been released from the state mental hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia.

I do not know what his condition was.

And he'd returned to Columbus, Georgia.

He was known to walk around town, talk to himself.

He sold ads for the local Black newspaper.

Most police, when they'd see him, and if he'd be kind of wandering and confused, they'd say, "Preacher, you lost your way again.

Come on, get in the car.

Let me take you to your sister's where you live."

Very nice.

But there were always one or two that wouldn't, and one in particular didn't, and he jailed Clarence Pickett and then went into the cell and just kicked and stomped.

It was brutal what he did.

He's taken to the medical center.

Even the police chief is worried at this point that he's got a bad case on his hand.

And he sends a police officer into the medical center with Clarence Pickett while a doctor is seeing him and treating him.

And the doctor, seeing Clarence Pickett, showed his acceptance of some terrible, some terrible myths about Black people and their tolerance for pain.

And as he's examining Mr. Pickett, who, it turns out, had a torn and split, some people say duodenum, some people say duodenum, okay?

And toxic juices were flowing.

As he's writhing in pain, the policeman in the examine room says, "So, doctor, what do you think?"

And the doctor says, "I think he's just putting on" and gives him a new analgesic, I forget the name of it all of a sudden, but anyway, and an aspirin and sends him home.

The next day, he's still in pain.

His sister puts him in an ambulance, sends him to the hospital, and he's dead on arrival, okay?

And we're having multiple cases, We have multiple cases of doctors who were in a position to extend or save the life of a victim of violence and didn't do it, okay?

I wanna turn now, given the time, to Ahmaud Arbery, which some of you know is a more frequent case.

It was the first time I took on a case with the podcast that was not in that modern civil rights era from around 1945 to 1968, 1970.

Because as soon as I saw the video and heard, started hearing the stories, and within an hour, I'm typing up a note to all my podcast people saying, "This is just too much like 1950.

We have to do this case.

Here we go again," okay?

I think there was a gerund in there that is a curse word.

And so there are just a couple of things I wanna point out about it, 'cause I love this podcast.

And one is that there was this presumption by the white killers that Ahmaud Arbery jogging through their neighborhood in South Georgia, along the golden aisles, the shore, is the interloper, that he has no right to jog by their home on their streets, okay?

"This is ours, who is he?"

Okay?

And I talked to this guy who wrote a beautiful piece for The Bitter Southerner and, a newspaper online, and Jim Barger, and he just did a beautiful, he's a lawyer, but he had studied, gotten his masters at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi.

And he had studied the Geechee culture and the Gullah culture, and he was very familiar and he said, in his piece, he said, "You know, Ahmaud Arbery had basically more right," and you'll hear him on the podcast say, "to be on that piece of land than those white guys."

If you trace Ahmaud Arbery's history, his genealogy, it goes all the way back to the original enslaved people who came from West Africa and were settled on Sapelo Island.

And indeed, I did the research, okay?

I had students doing the research on the three killers, and they go back to the Confederacy.

It, yeah, I started to say, "Was that a crime?"

Actually, it was because they were part of a secessionist movement.

But anyway, but, you know, that would not be unusual to find a white family that's been there since the 1800s to have served in the Confederate Army, but they also owned slaves.

An interesting fact.

It's not itself, you know, convincing.

I don't believe every, I don't think racism is genealogically passed on.

But, and then we looked into Ahmaud Arbery, and you can trace him back to the most significant, I call it the royalty of the enslaved in South Georgia in that, along the islands there, a man named Bilali Muhammad, a literate Muslim, who was a brilliant agronomist and who worked, his slave owner was very progressive about his farmland.

And the two of them together made lots of money, although I assume the slave owner made the money, okay?

But Bilali Muhammad gets to be quite well-known.

And when he died, he left behind a manuscript, 13 pages, that's at the Hargrett Rare Book Library at University of Georgia, okay?

And in Arabic.

Well, Ahmaud Arbery is a descendant of Bilali Muhammad.

And so I was quite comfortable saying, "Yes, he had more right to be on that land than anybody," okay?

So we go into that in that verdict.

The other thing that is helpful is that those verdicts, one of the lessons there, the verdicts that found the white men guilty, is it helps us take a measure of our progress toward a more just nation.

You know, one jury was 12 white people and one Black.

Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.

That was the state court.

And then in federal court, that was nine to three white people, two Blacks, one Hispanic, and they were guilty, guilty, guilty.

Lastly, I want to talk briefly here about Isaiah Nixon.

And maybe somebody will ask me a question about the Biden thing after the board, because I might run out of time.

So can I plant a question?

You right here, you, can you, yes.

That's my wife, okay?

All right.

Just as the earth can turn up long-hidden holdings, so can onsite research.

And it's never too late to discover things.

Out of a page there, missing page.

But Isaiah Nixon in 1948, farmer, father of six, the youngest, two weeks old, decides to vote in the Democratic Party primary in Georgia.

It's only the second time in Georgia history, post-reconstruction, that Black people could vote in the Democratic Party primary.

They could vote in the general election, but it didn't matter because just about everybody was a Democrat.

And whoever wins the Democratic Party nomination is gonna become governor or senator, whatever it would be.

And they insisted that this efforts to say they could vote in the general election was just a ruse, and they were right.

And so Dover Carter, the head of the NAACP, is trying to get people to vote.

He gets Isaiah Nixon to vote.

And on election day, Dover Carter's shuttling people back and forth to the polls, him and his wife, Bessie, and then Isaiah Nixon votes, Dover Carter votes, and later in the day, they beat the hell out of Dover Carter.

Two white guys, brothers, beat the living hell out of Dover Carter, leave him on the side of the road, his kids get him, and then he's very quickly moves to Philadelphia with his 10 kids.

And he left behind a lot.

His wife's father was the largest Black landowner in this particular county.

Isaiah Nixon, late in the day, is at his farmhouse.

And these two white guys, one of the same brothers and then another, and showed up and said, "Nixon, come on out here.

We want to talk to you."

And they knew him, they grew up with him.

As Isaiah Nixon's mother said, "They had lunch in our house growing up," and now they're caught up in this racist fever of a madman candidate who had been governor three times and had run for a fourth, Eugene Talmadge, and his son, who lived in our lifetimes, Herman Talmadge, who was running for governor and was later US Senator for many years from Georgia.

And there's just this fevered pitch against Black people that comes up again and again and again.

And so these two white men show up at Isaiah Nixon's farmhouse, and in front of all of his kids and his mother and neighbors, said, "Nixon, come on outta the farmhouse, we wanna talk to you."

And he comes out and he comes down the steps and they've got guns out.

And one says, "Got two questions.

Did you vote?"

He says, "I reckon I did."

Says, "Who'd you vote for?"

Well, it wasn't Talmadge.

And they said, "Come, go with us.

We wanna go for a ride."

And maybe he had already known what had happened to Dover Carter, I don't know.

But he said, "I'm not going with you."

(imitates gunshots) Three times they shot him and he died a couple of days later.

And by the way, just to give you what the reality was at the time, he dies in Montgomery County, but he had to go two counties away, not in his own car, he only had a buggy wagon and a horse named Della, a mule, okay?

So if neighbor comes and drives him later that night, they have to go two counties away to find a hospital that will take a Black man.

So he dies there in Dublin, Georgia.

So I've gotten to know, very well, the Nixon family, his daughter Dorothy is the star of the podcast.

And I'll tell you just quickly, when she walked out on stage at some public event we did in Atlanta, and people have only heard her, they've only listened to her on a podcast, and she walks out on stage and I introduced her, 400 people at the Atlanta History Center stand up and give her a standing ovation.

We were both crying so hard, we couldn't get our interview going, okay?

And now I also was getting invited to the Dover Carter family reunions.

As I told you, he takes his family to Philadelphia.

But you're about to hear, he always wanted to be buried back in Georgia, okay?

So I want you to hear this final little clip.

A few minutes later, we arrive at Live Oak Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, Georgia.

It's a sweet country church with a small cemetery behind it.

And as we walk to the grave side of his parents, Dover and Bessie Carter, a chorus of crickets and cicadas greet us.

(cicadas buzzing) Now, Dover Carter may have fled Austin in fear, but Aaron says his dad always wanted to be buried back in Georgia.

- [Aaron] He always wanted to be here.

He's where he wanted to be.

- [Hank] Dover Carter lived to age 81, almost 40 years after that fateful election day.

And his wife, Bessie, well, looking at her headstone, I was able to do some fast arithmetic and I smiled.

She was born in the year 1910 and she died in 2009.

My goodness, she lived 99 years.

But wait, this gets better.

I need to tell you that in the time I've spent with the families of Isaiah Nixon and John Harris and Dover Carter, I've noticed many strong and similar threads.

They believe deeply in God.

Education is the ticket to a worthy and worthwhile life.

And nothing should ever keep them from voting on election day.

It's remarkable to learn that Bessie Carter lived long enough to cast her ballot for a Black man for president, Barack Obama.

- [Interviewee] Oh, I think it was one of the proudest minutes of her life.

I can imagine now that, you know, looking back, when she wasn't allowed to even to vote, but, and then now she's voting for a Black man.

It was the crowning part, I think, of her life.

(peaceful music) - [Hank] Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20th, 2009.

Bessie Carter would die five days later.

(peaceful music) So I think we'll take questions.

(chuckles) (audience applauding) (paper rustling) - Wow, that was incredibly powerful.

I'm hearing some sniffling and if anyone needs some tissues, let me know.

We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programming here at the City Club.

We are joined by Hank Klibanoff and American journalist and professor at Emory University.

We welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, students, and those joining via our livestream at cityclub.org or radio broadcast at 89.7 Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to tweet a question, please tweet it @thecityclub.

You can also text them to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794, and our staff will try to work it into the program.

May we have the first question, please?

- [Audience Member] Our first question comes to us from a text.

"With so much xenophobia at this time against immigrants, particularly those of color, and an increase in attacks against Asians, do you see parallels between the root causes of this violence in Georgia's cases you've covered and xenophobia today?

What is different?"

Thank you.

- Oh, I see close parallels, mm hmm.

I think we're at a period of impatience, of not willing to open our eyes, our ears, and our minds, not willing to learn other people, not willing to learn their stories, their cultures, and to get to know people beyond whatever comes across some phony story across Twitter, or on TV news or whatever.

And I also think that we're at a time, you know, I also study the 1906 Atlanta race massacre, which, the largest mass killing in Atlanta history, 26 people at least.

And we know it was more than that, Black people.

And it all happened during a political campaign.

Happened in a midst of a governor's race in which both candidates were doing a lot of serious race baiting and all four newspapers just collapsed and just were spouting all the race baiting stuff and not holding anyone accountable for what they were saying.

I think we've gone through a period of political hysteria now, and mania, and I think I do see a lot of similarities.

- It was amazing the things, stories that you tell.

My question for you is that as Americans who came from Europe, running away from religious intolerance, and then come to United States and then create tremendous amount of stress and savagery against the Native Americans.

And then we go to the next generation, a few generations later, is the Chinese Americans or the Chinese that came.

And then the African American.

I mean, and then we are unwilling to learn from our history.

We are banning books in America that teaches history that is our history.

And we have heroes that were defeated who were insurrections and created, tried to separate United States.

What's wrong with our society that we are unwilling to learn from our history?

- We have not valued history as we should have.

We haven't valued it in the schools, I don't think.

I can't tell you I was all over history in high school or even in college.

I mean, I took courses and was astonished once when I thought I was one credit shy of graduating and, you know, weeks, the clock was ticking.

And a guy walks past me, I was standing outside a dorm, he says, "Hey, I just picked up the papers from Professor Chambers.

You did great.

You got an A."

I said, "What are you doing looking at my paper grade?"

But guy left them in a box, you know?

I said, "Oh, thank you."

He said, "Yeah, four credits."

I said, "No, three credits."

He says, "No, no, it was an honors course."

And so I wasn't even paying close enough attention to know that I actually had enough credits to graduate, okay?

(audience chuckling) I don't know how we get that back.

I mean, I've always loved this idea of trying to merge the interest that Sandra Day O'Connor had and civic literacy with this newborn, of the last five, six, eight years or more than that, interest in news literacy, you know?

And merge these two so that people can become more knowledgeable about civics and how we do what we do and how elections are run, up against news literacy and how stories are put together, how truth is gotten and obtained, and how you as the scrutinizing reader can discern the truth from falsity.

That, I think, makes history more credible down the road.

You shouldn't have, no one should have to rely on me to learn history, you know?

But that is what we're doing.

And I feel privileged that I had a chance to learn it all again, okay?

About my own history in the South by the research that I did.

When I say 12 years, they were 12 hard, long, learning years.

So that's all I can, that's not the clue, that's not the button we can push to make it happen, but it's what I think we need.

- Oh, good afternoon, I am so glad you're here.

- [Hank] Thank you.

- The white supremacists are running this country, all the way from the State Board of Education, of which I am a member, to our Ohio legislature, all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

And it's hard to hold on to hope, but I do that.

And I think that we have to find our hope in our younger generation.

18-year-olds can vote as long as they're 18 by election day.

Could you talk about, and deadline for voter registration's July 5th, in case y'all didn't know.

Can you talk about the importance of our younger generation trying to turn this whole thing around?

- Well, I think it's, to me, on the one hand, I wanna say it's self-evident.

On the other hand, I don't know that it's really going on.

I'm thrilled to see tables of young people here, and if you are old enough to vote, you haven't registered, don't forget you have 'til July 5th.

All right, okay?

It's history worth learning.

You know, it's one of those things that's good to be smart about is the history and how we got here, okay?

It's not because you'll always be the smartest person in the room, but you might, the knowledge that you have might be put to better use than other kinds of knowledge, okay?

Because it doesn't matter if you're a physician or a physicist or if anybody still works at Western Union, or UPS driver, whatever it is, what we all hold in common is this democracy.

This fragile democracy in this nation.

It's what we all have together, okay?

And that there's no way we should ever risk losing it, okay?

There are other things that I wanna say that are self-evident, like I am very much in favor of prosecuting people for crimes they committed, for murders they committed long ago, okay?

If you find an 80, if I found an 89-, 95-, 110-year-old man who committed a crime, we're gonna make it news and we're gonna make it known.

I will never, I'm a journalist, I don't take my findings to the DA or the attorney general.

We put it, we published it, and let the DA then decide to do it or not do it.

That's just an old journalism ethical standard that you don't really become an arm of law enforcement.

But you want it out there.

And why?

Or why do we even do this?

Well, when I started doing this work, there were still living perpetrators, okay?

And keep this in mind, we are in disagreement in this country about a lot of things from state to state to state.

Laws in New Mexico are different than laws in Oregon, different from laws in Maine, different from laws in Illinois, okay?

Except for one standard that persists in all 50 states.

And that is there is no statute of limitations on murder.

Okay?

If you murdered somebody in 1942, '48, in 2002, in 2022, they can come after you anytime.

And anyone who has committed a murder, the ones that I've looked into, those people should not go to bed at night without wondering if tomorrow is the last time they're gonna be free, okay?

And so that's my why.

Now, most of these cases aren't, the perpetrators are dead.

I still say there's no statute of limitations on the judgment of history to bring these cases forward and people can know the truth of what happened.

So I'm not sure if I, that wasn't fully responsive, but July 5th, everybody, don't forget.

Yes, sir.

- Well, thank you, first, for all the work you do and for coming to spend the afternoon with us.

I'm wondering what the general reception has been to your work.

These are, I'm assuming, generally men, but officially, their reputation is one of innocence and this is challenging that.

We heard the man's son maybe giving some different thought.

I'm interested to know kind of the general reception you've received to dig into the past in this way.

- The one answer I can't give you, and I sort of, frankly, I regret it, but I'm one person.

I do have my students, but there's limited time with other obligations.

I can't tell you what the reception was down in Montgomery County where Isaiah Nixon lived among the white people, okay?

Who might have known the killers, okay?

But except for this.

Liz, can you just show that, you remember the other photos that you had?

I want to show something, if y'all don't mind, there's like four slides and I'm gonna, the first one is just me walking across the street with students, reenacting A.C. Hall's final steps the night he was killed in October of 1962.

And then we did it again later at night at the same time of night as he did.

Then the next one is gonna be, it says "Isaiah Nixon."

That's was his grave site.

The slab over his body.

I'm gonna tell you about that.

And then, is there a way to, that's the grave site.

Is there a way to freeze it or no?

Okay, so the family buried Isaiah Nixon and then fled, although Isaiah Nixon's widow, who was still alive when we did the podcast, and you'll hear her on there, okay?

She said, "We didn't flee, we weren't afraid."

And I thought (chuckles) "Well that's not what I heard, but I'm not gonna argue with you, Ms.

Nixon."

So the family, right after they left to go to Jacksonville, Florida, when they finally felt it was safe to come back to Georgia and to go to Old Salem Cemetery where they buried him, they couldn't find his grave site.

Couldn't find it.

And I mean, they went year after year after year for the cleaning of the cemetery.

Couldn't find it, okay?

And I'll tell you why.

On the front facing of the headstone, there's no words, it's not his name.

And it's not that it was there and washed away, it never had his name.

And on the back, it didn't have his name.

Across the top of the headstone, it says "Father," but that could be a lot of people.

And what they hadn't realized was that slab of cement that you see there had sunk, okay?

And it was covered in weeds that were just like strangling weeds.

And a lot of leaves and there's a gnarly old tree over.

Year after year, they came and looked and it was covered.

Just a whole layer of grass, thick enough that when the mowers came through, they just went over it and didn't.

And my student happens to be standing, that's Dorothy Nixon, who's the star of the show, happened to be standing there one day when we, the first time we went down there.

And she's standing there and as she's looking down at the headstone and then she looks down on the ground, she sees that like, I don't know, maybe a pounding rain or something had cleared away some of the weeds and the leaves.

And she saw an "I" and she saw an "S" and she says, "I found it!"

And then she's on her hands and knees cleaning and she sees "S-E-P," she knows he died September 10th, 1948.

The students are fairly well knowledgeable about all the stuff at that point.

She had found Isaiah Nixon's grave site 67 years after the family lost sight of it.

And then a couple of months later, Dorothy finally was able to get there.

She couldn't come right away for personal reasons, but she was able to get there.

And the next one, if you would, and then you can stop it, is her reaching down and rubbing her name, her fingers over her father's name, okay?

After that got written up in the Wall Street Journal, we get a call from a man that, I'm giving you the short version.

He emails somebody, actually it was my daughter 'cause she had done the Vimeo that I put on our website.

And he sends her an email and says, "I'm the nephew of the man who killed that man Nixon.

Who can I talk to?"

And my daughter calls me and says, "Dad, you've gotten me in too deep now."

(chuckles) And I assigned it to my students.

I said, "Call this fellow and see what it was."

And they came back, they said, "He wants to apologize for his family."

I said, "Where does he live?"

They said, "Jacksonville."

I said, "Jacksonville, Florida, the same place where Dorothy lives?

This is impossible.

I don't trust him."

But he was very trustworthy, and indeed, he did apologize.

And you'll hear that whole meeting of Dorothy Nixon with Keith Johnson when he does apologize on that podcast.

So one of the things is that we are getting some response, whether it's an apology, or plus, if I might say this, I never did a podcast.

I had had no idea what these things were, you know?

I mean, it's got more than 3 million people have listened to it and I haven't heard anyone complain yet.

I'm not saying they all love it, but I'm saying.

So I just, I'd like to think that that's having some effect.

But I don't know.

I thought the Ahmaud Arbery, everything we brought up came up at the trial months later and I thought, "Wow, I'm glad we were a little right on that," 'cause you'd hate to be really wrong about something like that.

Yes.

- [Audience Member] Thank you, I wanna start by thanking you for speaking with us today and by leading by example and showing how those of us who are able to come from a place of privilege should use that to bolster those who cannot.

So thank you so much for that.

- Thank you.

- [Audience Member] You mentioned that you were born in 1949- - [Hank] Did I say that?

(audience laughing) - Oh, got it on record.

And I was born maybe a couple years after that.

And so I wanted to take this opportunity to ask you, as somebody who was born in that time in the South, a lot of times, when I am speaking with people who are of the same age as me up here in the North, we are, or some people are so willing to forgive those who came before, saying it was a different time, it was a different place.

But we know that that can't be just a blanket true statement because like, even at the signing of the declaration, there were abolitionists in the room.

So I'm wondering, as somebody from that time, from that place, how you would respond to somebody saying, "Well, we have to forgive them.

Everybody thought that way there and at that time," and how could we maybe use that knowledge that no, that's wrong, to have an impact on today's legislation?

- That's a really great question because it really makes you think about where your heart is.

Not just where your head is, but where your heart is on these things.

And even when I said I think anyone who committed a crime back then who can be found, who can be located, should absolutely be prosecuted.

I want to, and I sound pretty firm about that, but I wanna distinguish myself.

I'm not such an ideologue that I don't understand extenuating circumstances or that I don't have an emotional thing.

I have an emotional response when a very old, frail person is discovered and identified as having been a guard at a camp during the Holocaust.

Y'all had one here, right?

You had a major one here, right?

I remember that.

And yeah, part of me wants to say, "Well, yeah, he's gotta pay the price."

And there's a mother that say, "Well, it's really easy for you to be so glib," and I'm not Glibanoff, it's Klibanoff.

So yeah, it's good, it's important to have a heart on these things and to have some flexibility, but I think that that's why I get away with saying, "I'm not prosecuting, I'm just telling the stories."

(audience applauding) Thank you.

- Oh, what a joy.

Thank you so much, Hank Klibanoff, for joining us here today at the City Club.

And thank you again to Joy and Jan Roller for your collaboration.

Today's forum is part of our Authors in Conversation Series in partnership with Cuyahoga Arts & Culture and the John P. Murphy Foundation.

We would like to welcome guests at tables hosted by the A's Summer Experience Program, Friends of Dave Nash, the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, Shaker Heights High School, and Summer on the Cuyahoga.

If anyone is with us in attendance today, would like to hear more about a campaign that we have underway at the City Club.

Please feel free to join us after the closing gong for a short reception in the Mandel room across the lobby.

A heads up, we are off Friday, July 1st, in observance of Independence Day.

You can catch us again on Friday, July 8th.

We will be joined by Crystal Bryant, executive director of the Cleveland NAACP.

A very relevant conversation after today, she will examine what Black freedom means in America today.

Tickets are still available, and you can learn more about this and other forums at cityclub.org.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you, Hank, and thank you members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, and this forum is now adjourned.

(audience applauding) - [Narrator] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

(calm music) - [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club forums on Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.