Author, filmmaker discuss racial injustice

 Hank Klibanoff and Judy Richardson, who have have spent the last two and a half decades investigating cold case crimes of racial injustice, bringing solace for victims and the families of victims but also correcting history’s view of the Civil Rights era, came to Northeastern yesterday to share their message.
“Our purpose is not necessarily to lead to fresh prosecutions of cases but to tell the full story of what happened,” Klibanoff said.
The event was put on by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, an on-campus team of law professors and students intent on bringing back and re-prosecuting cold cases of racial injustice.
Klibanoff worked for about 30 years as a journalist, including a three-year stint at the Boston Globe from 1979 to 1982, according to Georgia Center for the Book, an organization that supports literary programs. After he retired he went on to do his own investigative reporting on civil rights and civil rights infringement, he said. His work includes “The Race Beat,” a book on race-centered journalism that won him the Pulitzer Prize for history.
He was the first to speak, delivering a multi-part speech. The first part of the speech focused on “The Race Beat.”
“The race beat is something that journalists did starting in the decades before the civil rights era. They decided the one big issue in America was race and they wanted to spend whatever amount of money it took to figure out what the issue of race was in this country,” Klibanoff said in the speech.
He went on to recite accounts of these journalists working with events in the civil rights movement.
The second half of his speech dealt with his current project, the Civil Rights Cold Case project.
“I work with investigative reporters, TV documentary filmmakers, multi-media people investigating unsolved civil rights murders from the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. We’re digging up some pretty amazing stories,” Klibanoff told The News.
He also showed a four-minute trailer of a potential four-part documentary made by the Civil Rights Cold Case Project on some of its findings. The documentary is in the process of being approved and funded by PBS.
“I thought the speech was very informative, I didn’t know a lot of the history behind what was being covered so it was enlightening for me. It’s definitely something I’ve become interested in and I’ll look into it in the future” said Michael Murry, a freshman undecided major.
Judy Richardson, who has been a filmmaker since 1978, showed a clip of her new documentary, Scarred Justice, The Orangeburg Massacre 1968.
The documentary, which deals with the 1968 shooting in which three were killed and 29 were wounded, is set to premier nationally February on PBS, Richardson said.
“The piece we saw of it tonight was very powerful, I can’t wait for it to come out on PBS,” said John Enterline, a second- year law student. “I think the power in it comes from seeing the multiple perspectives and angles that show the full story, and that’ll spark a need for people to get into this type of work.”
The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project has recently taken on a case involving two boys who were killed in 1964 in Mississippi, Margaret Burnham, director of the program, said in an interview with The News.
“We have called a federal court action to vindicate their deaths, a civil action charging that law enforcement officers in Mississippi were complicit in committing crimes against them,” she said.
Klibanoff said the biggest adversary his organization and others like it face is lack of funds.
“We’re doing it without nearly as much money as we would like to have,” he said. “Everyone believes it’s a great story and gets very inspired but it’s not a revenue generator for anybody.”