Two associated faculty in the History Department – Dr. Carol Anderson (African American Studies) and Hank Klibanoff (Creative Writing) – were recently interviewed on Closer Look with Rose Scott, a program produced by Atlanta’s NPR affiliate WABE. Anderson and Klibanoff discussed the recent convictions and sentencing of the three men who chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery. Anderson is the author, most recently, of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Klibanoff is the host of the WABE podcast Buried Truths, which dedicated its third season to the Arbery’s life and murder. Listen to the full Closer Look interview here.
Category / Antiracism
Klibanoff Discusses DOJ’s Decision to Close Emmett Till Case
Hank Klibanoff, James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently a guest on “Closer Look,” a program produced by the Atlanta NPR affiliate WABE. Klibanoff discussed the decision by the U.S. Department of Justice to once again close its investigation into the murder of Emmett Till. The cold case was reopened in 2004 and again in 2017. Klibanoff hosts the “Buried Truths” podcast and serves as the director of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory. Listen to Klibanoff’s conversation with host Rose Scott here: “Local professor discusses the Department of Justice’s decision to close Emmett Till case.”
‘TIME’ Features Research Conducted by Klibanoff and Students for ‘Buried Truths’ Podcast
TIME recently featured historical research conducted by the Emory team behind the “Buried Truths” podcast. Season three of the podcast, which is led by James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism Hank Klibanoff and comprised of Emory undergraduate students, focused on the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. The researchers identified various direct descendants of Arbery, including an enslaved local leader in agriculture and environmental engineering, Bilali Mohammed, through census research. Read an excerpt from the TIME piece below along with the full article: “What Ahmaud Arbery’s Death Has Meant for the Place Where He Lived.”
“In the 1700s, some of Watts and Arbery’s shared ancestors arrived in the region in a group of enslaved families brought to Sapelo Island to cultivate rice, cotton and indigo to enrich their white slaveholders. On his father’s side, Arbery was also the direct descendant of Bilali Mohammed, an enslaved man originally from West Africa brought to the island after first being enslaved in the Caribbean, according to the team of students behind Atlanta Public Radio’s Buried Truths podcast. The students, lead by Hank Klibanoff, director and co-teacher of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory University, were able to confirm that lineage by hunting through Census and other records after a detailed tip shared by Barger, something of a local-history buff. Mohammed—whose slaveholder represented Georgia in the U.S. Congress—was an important source of African agricultural and engineering techniques befitting a climate where rice will grow; that knowledge was key to making Brunswick a prosperous center of economic and cultural activity. Mohammed left behind a 13-page Arabic-language manuscript that is today in the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript collection at the University of Georgia.“
Anderson Critiques Long Pattern of Demonizing Black Victims like Arbery for ‘CNN’
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in a CNN article chronicling the murder trial of Ahmaud Arbery. Titled “Demonizing Black victims is an old racist trope that didn’t work for defense attorneys this time,” the piece discusses how attorneys in the trial sought to demonize, dehumanize, and criminalize Arbery. Anderson offers historical context about this rhetorical strategy and violent practice across centuries of U.S. history. Read an excerpt below along with the full piece here.
From assertions that Black pastors might frighten jurors to a remark about Arbery’s “long, dirty toenails,” the defense’s strategy was rife with rhetoric that sought to dehumanize and devalue Black Americans.
“What I saw was the defense preying on White fears,” said Carol Anderson, a historian and the chair of African American studies at Emory University. “The ‘long, dirty toenails’ — that is an old trope of the ‘Black Beast.’ That is the stuff coming out of Reconstruction and Jim Crow.”
“Visions of Slavery,” Co-Organized by Walter C. Rucker, Awarded Prestigious Mellon Foundation Grant
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Emory College a $225,000 grant for a year-long investigation of the histories of unfreedom in the Black Atlantic. The grant will support a symposium titled “Visions of Slavery,” which is co-organized by Dr. Walter C. Rucker, Professor of History, and Bayo Holsey, Associate Professor of Anthropology. The event will take place as a part of Mellon’s 2022-2023 Sawyer Seminar series and involve faculty from other university campuses across Atlanta. History Department faculty Mariana Candido and Adriana Chira are part of the working group for the seminar. Read more about the symposium via the Emory News Center as well as the Department of African American Studies.
Klibanoff Discusses Conviction of Ahmaud Arbery’s Killers on WABE
Hank Klibanoff, James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently interviewed on “A Closer Look,” a program of the Atlanta NPR affiliate station WABE. The interviewed focuses on the guilty conviction of the three men who killed Ahmaud Arbery. Klibanoff dedicated season three of his podcast, “Buried Truths,” to the Arbery case. Listen to the WABE interview here: “Jury Finds All 3 Men Accused of Killing Ahmaud Arbery Guilty of Murder.”
Lipstadt Describes “Surrealistic” Experience Testifying in “Unite the Right” Trial
Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently recounted what she described as the “surrealistic experience” testifying in the Charlottesville, VA, trial against the organizers of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally. Lipstadt served as an expert witness for the trial and was cross-examined by one of the defendants. Read an excerpt from the HuffPost’s coverage of the trial below along with the full article here: “Experts Describe ‘Surrealistic’ Process Of Putting Charlottesville’s Nazis On Trial.”
“On the stand, Lipstadt read aloud some of the planning messages sent by the event’s organizers. She testified that she was ‘taken aback‘ by the level of anti-Semitism and the adulation for Nazi Germany evident in the discussions.
“‘On one hand, I could feel like I was in the classroom, teaching about anti-Semitism and teaching about its connection to white supremacy,’ Lipstadt told HuffPost about her experience as an expert witness. ‘This was a call to arms. This was a call to violence. If you read their statements, it’s just overwhelming.‘”
Anderson Quoted in ‘AP News’ Article about Vigilantism
Dr. Carol Anderson was recently quoted in the Associated Press News article “2 trials, 1 theme: White men taking law into their own hands.” Following the trials of Kyle Rittenhouse and the three men convicted of killing Ahmaud Arbery, the piece examines white vigilantism in historical and contemporary perspective. Anderson’s most recently book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021), charts how anti-Black racism shaped the Second Amendment. Read an excerpt from the AP News piece below, along with the full article here.
“So much of this issue about protection and safety is about the safety and the protection of whites or white property,” said Carol Anderson, historian and professor of African American studies at Emory University. “There is a hubris of whiteness. The sense that it is on me to put Black lives back into their proper place.”
Anderson in ‘The Guardian’: “White supremacists declare war on democracy and walk away unscathed”
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published an opinion piece in The Guardian. Surveying U.S. history since the eighteenth century, Anderson highlights a pattern of white supremacists endangering U.S. democracy and yet suffering few to no consequences thereafter. Anderson links this historical pattern to the results of current cases brought against the invaders of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Read an excerpt from the article below along with the full piece: “White supremacists declare war on democracy and walk away unscathed.”
“This horrific attack on American democracy should have resulted in a full-throttled response. But, once again, white supremacy is able to walk away virtually unscathed. US senators and representatives who were at the rally inciting the invaders were not expelled from Congress. Similarly, in shades of the post- civil war Confederacy, several politicians who attended the incendiary event at the Ellipse were recently re-elected to office. And those who stormed the Capitol are getting charged with misdemeanors, being allowed to go on vacations out of the country, and, despite the attempt to stage a coup and overturn the results of a presidential election, getting feather-light sentences.”
Lipstadt Serves as Expert Witness in Civil Trial Against Organizers of Charlottesville Rally
Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, is serving as an expert witness in a civil lawsuit against the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Counterprotesters charge that the rally organizers promoted violence against them based on racial and religious hatred. That violence led to the death of one counterprotester, Heather Heyer, who was killed when white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. In her expert testimony (published here), Lipstadt concludes that “the ideology, symbols, and rhetoric that were on display at the Unite the Right rally fit comfortably within a long tradition of antisemitism and share in the tradition that led to the violent murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust.” Read more about the case in The New York Times article: “For Holocaust Scholar, Another Confrontation With Neo-Nazi Hate.”