On this day in Alabama history: Grover Hall published editorial condemning Ku Klux Klan
Exhibition showing human rights barriers during the Civil Rights era, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, 2010. (The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
July 3, 1927
Grover C. Hall, editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, published the cornerstone editorial in a series of articles that won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. In the editorials, Hall condemned statewide public floggings of African-Americans by the Ku Klux Klan. He later published editorials urging the repeal of Prohibition, arguing for the release of the Scottsboro Boys, and criticizing anti-Semitism. His 1938 editorial, “The Egregious Gentile Called to Account,“ was published in the U.S. Congressional Record in 1939.
Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.
Henry County native Grover Cleveland Hall (1888-1941) was an Alabama journalist who served as editor of the Montgomery Advertiser during the late 1920s, winning a Pulitzer Prize for editorials against the Ku Klux Klan in 1928. Prior to his years in Montgomery, Hall worked at newspapers in Enterprise, Dothan, and Selma. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, Courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History)
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