FLORENCE – Florence-Lauderdale Public Library will host a live episode
of the Peabody-winning civil rights podcast Buried Truths on Thursday, February 27, at 6 p.m.
The event will be co-hosted by Pulitzer-winning author, journalist, and professor Hank Klibanoff
and TimesDaily journalist Sherhonda Allen. The program will focus on race relations in the
Shoals area during the civil rights era.
This event, called “Buried Truths Live: Civil Rights in the Shoals,” is part of the library’s
“Voting Rights in America” series, which commemorates this year’s anniversaries of the
Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, as well as Black History Month and Women’s History
Month. This ongoing series of exhibits and programs explores the struggles for equal voting
rights for African Americans and women. “Buried Truths Live” is sponsored by the Alabama
Humanities Foundation, the UNA Mitchell-West Center for Social Inclusion, and the UNA
Department of Communications.
Klibanoff and Allen, both natives of the Shoals area, will explore the Black and White
Hank Klibanoff
experience in the Shoals during the civil rights era and beyond, discussing topics such as
integration, voting rights, and more. The event will include the opportunity for public comments
and questions, and community members are encouraged to share stories about their experiences.
“Often, the conversation about the civil rights era in the Shoals revolves around the contrast
between us and other Alabama cities,” said Jennifer Butler Keeton, the library’s Public Affairs
Coordinator. “People are proud that we didn’t have the level of violence or national attention that
Birmingham or Montgomery had, but that doesn’t mean that the problems here weren’t real, that
local African Americans didn’t have significant struggles or fears, or that our community isn’t
still grappling with those struggles.”
This event seeks to bring those real struggles to light through frank discussions, interviews and
Q&A. Buried Truths, a podcast of NPR affiliate WABE in Atlanta, is a narrative civil rights
history podcast that investigates injustice, resilience, and racism in the American South. Buried
Truths creator and host Klibanoff is a white man who was a senior at Coffee High School when
Florence schools integrated. For this episode, he is being joined by Allen, an African American
woman who started school at Brooks Elementary shortly after the onset of integration.
Sherhonda Allen
“Hank and Sherhonda are both accomplished journalists from the Shoals who have very different
perspectives on growing up in the area,” said Abby Carpenter, the Assistant Director at the
library. “This event will allow them to discuss those differing perspectives and invite the
community to share theirs as well.”
Community members are also invited to familiarize themselves with the Buried Truths podcast
through a listening session at the library on Tuesday, February 25, at 11:30 a.m. Participants will
listen to and discuss the first episode of the podcast.
The “Voting Rights in America” series continues through March. For a complete list of events,
visit www.flpl.org/votingrights.
