Grover Hall, Sr.

The product of a newspaper family, Grover Hall Sr., would not be cowed by the Ku Klux Klan.

At a 1923 rally in Homewood - complete with fireworks, a barbecue, and the Klan band - 1,500 people joined the organization as 25,000 people watched. In 1924, more than half of Birmingham's 32,000 voters belonged to the Klan and helped elect Governor Bibb Graves, himself a member of the Montgomery Klan.

When Hall became editor of the Montgomery Advertiser in 1926, he wrote bold editorials denouncing Klan members and officials. He was especially critical of Klan floggings and gangsterism executed to terrify blacks, religious minorities, immigrants, and anyone else whose moral behavior was considered suspect. Hall won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for his editorials about the Klan.

A native of Henry County, Hall was a self-taught journalist who worked at papers in Dothan, Bessemer, and Pensacola before joining the Advertiser in 1910. "Hall had read history, literature, and philosophy to the extent that he was better read than most university professors," remembers journalist Gould Beech, a Hall protégé. "There was a focus to his life: he vehemently opposed any limitation on the human mind. He was confident that the freedom to learn, to think, to express - without limit from any government or institution or organization - would lead in time to a solution of man's ills."

Hall wrote with passion and precision and had the utmost respect for the craft of editorial writing. "Every literate person has one or two editorials in him, but few are fitted for routine, year-round writing," he explained. "A writer in regular practice is in form, on edge, like an athlete."