Obituaries

Tom Lankford, civil rights reporter secretly in league with police, dies at 85

By Matt Schudel
Jan. 16, 2021 at 8:31 p.m. EST

Tom Lankford, a journalist who covered the civil rights movement in the troubled city of Birmingham, Ala., while also conducting secret surveillance for his publisher and local police authorities in the 1960s, died Dec. 31 at a hospital in Gadsden, Ala. He was 85. ... His family announced the death in a notice in the Gadsden Times newspaper. His former newspaper, the Birmingham News, reported that he died of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

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“That man was present for almost all the historical civil rights events,” former Birmingham police officer Teresa Thorne, who interviewed Mr. Lankford for an upcoming book about the civil rights era, told the News. “He had a lot of respect for Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth. He admired their courage. He was on a friendly basis with them.” ... During those years, Mr. Lankford was not just a “multi-portfolioed Birmingham News reporter,” Diane McWhorter wrote in “Carry Me Home,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the civil rights movement in Birmingham. He also had a secondary identity as a “surrogate cop, spy, and ‘have gun, will travel’ agent provocateur.”

At the behest of Vincent Townsend, assistant publisher of the News, Mr. Lankford had a lavish expense account to buy wiretap and photographic surveillance equipment. He had a truck with a phone company logo on the side and became adept at climbing telephone poles and putting wiretaps on the lines. He entered churches and union meeting halls to put surveillance devices in place.

He also worked closely with Birmingham’s police department, which was led until 1963 by the notoriously brutal segregationist Eugene “Bull” Connor. One of Connor’s detectives introduced Mr. Lankford to members of the Ku Klux Klan, which saved his life at least once. After he photographed White gangs beating civil rights protesters, Mr. Lankford was roughed up in an alley by Klan members until one of them recognized him as “Bull’s boy.” ... “He was embedded with the police department,” Thorne told the News in its obituary of Mr. Lankford. “By his own admission, he became too involved and too close for an objective journalist. He did not regret it one bit.”

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Matt Schudel
Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004. He previously worked for publications in Washington, New York, North Carolina and Florida. Follow https://twitter.com/MattSchudel