Grover C. Hall

Grover Cleveland Hall, Sr. (January 11, 1888 – 1941) was an American newspaper editor. At the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama, he garnered national attention and won a Pulitzer Prize during the 1920s for his editorials that criticized the Ku Klux Klan.

Hall was born in Haleburg, Alabama, near the Georgia and Florida borders, and educated in the state's country schools. Grover was ten in 1898, when his older brother William Theodore Hall started newspaper work in Dothan, Alabama, also in the southeastern corner of the state. W.T. Hall was editor of the Dothan Eagle from 1905 to 1924 (his death) and Grover started work under him in 1905. There he was a printer's devil; from 1907 to 1910 he worked in editorial positions at the Enterprise Ledger (Enterprise, AL), Dothan Daily Siftings, Selma Times, and at the Pensacola Journal, where he wrote editorials in 1910. That year he moved to be associate editor of the Montgomery Advertiser in the state capital, where he married in 1912, became chief editor in 1926, and was appointed probate judge in 1933.

Today the Montgomery Advertiser says that it "waged war on the resurgent Ku Klux Klan" during the 1920s. Hall won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 1928 for that work. The official citation specified "his editorials against gangsterism, floggings and racial and religious intolerance."

Hall endorsed Al Smith for U.S. President in 1928 (against Hoover). He was a friend of H.L. Mencken, editor of The Baltimore Sun, and they exchanged many letters, some of which "inspired Hall to think critically about the South". Mencken did not support democracy but theirs was "a remarkable coincidence of views" on less political matters, according to the Hall family biographer (quoted in the review).

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