Tom Lankford, civil rights reporter secretly in league with police, dies at 85 Matt Schudel 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. Mr. Lankford began working for the News, then an afternoon newspaper, in 1959, when the civil rights movement was gaining strength, along with White resistance to it. For several years, he seemed to be everywhere in the South, covering major civil rights flash points.