John N. Herbers (November 4, 1923 – March 17, 2017) was an American journalist, author, editor, World War II veteran, and Pulitzer Prize finalist.

[1] After graduating from Haywood High School in Brownsville, Tennessee in 1941, Herbers served as a combat infantryman in the Pacific during World War II from 1941 to 1944.

[7] Herbers joined the staff of the New York Times in 1963 as a civil rights correspondent in Atlanta, covering demonstrations in Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, and in St. Augustine, Florida.

[8] When covering demonstrations in St. Augustine, Herbers, his wife, and their four daughters were threatened in the middle of the night by a white supremacist vigilante group.

[9] He covered the murders of four civil rights workers in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the KKK bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that resulted in the death of four children.

He interviewed Martin Luther King Jr.[10] and reported on Malcolm X's Selma visit sixteen days prior to his assassination.

[14] In 1969, he was made the New York Times Urban Affairs National Correspondent and reported on city riots, anti-Vietnam demonstrations, and college campus upheavals.

He served as writer and columnist for Governing magazine for three years and was appointed a member of and consultant to the National Commission on State and Local Public Service.

[22] In The Race Beat, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the press and the civil rights movement, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff say that Herbers as far back as 1952 was "breaking new ground in his coverage [of Negro leaders and their activities].

Wicker said, "When Robert Kennedy became a presidential candidate, I assigned for full-time coverage a very distinguished reporter in our Washington bureau named John Herbers.