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RACIAL JUSTICE: The South's growing movement for change

By Chris Kromm

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Articles

  • Politics
  • Demographics
  • History

The campaign to overturn Trump's truth-denying equity gag order

By Rebekah Barber
December 3, 2020 - Partly in response to the acclaim for Nikole Hannah-Jones's The 1619 Project on slavery's legacy in the U.S., President Trump recently signed an executive order that seeks to stifle federal agencies, contractors, and grant recipients from talking about systemic racism and sexism. Refusing to be silenced, the African American Policy Forum has launched an effort to overturn it.
  • Economy
  • Politics

VOICES: Deconstructing the systems crushing the South's young people in the pandemic

By Victoria Bowden
December 4, 2020 - Victoria Bowden, 25, of Stone Mountain, Georgia, shares her and other young people's difficult experiences trying to get by during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now a graduate student intern with the Southern Economic Advancement Project, she offers practical ideas for fixing the systems that put young Southerners at risk of heavy debt, poverty, homelessness, and mental illness.
  • Human Rights
  • Economy
  • Politics

McDonald's workers strike over low wages, lack of COVID-19 protections

By Rebekah Barber
December 15, 2020 - Employees at one of the fast-food giant's outlets in Durham, North Carolina, say they were not notified when a coworker tested positive for COVID-19, putting their health at risk. They recently went on strike to demand better safety protections — as well as higher wages. 
  • Politics

In the Georgia runoffs, 'poll chaplains' continue King's legacy

By Deirdre Jonese Austin
December 21, 2020 - With mail-in and early voting in full swing in the runoffs for two U.S. Senate seats, Georgians of faith are working around the clock to mobilize their communities to vote.
  • Human Rights
  • History

ICE sterilizations in Georgia evoke tragic chapters in South's history

By Dakota Hall
November 19, 2020 - A whistleblower complaint has alleged that nonconsensual hysterectomies were being performed on women held at an ICE detention facility in Georgia — and ICE is responding to the allegations by deporting the women. The mistreatment is part of a long history of medical abuses of reproductive rights in the South.
  • Politics
  • History

Election problems show why Congress needs to restore the Voting Rights Act

By Benjamin Barber
November 18, 2020 - Black voters turned out in record numbers this election cycle but had to overcome barriers to the ballot box that undermine the fairness of the electoral process. Advocates continue to call for restoring the Voting Rights Act to ensure that African American voters are protected from voter suppression.
  • Human Rights
  • Environment
  • Politics

THE STAKES 2020: Catherine Coleman Flowers on the environmental justice movement and elections

By Rebekah Barber
October 23, 2020 - Across the rural South's Black Belt, the lack of adequate sewage and water infrastructure has created serious public health problems. We spoke with Catherine Coleman Flowers, a longtime environmental justice activist in rural Alabama and the recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, about her work to draw attention to the region's intersecting crises and how grassroots activism can impact federal policy. 
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

THE STAKES 2020: Aranza Sosa on voting out racist officials in a rural North Carolina county

By Olivia Paschal
October 19, 2020 - Alamance County, North Carolina, has been the site of recent protests over a local Confederate monument, and its sheriff has long been accused of racism for public comments and his participation in ICE's controversial 287(g) program. We spoke with local activist Aranza Sosa about growing up in the shadow of 287(g) and the power of elected officials who come from the same background she does.
  • History

Descendants of Arkansas' Elaine Massacre victims push for restorative justice

By Olivia Paschal
October 7, 2020 - It has been 101 years since one of the deadliest instances of racist violence in U.S. history took place in the Arkansas Delta. Descendants of its victims are pushing for concrete steps towards restorative justice — and a seat at the table.
  • Politics
  • History

INSTITUTE INDEX: Confronting the GOP's poll watcher threats

By Sue Sturgis
October 2, 2020 - This presidential election will be the first in 40 years to take place without a consent decree in place requiring the Republican National Committee to refrain from voter intimidation under the guise of ballot security. With President Trump urging his supporters to go to the polls and "watch very carefully," we look at what the law says about such activity and how voting rights advocates are responding.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

Groups mobilize to pay off legal debts, restore ex-felons' voting rights in Florida

By Benjamin Barber
September 24, 2020 - The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld a Florida law requiring people with felony convictions to pay off all court fines and fees before they can cast ballots again, so voting rights advocates are redoubling efforts to raise funds to help the indigent.
  • Environment
  • Politics

Public records show a Louisiana lawmaker is getting paid to push a proposed pipeline through Black, Indigenous communities

By Sara Sneath
September 24, 2020 - The 280-mile Delta Express pipeline would connect an existing natural gas pipeline in northern Louisiana to a liquid natural gas facility in its southernmost parish.
  • Politics

The Black Southerners hoping to chart a new path to the U.S. Senate

By Olivia Paschal
September 22, 2020 - In Marquita Bradshaw of Tennessee and Rev. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, the South has two prominent Black Democratic U.S. Senate candidates who have never held elected office before. They represent a new type of statewide candidate emerging from grassroots community organizing and advocacy work.
  • Politics
  • Demographics

Southern Black women make history in the 2020 election

By Rebekah Barber
September 10, 2020 - More Black women are running for Congress than ever before, including in several key races across the South. Many of these women are already trailblazers, and now they're building new paths into politics.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

Poverty continues to prevent many ex-felons from voting

By Benjamin Barber
September 9, 2020 - As states across the country gear up for the November elections, millions of formerly incarcerated people could be blocked from voting because of laws requiring them to first pay all court fines and fees. But voting rights advocates are challenging those laws — and they recently racked up a big win in North Carolina.
  • Human Rights
  • Economy
  • Politics
  • History

INSTITUTE INDEX: Saving the U.S. Postal Service is a civil rights issue

By Sue Sturgis
August 27, 2020 - Since the Civil War, the post office has provided important economic opportunity for African Americans and played a critical role in advancing equal rights in the South. Now it's under threat from Postmaster Louis DeJoy, whose own company — a postal service contractor — has been sued over racial discrimination and other maltreatment of workers.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

VOICES: Saving our burning house will take more than voting

By Evan Malbrough
August 24, 2020 - As a voting rights activist in Georgia, I understand the sacred importance of the hard-won ballot. But as a young Black man in America, I recognize that elections alone cannot save Black lives.
  • Human Rights
  • Economy

From police brutality to COVID-19: racism's deadly toll

By Sharrelle Barber Rebekah Barber
August 13, 2020 - As Black people continue to be victimized by police brutality, they are also dying disproportionately from COVID-19. The common thread is racism. 
  • Politics

Court rejects judicial election district for Louisiana parish's Black citizens

By Billy Corriher
August 12, 2020 - A federal appeals court recently overturned a lower court ruling that required a new majority-Black judicial election district in Terrebonne Parish. Only one Black judge has served there, but a white judge was re-elected after donning blackface and a prison jumpsuit for Halloween. The case is part of a broader struggle for judicial elections that are fair to Black voters.
  • Human Rights
  • Economy
  • History

Black farmers markets bring greater equity to the South's food system

By Grace Abels
July 31, 2020 - In North Carolina, the Durham Black Farmers Market has become so popular it's now branched out to nearby Raleigh. The markets are part of a growing local food justice movement that seeks to nourish and empower Black communities that have too often been cut off from agricultural opportunity.
  • Politics
  • History

John Lewis's final fight to restore the Voting Rights Act

By Benjamin Barber
July 28, 2020 - As the civil rights icon lies in state this week at the U.S. Capitol, lawmakers continue to press to restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark civil rights legislation that Lewis nearly died fighting for.
  • Human Rights
  • History

Remembering our elders: John Lewis recalls the Nashville sit-ins

By Olivia Paschal
July 18, 2020 - Congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia), who became a leader in the Civil Rights Movement as a student and chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for several years before being elected to Congress in 1987, has died at age 80. In this 1980 interview with Lewis, he recalls the Nashville sit-ins and the deep faith he had in the Movement.  
  • Human Rights
  • Politics
  • History

Mab Segrest on building a Southern freedom movement for all

By Grace Abels
July 16, 2020 - In 1988, Southern Exposure, the print forerunner of Facing South, published a speech by Segrest, a North Carolina anti-racist organizer and lesbian activist, for an issue on lesbians and gays in the South. Segrest went on to write several books, including "Memoir of a Race Traitor," and to teach college in Connecticut. Back in North Carolina again, Segrest recently talked with Facing South about the urgency of broad-based organizing in this historic moment.
  • Human Rights
  • Demographics

Say Her Name campaign targets police killings of Black women and girls

By Rebekah Barber
July 15, 2020 - Breonna Taylor's is just the latest police killing the #SayHerName campaign has helped to bring to the public’s attention. Ongoing and too often ignored police violence against Black women and girls shows why this intersectional campaign is so necessary. 
  • Politics

Will one of NC's chief voter suppression architects back expanded mail-in voting?

By Benjamin Barber
July 15, 2020 - Before he was elected to the U.S. Senate, Thom Tillis helped carry out the North Carolina Republican Party's strategy to restrict voting under the guise of preventing fraud. Now facing a tough re-election battle amid a pandemic, Tillis is under pressure to back two bills that would increase voters' access to absentee ballots.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

A poll tax by any other name

By Dana Sweeney
July 9, 2020 - States across the country require people with felony convictions to purchase their voting rights back if they ever want to cast a ballot again. It is a mechanism that felony disenfranchisement schemes increasingly rely upon, and it marks a return to the sordid tactics of Jim Crow.
  • Human Rights
  • Economy

How to reverse the rural South's rising incarceration rate

By Olivia Paschal
July 2, 2020 - As the incarceration rate in urban America falls, it's still climbing in rural communities. Here's why it's rising — and how some academics and activists suggest reversing the trend.
  • Human Rights
  • History

INSTITUTE INDEX: Strange fruit hanging still?

By Rebekah Barber
July 1, 2020 - Against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter uprising, a recent spate of suspicious hanging deaths of Black and Brown people nationwide sparks fears about the kind of vicious white backlash against Black progress the U.S. has seen before.  
  • Human Rights

NC courts grapple with monuments to jurist who brutalized the enslaved

By Billy Corriher
June 30, 2020 - Black Lives Matter protesters recently targeted a statue of former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin, an enslaver and rapist notorious for sanctioning physical violence against enslaved people. Days later, a commission discussed removing an enormous portrait of Ruffin that looms over the state Supreme Court. 
  • Human Rights
  • Economy
  • Politics
  • History

Charleston's deposed Calhoun monument and the erasure of Black workers

By Kerry Taylor
June 26, 2020 - When South Carolina's largest city ordered the removal of the statue of former U.S. Vice President turned secessionist John C. Calhoun, there were few if any Black workers on the crew. That points to contradictions that define our political moment.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

INSTITUTE INDEX: Bank of America's disconnect on racial inequality

By Sue Sturgis
June 19, 2020 - Spurred by recent protests over police brutality, the North Carolina-based banking giant, which has a long history of racial discrimination, recently pledged to donate $1 billion over the next four years to address racial and economic inequality. But political spending by the company's employee PAC program is at odds with that goal.
  • Human Rights
  • Economy

VOICES: A modest cheer and a half for NASCAR's Confederate flag ban

By Scott Huler
June 19, 2020 - Following nationwide protests over racism, a public call by African-American driver Bubba Wallace got NASCAR to ban displays of the Confederate flag from its events. The business has seen that its customers may be growing weary of at least overt racism, and it's finally responding.
  • Economy
  • Politics

As Southern police budgets rise, activists press for defunding

By Olivia Paschal
June 18, 2020 - Police funding across 47 of the South's largest cities has risen as a share of total expenditures in the past three decades, even as funding for other essential services has plateaued. With city councils planning their 2021 budgets, citizens are demanding a reallocation of those funds.
  • Culture
  • Human Rights

North Carolina visual artist auctions work for racial justice

By Keona Frasier
June 17, 2020 - Antoine Williams, an art professor at Guilford College in Greensboro, produces mixed media artwork informed by critical race theory. He recently auctioned off two of his works to benefit Black Lives Matter and other groups working for racial justice — part of a broader effort by the art world to take a stand against racism. What Williams hoped to sell in two weeks was gone in 30 minutes, so now he's planning his next steps.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

Galvanized by George Floyd's killing, Black mothers rise up to fight systemic poverty

By Rebekah Barber Benjamin Barber
June 17, 2020 - As he died at the hands of Minneapolis police, Floyd called out for his mother — rending the hearts of Black mothers nationwide and spurring many to take part in street protests. Some of those same Black mothers will also be taking part in the Poor People's Campaign's virtual mass rally on June 20, and they are drawing connections between police violence and policy violence.
  • Human Rights
  • History

VOICES: A prayer for Mother Emanuel, and for all of us

By John Cooper
June 17, 2020 - This week marks five years since the racist massacre of black worshippers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The grim anniversary finds America in turmoil over police violence and a global pandemic that also reveals our racial divisions. While we tend to think our nation's story is always getting better, recent events make that hope hard to sustain, writes South Carolina native John Cooper.
  • Human Rights
  • History

Recent protests topple monuments to white supremacy

By Rolando Zenteno
June 16, 2020 - The 2015 massacre of nine churchgoers in Charleston by a Confederate flag-waving white supremacist spurred a movement to remove symbols of the Confederacy from public spaces. The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has propelled that movement forward.
  • History

The bitter history behind the highways occupied by protesters

By Olivia Paschal
June 5, 2020 - Demonstrators protesting police brutality in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd are occupying highways that were built by destroying black communities.
  • Human Rights

INSTITUTE INDEX: Police use tear gas banned from war on protesters at home

By Sue Sturgis
June 3, 2020 - As people took to the streets nationwide to condemn last week's Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, they were met in many places by tear gas, which is banned from use in war but still deployed domestically by police for crowd control. The tear gas canisters fired in recent protests in Minneapolis and many other cities were made by Florida-based Safariland, whose products have also been controversially used against asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border.
  • Human Rights

Ahmaud Arbery's killing spurs action on Southern states' lack of hate crime laws

By Benjamin Barber
May 21, 2020 - Previous efforts to pass a hate crimes law in Georgia have failed, but Ahmaud Arbery's killing has renewed the urgency to move legislation there. South Carolina is also once again considering putting a hate crime law on its books.
  • Politics
  • History

Bakari Sellers on a life shaped by the rural South's civil rights movement

By Olivia Paschal
May 13, 2020 - The former South Carolina state legislator, attorney, and CNN analyst spoke with Facing South about his new memoir, the intergenerational scars of racial violence, and what effective political organizing looks like in the South.
Chris Kromm

Chris Kromm

@chriskromm

Chris Kromm is executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies and publisher of the Institute's online magazine, Facing South.

Email Chris

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