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RACIAL JUSTICE: The South's growing movement for change

By Chris Kromm

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Articles

  • Human Rights
  • Politics
A man and a woman hold a Texas flag with the text "Our Bodies Are Not Your Political Playground" written on it

Reproductive justice groups fight new Texas anti-abortion law while bracing for lawsuits

By Abby Zimmardi
July 21, 2021 - As conservative lawmakers across the South further limit access to abortion, leaders of reproductive justice organizations in Texas that help people in marginalized communities end unwanted pregnancies fear for the future of their groups — and the well-being of those they serve — under a new anti-abortion law with a litigious agenda.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics
  • History

Tram Nguyen on how Virginia passed its own Voting Rights Act

By Benjamin Barber
July 21, 2021 - Nguyen, the co-executive director of New Virginia Majority, helped craft Virginia's Voting Rights Act, the first such state law in the South and the nation's most far-reaching one. She talked with Facing South about the historical significance of the law, the need for federal voting rights legislation, and her hopes for the future of voting rights.
  • Education
  • Politics

How Art Pope's money shaped UNC's toxic debate over Nikole Hannah-Jones

By Sue Sturgis
July 16, 2021 - Long before journalist Hannah-Jones' tenure fight with the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees, the influential conservative policy network built and funded by millionaire businessman and GOP power broker Art Pope had turned its attention to her reporting on racism with attacks and distortions reminiscent of its dishonest treatment of climate science. Pope denied direct involvement in the tenure controversy, but his organizations' messaging carries weight in a UNC system where he's a major donor and serves on the powerful Board of Governors thanks to the Republican legislature he helped elect.
  • Education
  • Demographics

INSTITUTE INDEX: HBCUs use federal stimulus funds to ease student debt

By Rebekah Barber
July 16, 2021 - Drawing on federal COVID-19 relief money and other resources, historically Black colleges and universities are canceling debt for a student population that's disproportionately burdened by it.
  • Education
  • History

VOICES: Southern schools need more, not less, critical race theory

By Nareissa Smith
July 15, 2021 - CRT teaching bans are being imposed in states and local communities nationwide. But their distorting effects on young people's understanding of their nation's past and present will take a particularly heavy toll in the South — the heart of Black America and the repository of so much Black history.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

Oriaku Njoku on envisioning a South where reproductive justice is a reality

By Jessica Agbemavor
July 15, 2021 - The co-founder and executive director of the Atlanta-based abortion fund Access Reproductive Care-Southeast talked to Facing South about the critical difference between reproductive rights and reproductive justice, President Biden's proposal to scrap a budget provision banning federally funded abortions, and what a South with true reproductive freedom would look like.
  • Politics

VOICES: How students can fight back against attacks on their voting rights

By Jeffrey Clemmons
July 15, 2021 - Texas's SB7 anti-voter bill, which was set to be considered in a special session until Democratic lawmakers fled the state to block it, is part of a wave of nearly 400 such measures introduced in state legislatures this year in reaction to 2020's unprecedented turnout by young people. There are several steps they can take to fight back, says Jeffrey Clemmons, a student in Texas and an Andrew Goodman Foundation ambassador.
  • Human Rights

Southern states' anti-protest bills face First Amendment challenges

By Billy Corriher
July 14, 2021 - As legislative sessions wind down, Republicans in states across the South are still pushing bills that could lead to mass arrests of protesters. Meanwhile, lawsuits have been filed against new anti-protest laws recently passed in Florida and Louisiana.
  • Human Rights
  • Environment
  • History

Arkansas Marshallese commemorate 75th anniversary of U.S. nuclear testing

By Olivia Paschal
July 13, 2021 - At a series of events hosted by the Marshallese Educational Initiative, Marshallese leaders in Arkansas discussed the public health inequities their community faces as a result of the U.S. nuclear legacy, climate change, and government policy.
  • Human Rights
  • Education
  • History

VOICES: On UNC's troubled racial past and present

By Geeta N. Kapur
July 7, 2021 - Geeta N. Kapur, a North Carolina civil rights attorney and UNC-Chapel Hill alumna who has a book coming out in August about the school's fraught racial history, says it should come as no surprise that journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones — a Black woman bold enough to speak truth to power — was initially denied tenure by the school and then granted it only begrudgingly. Tenure would have given her a degree of academic freedom to reveal other truths that some don't want to hear.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

SCOTUS complicates DOJ's challenge of Georgia's restrictive voting law

By Benjamin Barber
July 2, 2021 - Last week the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was suing Georgia over its restrictive new voting law, part of a recent wave of such legislation passed by Republican-led state legislatures. But a July 1 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on a Voting Rights Act case out of Arizona makes the lawsuit's future even more uncertain.
  • Demographics

Biden's first pick for Southern appeals court fails to address racial diversity

By Billy Corriher
July 1, 2021 - The president has nominated a record number of people of color to federal courts, but his choice to fill a vacancy on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from the Carolinas, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, is a white man.  
  • Human Rights
  • Economy

A look at the first official act of reparations in Georgia

By Adina Solomon
June 29, 2021 - In the 1960s, Athens's urban renewal program evicted a Black neighborhood through eminent domain to build dorms for University of Georgia students. In response to displaced families' demands, Athens-Clarke County has set aside money dedicated to public projects of their choosing, a form of reparations for the community that was lost.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics
  • History

VOICES: An original Freedom Rider welcomes the Freedom Ride for Voting Rights

By Joan C. Browning
June 28, 2021 - Joan C. Browning of West Virginia took part in the 1961 Freedom Rides challenging segregated transportation in the Jim Crow South, and she recently welcomed the Black Voters Matter Freedom Ride for Voting Rights to Charleston. We're reprinting the full text of her remarks drawing on history to suggest paths to a more just future.
  • Human Rights
Alabama prisoner in blood-soaked clothing

VOICES: Prison violence like Alabama's demands a national reckoning

By Robert T. Chase
June 18, 2021 - Despite lawsuits instituting reforms, state prisons across the U.S. continue to be places of physical and sexual violence, especially against incarcerated people of color. Conditions got so bad in Alabama's prisons that the federal government recently sued the state for violating the Constitution. Robert T. Chase, a historian of prisons, says they need the same kind of scrutiny now faced by police.
  • Culture
  • Human Rights
  • Politics
  • History

From the Archives: Building a new Southern freedom movement

By Southern Exposure
June 18, 2021 - A 1988 issue of Southern Exposure magazine, the print forerunner to Facing South, reprinted a visionary address by North Carolina-based organizer Mab Segrest calling for an intersectional Southern gay and lesbian liberation movement. We're republishing it in honor of Pride Month.
  • Politics
  • History

Black Voters Matter holds Freedom Ride across the South to promote voting rights

By Benjamin Barber
June 17, 2021 - This Juneteenth, Black Voters Matter will launch a bus tour through Southern states marking the 60th anniversary of the original Freedom Rides that successfully challenged segregation. The tour will promote the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and drive home the importance of confronting voter suppression.  
  • Human Rights
  • Politics
Several people walking down a street holding signs in protest of Alabama's prison lease plan

How Alabama organizers blocked Gov. Ivey's prison lease plan

By Olivia Paschal Elisha Brown
June 17, 2021 - The Communities Not Prisons coalition has stalled Alabama's plan to work with private prison companies to expand the state prison system, which the U.S. Justice Department has charged with unconstitutional human rights abuses. The victory was won by organizing across geographic, race, and class lines — and by targeting the banks involved.
  • Economy
  • Politics

Low-wage care workers rally for the American Jobs Plan

By Rebekah Barber
June 16, 2021 - Home care workers, most of whom are women of color, are among the most underpaid workers in the U.S., and the situation is especially dire in the low-wage South. In North Carolina, care workers recently rallied to call on federal lawmakers to support President Biden's American Jobs Plan, which would increase their pay and on-the-job protections.
  • Politics
  • Demographics

INSTITUTE INDEX: Re-diversifying the South's appellate courts

By Billy Corriher
June 15, 2021 - Federal appellate courts in the Deep South are disproportionately white compared to the region's population, but President Joe Biden has pledged to diversify the courts with his nominations. Efforts to expand the region's mostly white state appellate courts could also lead to more diversity on the bench.
  • Human Rights
  • Economy

Dorothy Brown on racism in the tax code

By Elisha Brown
June 11, 2021 - The Emory law professor and author of "The Whiteness of Wealth" calls for returning to a progressive income taxation system and establishing a tax credit as compensation for systemic racism. She also argues that simply publishing tax data by race could make the public angry enough to want to change the federal tax system.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

VOICES: In DeSantis' Florida, the Tally 19 face an uphill battle for justice

By Kacey Johnson
June 4, 2021 - Some of the 19 young people arrested in Tallahassee last year while protesting deadly police violence are still facing charges that carry prison time. But their push for justice continues, with the goal of one day winning a community task force that holds officers accountable.
  • Human Rights
  • Economy
  • Politics

INSTITUTE INDEX: Debt relief is on the way for Black farmers

By Sue Sturgis
June 3, 2021 - Black farmers will start receiving their first payments this month under the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act. Sponsored by Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, it was part of the latest COVID-19 stimulus and has been called the most significant legislation for Black farmers since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the Texas agriculture commissioner and former Trump adviser Stephen Miller are among those involved in lawsuits to halt the payments, arguing they're unfair to whites.
  • Human Rights
  • Economy

For Magaly Licolli, organizing poultry workers starts with learning together

By Olivia Paschal
June 1, 2021 - Licolli co-founded the group Venceremos to organize poultry workers in Northwest Arkansas and now serves as its director, a position she previously held at the now-defunct Northwest Arkansas Workers' Justice Center. In this oral history interview, she talks to Facing South about her upbringing in Mexico, how her theater education plays into her organizing strategy, sexism's impact on worker organizing, and lessons she's learned through her work.
  • Human Rights
  • History
Black and white photo of a Black woman on the phone in an office.

From the Archives: 'I feel what women feel'

By Southern Exposure
June 1, 2021 - In the Summer 1989 issue of Southern Exposure, poultry organizer Donna Bazemore talked about lives on the line — and overcoming fear.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

VOICES: A step toward occupational licensing fairness for Georgians with criminal records

By DJ Sims
May 27, 2021 - Gov. Brian Kemp recently signed into law a bill that would bar Georgia's many licensing boards from denying credentials to people on probation or parole for many crimes. That's an important step toward fair chance licensing, says DJ Sims, a reentry organizer in Georgia — but additional reforms are needed to ensure that people who've served their time are able to make a living.  
  • Human Rights

New Southern voter suppression bills face challenges in state and federal court

By Billy Corriher
May 21, 2021 - Republican state legislators across the South are making it harder for voters to cast a ballot. Voting rights groups and local officials are suing over the changes, which they argue will disparately impact voters of color and those with disabilities. But the judges with the final say are mostly Republicans.
  • Education
  • History

The University of Arkansas's hidden history of helping Nazis

By Michael Adkison
April 30, 2021 - In the early 1930s, a German lawyer named Heinrich Krieger enrolled in the University of Arkansas as an exchange student to study American race law. When he returned to Nazi Germany, his studies directly contributed to shaping the antisemitic and white supremacist Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1935, to genocidal ends. The university is now confronting various racist chapters in its history, but Krieger's is not among them.
  • Politics

Voting rights attorney Allison Riggs on fighting for an inclusive democracy

By Benjamin Barber
April 8, 2021 - Riggs, an attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, led the successful legal fight against North Carolina's 2013 voter suppression bill. She talked with Facing South about the ongoing attacks on voting, legal strategies for combating new voter suppression bills, and her hopes for the future of voting rights.
  • Human Rights

The long road to nuclear justice for the Marshallese people

By Olivia Paschal
April 2, 2021 - U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the 1940s and 1950s displaced residents of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, many of whom later settled in Northwest Arkansas. Decades later, they're still fighting for justice for the devastation of their health and homeland, now also threatened by rising seas from climate change. 
  • Economy
  • Politics
  • History

Revisiting the Black power dream of North Carolina's Soul City

By Rebekah Barber
March 26, 2021 - Facing South recently spoke with Thomas Healy, author of "Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia." The book documents civil rights leader Floyd McKissick's pursuit of Black opportunity in the form of a Black-led model integrated community on a former slave plantation in Eastern North Carolina, and the lessons the quest and its failure holds for today.
  • Politics
  • History

Confronting the anti-civil rights filibuster

By Benjamin Barber
March 24, 2021 - U.S. senators are currently considering whether to eliminate, reform, or protect the filibuster. The parliamentary procedure that gives the minority outsized power has a long history of being used to undermine civil rights legislation — and it now threatens to derail a bold Democratic agenda that includes voting rights and other pro-democracy reforms.
  • Human Rights

INSTITUTE INDEX: Southern lawmakers seek new ways to criminalize protesting

By Billy Corriher
March 24, 2021 - In the wake of historic Black Lives Matter protests, Republican lawmakers in Southern states have introduced two dozen bills this year that could lead to new criminal charges for protesters — even peaceful ones. Most Southern states already have at least one such law on the books.
  • Human Rights
  • Politics
  • History

The PRO Act would undo decades of Southern anti-union laws rooted in racism

By Olivia Paschal
March 11, 2021 - Passed by the House earlier this week and championed by President Biden, the pro-labor law could break the stranglehold that right-to-work laws adopted under Jim Crow have placed on workers' power in the region. But it has to get through the Senate first.
  • Economy
  • Politics

VOICES: Essential workers deserve $15 an hour

By Eshawney Gaston
March 11, 2021 - We care for your parents, children, and homes. We should make enough to care for our own, too.
  • Politics
  • History

As states crack down on voting, advocates look to Congress

By Benjamin Barber
March 10, 2021 - Republican lawmakers nationwide have introduced over 250 bills this year to restrict voting access in 43 states — 39 bills in Georgia alone. Given the backlash against last year's record-breaking voter turnout playing out at the state level, voting rights advocates are looking to Congress and the promise of H.R. 1, which has now advanced to the U.S. Senate. But can it get past the filibuster?
  • Human Rights
  • Politics

Addressing Black maternal mortality in the South

By Elisha Brown
February 26, 2021 - New initiatives underway in Southern states aim to reduce the region's alarming maternal mortality rates in the Black community.
  • History

A new push to remove Confederate monuments from North Carolina courthouses

By Billy Corriher
February 23, 2021 - A group working to end racial disparities in the state's criminal justice system has launched a campaign to press local officials to take down the Confederate statues standing outside of dozens of courthouses across North Carolina, saying the statues send a message of racial subjugation. 
  • Politics

Republicans ramp up efforts to suppress voting in Southern states

By Benjamin Barber
February 12, 2021 - After massive turnout in last year's election, GOP state lawmakers across the South are introducing bills that would erect barriers to voter participation.
  • Economy
  • Education
  • Politics
  • Demographics

Biden could repay Black women supporters by canceling student debt

By Rebekah Barber
January 27, 2021 - Black women played a lead role in helping Joe Biden win the White House and Democrats win the Senate. One way to repay them would be by canceling the student debt that disproportionately burdens them.
  • Politics
  • History

Political scientist Angie Maxwell on countering the 'Long Southern Strategy'

By Benjamin Barber
January 22, 2021 - The University of Arkansas professor who co-wrote a book on the Republican Party's decades-long effort to win white Southerners' support through coded and not-so-coded appeals to racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism talks with Facing South about where that approach stands today — and what the election results in Georgia tell us about its future.
  • History

Louisiana and North Carolina high courts remove Confederate iconography

By Billy Corriher
January 14, 2021 - The Louisiana Supreme Court recently took down a statue of a former judge who fought for the Confederacy and participated in a deadly coup against the Reconstruction-era state government. And in North Carolina, the high court removed a portrait of its former chief justice, a brutal enslaver.
  • Politics

How rural Black organizers helped Democrats win the Senate

By Olivia Paschal
January 12, 2021 - A deep, well-resourced infrastructure of civic organizations helped Georgia's rural Black Belt counties achieve the highest level of voter turnout in a runoff election the state has ever seen.  
  • Culture
  • History

A conversation with Freeman Vines, maker of hanging tree guitars

By Olivia Paschal
December 18, 2020 - The luthier's new book "Hanging Tree Guitars" chronicles his life's work through the lens of guitars he made out of a tree where a Black man was lynched near his home in Fountain, North Carolina. We recently spoke with him about his process and latest projects.
  • History

N.C. commission grapples with giant courthouse portrait of slave-owning judge

By Billy Corriher
December 17, 2020 - For years, the North Carolina Supreme Court has faced calls to take down a large painting of a chief justice who trafficked in and brutalized enslaved people. A court-appointed commission wants to replace the portrait with a smaller version, but some members would like to see all of the portraits gone.
  • 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
  • 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. 
  • 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

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.
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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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VOICES: #BlackLivesMatter, #ImmigrantLivesMatter, this criminalization must stop

June 17, 2016
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