RACIAL JUSTICE: The South's growing movement for change

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.