RACIAL JUSTICE: The South's growing movement for change

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.