desegregation

This week, 52 years to the day after three young men were murdered in Mississippi while working to expand voting rights to African Americans, a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in a challenge to North Carolina's restrictive new voting law that disproportionately impacts African Americans.

The total student population in the U.S. is projected to become majority minority this year, but the South hit this milestone six years ago. Demographic changes have been sweeping Southern schools, introducing new racial dynamics in what has traditionally been a black and white story while progress on racial integration slips.

A student at a historically black North Carolina college who had his right to run for office challenged has won a city council seat, and students at another of the state's HBCUs marched to the polls en masse in a local election that represented a repudiation of right-wing attacks on public schools.

Though the Supreme Court rejected nullification after Southern states tried to use it to avoid desegregating public schools, the concept is now being deployed by gun rights advocates -- and not just in the South.

When the NAACP challenged Jim Crow laws, it selected plaintiffs who would elicit both sympathy and outrage. Today conservatives are using the same tactic, as illustrated by Fisher v. The University of Texas -- a case challenging consideration of race in admissions.

At the same time North Carolina is dramatically expanding the number of charter schools operating in the state, new research from Duke University finds that charter schools are much more likely than traditional public schools to be racially unbalanced -- and that can have negative educational consequences for students.

The Koch brother from another mother overseeing the state budget. A man found guilty of assaulting children running the Department of Public Safety. A science skeptic chosen to protect the environment. What is Gov. Pat McCrory thinking?

Just-released documents reveal two members of the Republican faction that ended Wake County schools' desegregation policy were involved in an extramarital affair. When it ended, one blamed the other for a burglary -- and now both are running for higher office despite claims the affair was widely known among political insiders. We look at the big conservative donors supporting their campaigns.

The Democratic-controlled Wake County School Board fires a superintendent hired by Republicans bent on ending a successful desegregation policy -- but the move may have put the system's funding in political peril.