equal justice initiative

March 18, 2022 - More than a century after the first anti-lynching legislation was introduced in Congress by a Black member from North Carolina, lawmakers finally passed a bill that makes lynching a federal crime. Advocates hope that the new law will address the generational damage caused by racial violence and prevent modern-day lynchings from going unpunished.

March 3, 2022 - While reporting on the human rights crisis in Alabama's prisons, journalist Beth Shelburne began corresponding with incarcerated men in the state about their fight to read. She recounts their ongoing battles against censorship inside an irrational system where books and magazines are treated like dangerous contraband.

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.  

April 11, 2019 - The issue of reparations for slavery is once again getting attention in Washington, with legislation introduced to study the matter getting unprecedented levels of support. Many of the Democrats hoping to unseat President Trump are embracing the concept.

July 11, 2018 - The organization's special rapporteur on extreme poverty presented a report last month documenting his disturbing findings in states including Alabama, Georgia and West Virginia.

May 7, 2018 - The photographs and reflections that follow describe sites of 19th- and 20th-century lynchings as they appear today. The images of the killing fields are not graphic. In fact, in their 21st-century forms, these and most other sites of Southern lynchings are disguised by natural beauty and the nothing-to-see-here normalcy of everyday life. Where the text conveys a history of brutality and details of depravity, the intent is not to shock but to offer an accurate record — long-hidden — of what happened in these places. It's a past that calls us all to witness and action.

July 14, 2017 - When the North Carolina legislature passed its so-called "raise the age" law last month, it became the last state to stop automatically treating 16- and 17-year-olds as adults in the criminal justice system. But some still will be, and that puts them at risk of serious harm.