Jim Crow
November 13, 2018 -
They ended racist Jim Crow-era policies in two states and raised the minimum wage in another. But elsewhere, Southern voters embraced racially discriminatory voter ID laws and took steps to restrict reproductive rights. The ballot measures that passed this year reflect a politically divided region.
September 26, 2018 -
After former Confederate states drafted progressive constitutions that allowed black men to hold office for the first time, there was violent resistance to black power at the local level. During the Jim Crow era, legislatures rewrote those constitutions to give themselves broad power to override local governments.
September 13, 2018 -
In 1868, Southern states held constitutional conventions in which recently freed black men helped eliminate vestiges of the Confederacy and draft progressive blueprints for state government. While some of the provisions survived Jim Crow, conservative politicians today are chipping away at Reconstruction's radical legacy.
August 31, 2018 -
Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh previously worked as an attorney for the George W. Bush White House, where he promoted the federal appeals court nomination of Charles Pickering — a Mississippi attorney with a history of hostility to civil rights.
August 22, 2018 -
Responding to protesters' toppling of the "Silent Sam" Confederate monument on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus this week, the student government's undergraduate executive branch issued this powerful statement praising the action and calling for further steps to ensure that every student feels welcomed.
June 29, 2018 -
Dealing a blow to the labor movement that will disproportionately affect people of color, the conservative majority's ruling that public-sector workers represented by unions should be able to pay nothing for that representation endorses a policy first promoted in the 1940s South by pro-segregation business interests hostile to organized labor because of its work on behalf of racial justice.
June 15, 2018 -
A North Carolina voter charged with violating the state's ban on voting while on probation for a felony is arguing that the policy violates the U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause.
