racial disparities

March 17, 2017 - The GOP plan to scrap the Affordable Care Act includes a provision barring the nation's leading reproductive health services provider from taking Medicaid payments. That would take an especially heavy toll in the South, which already suffers the nation's highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, unintended pregnancies and poverty.

March 7, 2017 - When it comes to pay equity between women and men, the South lags behind the U.S. overall, where women still earn just 80 cents on average for every $1 a man makes. Equal pay is one of the driving issues behind this week's A Day Without a Woman protest.

February 24, 2017 - Recently published academic research into the effects of strict voter ID laws offers new details into how they depress turnout by African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans.

February 17, 2017 - Georgia will have to do away with its exact-match voter registration verification scheme thanks to a lawsuit filed last year by voting rights advocacy groups. The program resulted in the disenfranchisement of some 42,000 people, disproportionately people of color — but now it's being considered by other states including Florida, Virginia and West Virginia.

November 18, 2016 - Voting changes in states no longer subject to federal preclearance under the Voting Rights Act impacted this year's election, though it's still unclear whether they affected its outcome.

November 4, 2016 - A report from the Sentencing Project documents how many people will be unable to vote in this election due to state laws barring people with felony convictions from voting — even after they've done their time.

October 6, 2016 - On what would have been the 99th birthday of Mississippi voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, we recall her untimely death from heart disease at the age of 59 — a testament that denying a group of people political power is literally hazardous to their health.