southern exposure

September 30, 2022 - To mark the 40th anniversary of the groundbreaking protests against North Carolina's plans to dump toxic waste in a rural Black community, we reprint from the 1988 Southern Exposure book titled "Environmental Politics" an essay and photos about the struggle by Jenny Labalme, who reported on it as an undergraduate at Duke University.

August 11, 2022 - In 1982, Southern Exposure printed an interview with two leaders in the fight to recognize and compensate veterans who had been exposed to Agent Orange. The PACT Act passed by Congress earlier this month expands benefits for U.S. veterans with health problems caused by exposure to the toxin. 

July 21, 2022 - Longtime labor journalist David Moberg passed away this week at the age of 78. In his memory, we're republishing a story about Mississippi poultry workers he contributed to a 1980 anthology on labor history published by Southern Exposure, the print forerunner to Facing South.

June 6, 2022 - With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to soon overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, we are republishing a 1977 Southern Exposure report delving into the backlash against abortion rights that was already taking shape across the region.

May 26, 2022 - For Memorial Day, we are republishing an interview from a 1973 issue of Southern Exposure with Walter Collins, a longtime Black Freedom Movement activist who was incarcerated in 1970 for refusing the draft. Collins was involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as well as the Black nationalist group the Republic of New Afrika. His interview touches on questions of colonialism and anti-Black repression in the United States, and is an indictment of the racist aspects of the military.

March 21, 2022 - In a 1975 issue of Southern Exposure titled "Focus on the Media," civil rights activist and academic Gloria Blackwell wrote about the opportunities the early Black press provided for Black women journalists.

December 16, 2021 - In 2004, Southern Exposure, the print forerunner to Facing South, devoted an issue to examining just how natural so-called "natural disasters" are. The reporting and analysis resonate today as residents of Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky struggle to recover from a devastating December tornado outbreak — the impact of which was compounded by workplace policies that treated profits as more important than human lives.

October 1, 2021 - In 1974, Southern Exposure, the print forerunner to Facing South, published an issue of oral histories that included recollections of people who'd been involved with the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union. Many of them refer to the Elaine Massacre, a mass murder of rural Black Arkansans by white mobs in response to sharecropper organizing attempts that took place 102 years ago this week. We're reprinting those oral histories in memory of the massacre.