Southern History

January 27, 2017 - Since 2005, Nissan workers in Canton, Mississippi — a city with deep roots in the civil rights movement — have been fighting for the right to unionize. This week they are taking their cause across the South with days of action in at least five cities. 

October 27, 2016 - Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s calls for his supporters to monitor the polls in 2016 raises the specter of the South’s long history of voter intimidation. Voting rights advocates are ramping up their own poll monitoring in response.

April 12, 2016 - Gov. Phil Bryant's decision to sign into law the "Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act" has nothing to do with freedom or conscience and everything to do with discrimination.

January 28, 2016 - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's remarks at a town hall this week seemed to revive the old, discredited idea that post-Civil War Reconstruction was a mistake. Her campaign has since issued a clarification, but the controversy shows that the debate over Reconstruction is far from over.

November 6, 2015 - With good preachers shouting a new gospel that champions working folks of all races.

November 3, 2015 - News stories that ask what went wrong with the South too often fail to capture the context of its intergenerational poverty: centuries of enslavement and systemic discrimination that resulted in the immense racial disparities we see today. And it's not just a Southern problem — it's an American one.

October 19, 2015 - A protest held last week at Ole Miss calling for the removal of the state flag with its Confederate emblem was crashed by a group of Southern secessionists. In recent decades the school has struggled to divest itself of Confederate symbolism, drawing intense protests.

October 12, 2015 - Southern white working-class folks have a reason to feel rebellious — they're just waving the wrong flag to show it.

August 20, 2015 - In an interview for Southern Exposure in the 1970s, civil rights legend and Institute co-founder Julian Bond offered a unique look at how he became involved in the Southern freedom struggle and his evolving views on the lessons and legacy of the movement.

August 12, 2015 - An N.C. State University professor has restored old reel-to-reel tapes from a public library in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, proving that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. first uttered his renowned "I Have A Dream" refrain in the eastern North Carolina city in 1962, nine months before his historic speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.