History

June 28, 2013 - A website publicizing details about people arrested in nonviolent protests at the N.C. legislature expanded this week to include salaries of arrestees who are public workers -- and suffered a setback when local officials said they’d no longer take arrestees' mugshots. Meanwhile, private data-gathering efforts in another state are generating controversy over their use for political retaliation.

June 19, 2013 - The Civitas Institute is publicizing the names, residence, political registration, employers, and other details of those arrested at the ongoing NAACP-organized protests at the legislature. The project calls to mind how Southern civil rights opponents once published the names of NAACP supporters in newspapers to encourage retaliation against them.

June 7, 2013 - Human rights advocate Chokwe Lumumba's election this week as mayor of Jackson, Miss. is the result of work by a new Black-led progressive coalition that intends to fight for power in a state too often written off as redneck Tea Party territory.

April 22, 2013 - As the South's hard-right pols block expanding Medicaid to a population in need, they show that civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer's description of the region's government as "with the handful, for the handful, by the handful" remains true today.

April 16, 2013 - President Obama's latest budget proposes privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority, which has been criticized as a socialist enterprise, yet Southern Republicans are opposing the plan. What's going on here?

April 1, 2013 - Cheap labor, regressive taxes, federal dependency: Is the South's economic approach really an example for the nation?

March 27, 2013 - Should the Supreme Court strike down bans on same-sex marriage, it would bring big changes across the South, where all states limit marriage rights to heterosexual couples -- and it wouldn't be the first time it took a high court ruling to change the region's marriage laws.

March 26, 2013 - A provision of the North Carolina constitution designed to suppress the black vote is no longer enforceable under the Voting Rights Act, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to give voters a second chance to remove it.

March 19, 2013 - When the NAACP challenged Jim Crow laws, it selected plaintiffs who would elicit both sympathy and outrage. Today conservatives are using the same tactic, as illustrated by Fisher v. The University of Texas -- a case challenging consideration of race in admissions.

March 8, 2013 - A story in a 1977 issue of Southern Exposure reported on how in the midst of the Great Depression Jessie Daniel Ames organized a mass "revolt against chivalry" that linked the anti-lynching campaign with the struggle for sexual emancipation. We share it today in honor of International Women's Day.