History
June 17, 2020 -
This week marks five years since the racist massacre of black worshippers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The grim anniversary finds America in turmoil over police violence and a global pandemic that also reveals our racial divisions. While we tend to think our nation's story is always getting better, recent events make that hope hard to sustain, writes South Carolina native John Cooper.
June 16, 2020 -
The 2015 massacre of nine churchgoers in Charleston by a Confederate flag-waving white supremacist spurred a movement to remove symbols of the Confederacy from public spaces. The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has propelled that movement forward.
June 5, 2020 -
Demonstrators protesting police brutality in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd are occupying highways that were built by destroying black communities.
June 4, 2020 -
Herbert Lee Wright passed away at age 92 last month in Arizona from complications related to the coronavirus. Though he doesn't appear prominently in U.S. history books, he played a critical role in shaping the modern Civil Rights Movement as the NAACP's national youth secretary from 1951 to 1962, defending students who participated in sit-ins and criticizing older leaders who wanted to end the protests.
June 3, 2020 -
The organizing drive at HCA Healthcare's Mission Hospital in Asheville is National Nurses United's largest labor campaign ever undertaken in a state with a long history of hostility to unions. A win could help shift the power dynamic in North Carolina and the rest of the South.
May 24, 2020 -
Durham, North Carolina-based peace, labor, civil rights, and human rights activist and organizer Raymond Lee "Bro Ray" Eurquhart died on March 30. In this excerpt of a 2002 oral history interview, he recounts his early political education and organizing while serving in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War.
May 13, 2020 -
The former South Carolina state legislator, attorney, and CNN analyst spoke with Facing South about his new memoir, the intergenerational scars of racial violence, and what effective political organizing looks like in the South.