History

December 16, 2022 - A radiation health expert who spoke out publicly about the coverup she witnessed while working inside Three Mile Island after the 1979 meltdown, Joy Thompson died last month in North Carolina. We remember her extraordinary courage and share the groundbreaking 2009 Facing South investigation she and her husband, Randall Thompson, informed.

November 30, 2022 - A new book co-edited by economist William "Sandy" Darity Jr. and his colleagues at Duke University explores how the coronavirus pandemic worsened racial inequality. Facing South recently spoke with Darity, a leading scholar of reparations for slavery, about policies to address the racial wealth gap.

November 15, 2022 - Rev. Charles Sherrod, a leader of the Albany Movement in Georgia, passed away earlier this year. A 1974 article in Southern Exposure remembered Sherrod's New Communities project, an experiment in land-based justice. We republish that article with an introduction from Chip Hughes, who lived on New Communities Farm in the 1970s, remembering Sherrod's life and work. 

October 27, 2022 - In 1984, Mab Segrest reported on the Ku Klux Klan's activities in North Carolina public schools in the context of the wider conservative backlash against racial integration and that year's elections. We republish her Southern Exposure report amid another conservative political backlash against public schools, which the Klan is using for its own purposes.

October 12, 2022 - For decades, the co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund has led voter organizing campaigns across the South and helped lay the groundwork for Democratic wins in Georgia's 2020 presidential and U.S. Senate elections. She talked with Facing South about mobilizing for the midterms, misconceptions about the South and the region's Black voters, and building a genuine multiracial democracy.

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.

September 28, 2022 - The famed civil rights leader who coined the phrase "environmental racism" in a North Carolina jail recently delivered the Robert R. Wilson Distinguished Lecture at Duke University Chapel in Durham. Titled "Environmental Justice: Past, Present, and Future" and shared here, his talk commemorated the 40th anniversary of protests over toxic waste dumping in a rural Black community that sparked the environmental justice movement.