History
January 25, 2022 -
As Republican state lawmakers across the South pass laws restricting how public school teachers can talk about racism with their students, a new national poll of teachers finds that over a third say the surge in such classroom speech bans makes them more likely to leave the profession at the end of this school year.
December 16, 2021 -
Four years of unprecedented rainfall left much of West Virginia devastated. Now residents, activists, and regulators struggle to reform the logging and mining industries that bear much of the responsibility.
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.
December 15, 2021 -
A hurricane-harried African American town lives with the specter of future disaster.
October 8, 2021 -
The organizer of the Elaine Unity Fest, held on the 102nd anniversary of the mass murder of Black sharecroppers in Arkansas, hopes it will be a first step towards restorative justice and economic development in the city and in Phillips County.
October 7, 2021 -
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was built by enslaved Black people but refused to admit Black students until the 1950s and only after a protracted legal fight — and the school continues to struggle around issues of race today. Civil rights attorney Geeta N. Kapur documents UNC's troubling history in her new book "To Drink From the Well: The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation's Oldest Public University," which she discussed with Facing South.
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.
