Human Rights

November 18, 2016 - Next month the Southern Human Rights Organizers' Conference will return to Mississippi where it began 20 years ago. This year's event at Tougaloo College in Jackson will include discussions on Islamophobia and resisting the Trump program.

November 17, 2016 - While the high-profile battle against the Dakota Access Pipeline continues, fights are also underway around the South to block new gas pipelines. Protests are planned in North Carolina this week against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, while opponents of the Mountain Valley Pipeline just had a big court win in West Virginia.

November 11, 2016 - Adopted to appease slaveholding states, the U.S. Electoral College has discouraged expansion of the franchise and resulted in five presidents who most voters opposed — but an alternative approach is gaining momentum in the states.

November 4, 2016 - A report from the Sentencing Project documents how many people will be unable to vote in this election due to state laws barring people with felony convictions from voting — even after they've done their time.

November 3, 2016 - North Carolina's controversial 2013 voting law was blocked by a court for discriminating against black voters, but the move affects other voters of color as well — including the state's fast-growing Asian American electorate.

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.

October 19, 2016 - Seventy years ago this week in South Carolina, the Southern Negro Youth Congress convened the largest human rights gathering the region had ever seen. The S.C. Progressive Network is holding a public symposium on Oct. 22 looking back at that historic event. To mark the occasion, we share author and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois'  convention address, one of his last major speeches and considered one of his best.

October 7, 2016 - Across the United States, hundreds of thousands of transgender citizens lack updated identification. Consequently, tens of thousands of those living in states with strict voter ID laws — most of them in the South — are at risk of disenfranchisement, according to a new report from The Williams Institute.

October 6, 2016 - On what would have been the 99th birthday of Mississippi voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, we recall her untimely death from heart disease at the age of 59 — a testament that denying a group of people political power is literally hazardous to their health.

October 4, 2016 - This Oct. 5 marks 100 years since the birth of Stetson Kennedy, the Florida writer and human rights activist who died in 2011 at the age of 94. The nonprofit foundation he launched while still alive is marking the occasion with a series of events that start this week with a biographical drama of Kennedy's life — and what a life it was.