Politics

July 16, 2021 - Long before journalist Hannah-Jones' tenure fight with the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees, the influential conservative policy network built and funded by millionaire businessman and GOP power broker Art Pope had turned its attention to her reporting on racism with attacks and distortions reminiscent of its dishonest treatment of climate science. Pope denied direct involvement in the tenure controversy, but his organizations' messaging carries weight in a UNC system where he's a major donor and serves on the powerful Board of Governors thanks to the Republican legislature he helped elect.

July 15, 2021 - The co-founder and executive director of the Atlanta-based abortion fund Access Reproductive Care-Southeast talked to Facing South about the critical difference between reproductive rights and reproductive justice, President Biden's proposal to scrap a budget provision banning federally funded abortions, and what a South with true reproductive freedom would look like.

July 15, 2021 - Texas's SB7 anti-voter bill, which was set to be considered in a special session until Democratic lawmakers fled the state to block it, is part of a wave of nearly 400 such measures introduced in state legislatures this year in reaction to 2020's unprecedented turnout by young people. There are several steps they can take to fight back, says Jeffrey Clemmons, a student in Texas and an Andrew Goodman Foundation ambassador.

July 2, 2021 - Last week the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was suing Georgia over its restrictive new voting law, part of a recent wave of such legislation passed by Republican-led state legislatures. But a July 1 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on a Voting Rights Act case out of Arizona makes the lawsuit's future even more uncertain.

July 1, 2021 - Over 2 million adults — including over half a million essential workers — fall into the Medicaid coverage gap in states that have refused to expand the program under the Affordable Care Act, and most are people of color living in the South. Congressional Democrats from Georgia and Texas recently unveiled plans to work around GOP-controlled legislatures' refusal to authorize broader Medicaid coverage even when facing a deadly pandemic.

June 28, 2021 - Joan C. Browning of West Virginia took part in the 1961 Freedom Rides challenging segregated transportation in the Jim Crow South, and she recently welcomed the Black Voters Matter Freedom Ride for Voting Rights to Charleston. We're reprinting the full text of her remarks drawing on history to suggest paths to a more just future.

June 25, 2021 - A report from the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Inspector General found that several Southern states failed to deliver unemployment payments in a timely manner. In Georgia, for example, about 80,000 unemployment applications remain in limbo.