History
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.
September 1, 2022 -
When North Carolina tobacco companies began manufacturing cigarettes in the 1880s, they needed skilled rollers, so they turned to Jewish immigrants on strike at cigarette factories in New York City. The bosses thought the workers wouldn't dare organize in the union-hostile South, but they were proven wrong.
August 29, 2022 -
Timothy B. Tyson, a historian of the South, calls Joshua D. Rothman's "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" one of the best history books he's ever read.
August 11, 2022 -
In 1982, Southern Exposure printed an interview with two leaders in the fight to recognize and compensate veterans who had been exposed to Agent Orange. The PACT Act passed by Congress earlier this month expands benefits for U.S. veterans with health problems caused by exposure to the toxin.