December 17, 2021 -
Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi are among the states with the lowest vaccination rates. Grassroots organizations there are partnering with public health officials to battle misinformation and distrust in rural, Latino, and Black communities — but elected officials in those states aren't making their jobs any easier.
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 16, 2021 -
Southern states' new Republican-drawn election maps would mean less political power for communities of color in the Black Belt region. Voters there are now asking state and federal courts to decide if the new districts violate state or federal law, including the Voting Rights Act.
December 15, 2021 -
A hurricane-harried African American town lives with the specter of future disaster.
December 10, 2021 -
In its first lawsuit to come out of the latest round of redistricting, the U.S. Department of Justice has taken aim at Texas, arguing that the GOP legislature's new election district maps violate the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against voters by race or color. We look at some of the numbers cited in the lawsuit, which faces an uphill fight in the new legal landscape created by the Supreme Court's 2013 decision gutting the landmark civil rights-era law.
December 6, 2021 -
Prisons inflate the political representation of the communities that host them — without any say from prisoners themselves.
