RACIAL JUSTICE: The South's growing movement for change

By Chris Kromm / July 8, 2020

Articles in this series

How Art Pope's money shaped UNC's toxic debate over Nikole Hannah-Jones

By Sue Sturgis
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.

Oriaku Njoku on envisioning a South where reproductive justice is a reality

By Jessica Agbemavor
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.

VOICES: How students can fight back against attacks on their voting rights

By Jeffrey Clemmons
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.

VOICES: On UNC's troubled racial past and present

By Geeta N. Kapur
July 7, 2021 - Geeta N. Kapur, a North Carolina civil rights attorney and UNC-Chapel Hill alumna who has a book coming out in August about the school's fraught racial history, says it should come as no surprise that journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones — a Black woman bold enough to speak truth to power — was initially denied tenure by the school and then granted it only begrudgingly. Tenure would have given her a degree of academic freedom to reveal other truths that some don't want to hear.

A look at the first official act of reparations in Georgia

By Adina Solomon
June 29, 2021 - In the 1960s, Athens's urban renewal program evicted a Black neighborhood through eminent domain to build dorms for University of Georgia students. In response to displaced families' demands, Athens-Clarke County has set aside money dedicated to public projects of their choosing, a form of reparations for the community that was lost.
Alabama prisoner in blood-soaked clothing

VOICES: Prison violence like Alabama's demands a national reckoning

By Robert T. Chase
June 18, 2021 - Despite lawsuits instituting reforms, state prisons across the U.S. continue to be places of physical and sexual violence, especially against incarcerated people of color. Conditions got so bad in Alabama's prisons that the federal government recently sued the state for violating the Constitution. Robert T. Chase, a historian of prisons, says they need the same kind of scrutiny now faced by police.

Low-wage care workers rally for the American Jobs Plan

By Rebekah Barber
June 16, 2021 - Home care workers, most of whom are women of color, are among the most underpaid workers in the U.S., and the situation is especially dire in the low-wage South. In North Carolina, care workers recently rallied to call on federal lawmakers to support President Biden's American Jobs Plan, which would increase their pay and on-the-job protections.

Dorothy Brown on racism in the tax code

By Elisha Brown
June 11, 2021 - The Emory law professor and author of "The Whiteness of Wealth" calls for returning to a progressive income taxation system and establishing a tax credit as compensation for systemic racism. She also argues that simply publishing tax data by race could make the public angry enough to want to change the federal tax system.

INSTITUTE INDEX: Debt relief is on the way for Black farmers

By Sue Sturgis
June 3, 2021 - Black farmers will start receiving their first payments this month under the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act. Sponsored by Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, it was part of the latest COVID-19 stimulus and has been called the most significant legislation for Black farmers since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the Texas agriculture commissioner and former Trump adviser Stephen Miller are among those involved in lawsuits to halt the payments, arguing they're unfair to whites.

For Magaly Licolli, organizing poultry workers starts with learning together

By Olivia Paschal
June 1, 2021 - Licolli co-founded the group Venceremos to organize poultry workers in Northwest Arkansas and now serves as its director, a position she previously held at the now-defunct Northwest Arkansas Workers' Justice Center. In this oral history interview, she talks to Facing South about her upbringing in Mexico, how her theater education plays into her organizing strategy, sexism's impact on worker organizing, and lessons she's learned through her work.

VOICES: A step toward occupational licensing fairness for Georgians with criminal records

By DJ Sims
May 27, 2021 - Gov. Brian Kemp recently signed into law a bill that would bar Georgia's many licensing boards from denying credentials to people on probation or parole for many crimes. That's an important step toward fair chance licensing, says DJ Sims, a reentry organizer in Georgia — but additional reforms are needed to ensure that people who've served their time are able to make a living.  

The University of Arkansas's hidden history of helping Nazis

By Michael Adkison
April 30, 2021 - In the early 1930s, a German lawyer named Heinrich Krieger enrolled in the University of Arkansas as an exchange student to study American race law. When he returned to Nazi Germany, his studies directly contributed to shaping the antisemitic and white supremacist Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1935, to genocidal ends. The university is now confronting various racist chapters in its history, but Krieger's is not among them.

The long road to nuclear justice for the Marshallese people

By Olivia Paschal
April 2, 2021 - U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the 1940s and 1950s displaced residents of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, many of whom later settled in Northwest Arkansas. Decades later, they're still fighting for justice for the devastation of their health and homeland, now also threatened by rising seas from climate change. 

Revisiting the Black power dream of North Carolina's Soul City

By Rebekah Barber
March 26, 2021 - Facing South recently spoke with Thomas Healy, author of "Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia." The book documents civil rights leader Floyd McKissick's pursuit of Black opportunity in the form of a Black-led model integrated community on a former slave plantation in Eastern North Carolina, and the lessons the quest and its failure holds for today.

Confronting the anti-civil rights filibuster

By Benjamin Barber
March 24, 2021 - U.S. senators are currently considering whether to eliminate, reform, or protect the filibuster. The parliamentary procedure that gives the minority outsized power has a long history of being used to undermine civil rights legislation — and it now threatens to derail a bold Democratic agenda that includes voting rights and other pro-democracy reforms.

As states crack down on voting, advocates look to Congress

By Benjamin Barber
March 10, 2021 - Republican lawmakers nationwide have introduced over 250 bills this year to restrict voting access in 43 states — 39 bills in Georgia alone. Given the backlash against last year's record-breaking voter turnout playing out at the state level, voting rights advocates are looking to Congress and the promise of H.R. 1, which has now advanced to the U.S. Senate. But can it get past the filibuster?

The campaign to overturn Trump's truth-denying equity gag order

By Rebekah Barber
December 3, 2020 - Partly in response to the acclaim for Nikole Hannah-Jones's The 1619 Project on slavery's legacy in the U.S., President Trump recently signed an executive order that seeks to stifle federal agencies, contractors, and grant recipients from talking about systemic racism and sexism. Refusing to be silenced, the African American Policy Forum has launched an effort to overturn it.

VOICES: Deconstructing the systems crushing the South's young people in the pandemic

By Victoria Bowden
December 4, 2020 - Victoria Bowden, 25, of Stone Mountain, Georgia, shares her and other young people's difficult experiences trying to get by during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now a graduate student intern with the Southern Economic Advancement Project, she offers practical ideas for fixing the systems that put young Southerners at risk of heavy debt, poverty, homelessness, and mental illness.

THE STAKES 2020: Catherine Coleman Flowers on the environmental justice movement and elections

By Rebekah Barber
October 23, 2020 - Across the rural South's Black Belt, the lack of adequate sewage and water infrastructure has created serious public health problems. We spoke with Catherine Coleman Flowers, a longtime environmental justice activist in rural Alabama and the recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, about her work to draw attention to the region's intersecting crises and how grassroots activism can impact federal policy. 

Remembering our elders: John Lewis recalls the Nashville sit-ins

By Olivia Paschal
July 18, 2020 - Congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia), who became a leader in the Civil Rights Movement as a student and chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for several years before being elected to Congress in 1987, has died at age 80. In this 1980 interview with Lewis, he recalls the Nashville sit-ins and the deep faith he had in the Movement.  

Mab Segrest on building a Southern freedom movement for all

By Grace Abels
July 16, 2020 - In 1988, Southern Exposure, the print forerunner of Facing South, published a speech by Segrest, a North Carolina anti-racist organizer and lesbian activist, for an issue on lesbians and gays in the South. Segrest went on to write several books, including "Memoir of a Race Traitor," and to teach college in Connecticut. Back in North Carolina again, Segrest recently talked with Facing South about the urgency of broad-based organizing in this historic moment.

THE STAKES 2020: Aranza Sosa on voting out racist officials in a rural North Carolina county

By Olivia Paschal
October 19, 2020 - Alamance County, North Carolina, has been the site of recent protests over a local Confederate monument, and its sheriff has long been accused of racism for public comments and his participation in ICE's controversial 287(g) program. We spoke with local activist Aranza Sosa about growing up in the shadow of 287(g) and the power of elected officials who come from the same background she does.

A poll tax by any other name

By Dana Sweeney
July 9, 2020 - States across the country require people with felony convictions to purchase their voting rights back if they ever want to cast a ballot again. It is a mechanism that felony disenfranchisement schemes increasingly rely upon, and it marks a return to the sordid tactics of Jim Crow.

INSTITUTE INDEX: Confronting the GOP's poll watcher threats

By Sue Sturgis
October 2, 2020 - This presidential election will be the first in 40 years to take place without a consent decree in place requiring the Republican National Committee to refrain from voter intimidation under the guise of ballot security. With President Trump urging his supporters to go to the polls and "watch very carefully," we look at what the law says about such activity and how voting rights advocates are responding.

North Carolina visual artist auctions work for racial justice

By Keona Frasier
June 17, 2020 - Antoine Williams, an art professor at Guilford College in Greensboro, produces mixed media artwork informed by critical race theory. He recently auctioned off two of his works to benefit Black Lives Matter and other groups working for racial justice — part of a broader effort by the art world to take a stand against racism. What Williams hoped to sell in two weeks was gone in 30 minutes, so now he's planning his next steps.

Galvanized by George Floyd's killing, Black mothers rise up to fight systemic poverty

By Rebekah BarberBenjamin Barber
June 17, 2020 - As he died at the hands of Minneapolis police, Floyd called out for his mother — rending the hearts of Black mothers nationwide and spurring many to take part in street protests. Some of those same Black mothers will also be taking part in the Poor People's Campaign's virtual mass rally on June 20, and they are drawing connections between police violence and policy violence.

VOICES: A prayer for Mother Emanuel, and for all of us

By John Cooper
June 17, 2020 - This week marks five years since the racist massacre of black worshippers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The grim anniversary finds America in turmoil over police violence and a global pandemic that also reveals our racial divisions. While we tend to think our nation's story is always getting better, recent events make that hope hard to sustain, writes South Carolina native John Cooper.

Poverty continues to prevent many ex-felons from voting

By Benjamin Barber
September 9, 2020 - As states across the country gear up for the November elections, millions of formerly incarcerated people could be blocked from voting because of laws requiring them to first pay all court fines and fees. But voting rights advocates are challenging those laws — and they recently racked up a big win in North Carolina.

INSTITUTE INDEX: Police use tear gas banned from war on protesters at home

By Sue Sturgis
June 3, 2020 - As people took to the streets nationwide to condemn last week's Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, they were met in many places by tear gas, which is banned from use in war but still deployed domestically by police for crowd control. The tear gas canisters fired in recent protests in Minneapolis and many other cities were made by Florida-based Safariland, whose products have also been controversially used against asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border.