Arkansas

October 29, 2021 - The Republicans who control legislatures in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas have drawn congressional maps that favor their party and disadvantage voters of color. Meanwhile, an independent redistricting commission has faltered in its effort to draw new election maps in Virginia.

October 1, 2021 - In 1974, Southern Exposure, the print forerunner to Facing South, published an issue of oral histories that included recollections of people who'd been involved with the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union. Many of them refer to the Elaine Massacre, a mass murder of rural Black Arkansans by white mobs in response to sharecropper organizing attempts that took place 102 years ago this week. We're reprinting those oral histories in memory of the massacre.

October 1, 2021 - This week marks the 102nd anniversary of the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas, when a union organizing attempt by Black sharecroppers was met with deadly violence by mobs of white people. From the archives of Southern Exposure, the print forerunner to Facing South, we're republishing an account of the tragedy drawn in part from oral histories of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union that appeared in the same issue.

August 20, 2021 - A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists finds an "alarming" level of concentration in Arkansas's chicken industry. Facing South spoke with the report's author about the implications of such high levels of concentration for farmers, workers, and consumers, and possible policy solutions.

August 20, 2021 - A professor confronts the deadly role misinformation has played in the white evangelical Christian church amid a COVID-19 resurgence in his home state of Arkansas, and he shares a still-unfinished poem written by his wife — an emergency physician — about her experience confronting the wages of bearing false witness.

July 13, 2021 - At a series of events hosted by the Marshallese Educational Initiative, Marshallese leaders in Arkansas discussed the public health inequities their community faces as a result of the U.S. nuclear legacy, climate change, and government policy.

May 13, 2021 - Measures under consideration in states including several in the South are being promoted as protecting the privacy of people who donate to nonprofits. But because the bills don't distinguish between charitable nonprofits and those that engage in partisan politics, they could make it harder to know who's trying to influence elections.