jesse helms

May 1, 2024 - This year will be the first election cycle to be impacted by the widespread use of artificial intelligence, technology that could spread disinformation that impacts already marginalized communities. State and federal lawmakers are now scrambling to implement measures to help safeguard the electoral process.

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.

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.

November 20, 2018 - The lame-duck North Carolina legislature convenes Nov. 27 to write a new voter ID law after the version it passed in 2013 was struck down for targeting black voters "with almost surgical precision." The same week, the U.S. Senate could vote to confirm to a federal judgeship a lawyer who helped draft the discriminatory law. 

August 29, 2018 - This week's federal ruling that North Carolina's congressional maps are unconstitutionally designed for GOP advantage adds to the uncertainty over the looming election. But it also offers a chance for the state's voters to cast their ballots in a fair contest for the first time in years — as long as Trump's Supreme Court nominee doesn't get in the way.

January 17, 2018 - Thomas Farr's nomination to serve as a federal judge in eastern North Carolina has met opposition because of his involvement in efforts to suppress the African-American vote. Less well-known are his efforts to quash workers' organizing rights.

June 23, 2016 - This week, 52 years to the day after three young men were murdered in Mississippi while working to expand voting rights to African Americans, a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in a challenge to North Carolina's restrictive new voting law that disproportionately impacts African Americans.