Ku Klux Klan
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.
January 27, 2022 -
As the N.C. Supreme Court prepares to hear a lawsuit challenging gerrymandered election districts, a prominent Republican leader has brought up the possibility of the legislature impeaching judges. It hasn't happened in well over a century, when white supremacist Democrats impeached two justices, as well as a Klan-fighting governor.
October 8, 2020 -
Meet the state lawmakers up for reelection in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee who champion the Lost Cause version of history that claims that the Civil War was not about slavery and the Klan were the good guys. Also meet who's funding their campaigns.
June 18, 2019 -
The man who gunned down his three Muslim neighbors in Chapel Hill in 2015 has pleaded guilty to their murders, but he couldn't be charged under North Carolina's hate crime law because it doesn't cover felonies. That's just one of many weaknesses in those state laws, which advocates are trying to strengthen.
April 10, 2019 -
Though better known these days for erecting statues to Confederate veterans during the Jim Crow era, the United Daughters of the Confederacy also promoted white supremacist Lost Cause propaganda through their campaigns to control history textbooks used in the South's public schools. That miseducation continues to haunt our politics today.
September 26, 2018 -
After former Confederate states drafted progressive constitutions that allowed black men to hold office for the first time, there was violent resistance to black power at the local level. During the Jim Crow era, legislatures rewrote those constitutions to give themselves broad power to override local governments.
August 31, 2018 -
Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh previously worked as an attorney for the George W. Bush White House, where he promoted the federal appeals court nomination of Charles Pickering — a Mississippi attorney with a history of hostility to civil rights.