lynching

March 18, 2022 - More than a century after the first anti-lynching legislation was introduced in Congress by a Black member from North Carolina, lawmakers finally passed a bill that makes lynching a federal crime. Advocates hope that the new law will address the generational damage caused by racial violence and prevent modern-day lynchings from going unpunished.

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.

July 1, 2020 - Against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter uprising, a recent spate of suspicious hanging deaths of Black and Brown people nationwide sparks fears about the kind of vicious white backlash against Black progress the U.S. has seen before.  

May 21, 2020 - Previous efforts to pass a hate crimes law in Georgia have failed, but Ahmaud Arbery's killing has renewed the urgency to move legislation there. South Carolina is also once again considering putting a hate crime law on its books.

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.

May 7, 2018 - The photographs and reflections that follow describe sites of 19th- and 20th-century lynchings as they appear today. The images of the killing fields are not graphic. In fact, in their 21st-century forms, these and most other sites of Southern lynchings are disguised by natural beauty and the nothing-to-see-here normalcy of everyday life. Where the text conveys a history of brutality and details of depravity, the intent is not to shock but to offer an accurate record — long-hidden — of what happened in these places. It's a past that calls us all to witness and action.

September 21, 2017 - "An Outrage," a new documentary by Virginia-based filmmakers Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren, is being used to educate K-12 students about the brutality of lynching across the South.