race

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.

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.

October 10, 2019 - Reed, who is African-American, was convicted in 1998 of raping and murdering a white woman based on DNA evidence — but he says they were having a secret affair, which the woman's cousin confirms. The case fits a pattern of questionable convictions of Black men for crimes against whites in Texas.

April 11, 2018 - President Trump is reversing several decades of progress on racial diversity — and the Senate is confirming his overwhelmingly white judicial nominees at a record pace.

July 14, 2017 - Two years ago this week Sandra Bland was found dead inside a Texas jail cell. Last month Texas passed a law named in her honor, but it focuses on mental health issues in jails and ignores the other factors that contributed to her suicide.

February 12, 2016 - North Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature redrew congressional districts to make two of them majority-black — and then moved this year's primary up two months. Now, with absentee voting already underway, those districts have been ruled unconstitutional and the legislature ordered to draw new ones.

January 28, 2016 - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's remarks at a town hall this week seemed to revive the old, discredited idea that post-Civil War Reconstruction was a mistake. Her campaign has since issued a clarification, but the controversy shows that the debate over Reconstruction is far from over.