Race and Civil Rights
February 25, 2016 -
This week a bipartisan group of House and Senate leaders bestowed the Congressional Gold Medal on the Alabama protest marchers who helped win passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. But there's little bipartisan unity on restoring provisions of the law gutted by the Supreme Court, and some marchers are speaking out about it.
February 19, 2016 -
This year the U.S. electorate is expected to be the most diverse ever, and that growing diversity has the potential to alter the political landscape in the conservative South.
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.
February 5, 2016 -
After the federal trial over North Carolina's restrictive voter ID law wrapped up this week, voting rights advocates turned their attention to preparing for a Feb. 13 mass march on Raleigh where organizers will mobilize volunteers to help with voter registration, education and protection.
January 29, 2016 -
Voting rights activists in a number of Southern states have taken state and federal election district maps to court in recent years — and the cases are going their way.
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.
January 20, 2016 -
After 40 years as a public-interest attorney, Lewis Pitts retired from practicing law in North Carolina. But he didn't merely let his N.C. State Bar membership go inactive: He fought for the right to resign, citing his profession's "hunt for profit" that's led it to serve the political and business establishment instead of fighting for justice for all. This is his resignation letter.
