Race and Civil Rights

January 14, 2016 - A new report looks at the demographics of state legislatures across the country and finds that in the South they are disproportionately male and more religious. They are also more racially diverse — at least for now.

January 8, 2016 - Since President Obama launched the White House Police Data Initiative last year, citizens have mobilized to bring data on police traffic stops and use of force to the public in easy-to-use online formats.

December 4, 2015 - Decades before the "sharing economy," African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama used Rosa Parks' arrest to organize a sophisticated city transit system that made the bus boycott a success and became a symbol of the power of collective action for the Southern civil rights struggle.

December 4, 2015 - This week the N.C. NAACP, voting rights advocates and faith leaders kicked off an 80-day mass voter engagement campaign in the run-up to the March primary — a nonpartisan effort to resist recent efforts by state leaders to make voting harder.

November 25, 2015 - Outgoing Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) signed an executive order this week to automatically restore voting rights to certain felons. The state is among several in the South with harsh felony disenfranchisement laws that disproportionately deprive African-American citizens of access to the ballot.

November 5, 2015 - A new study finds that candidates running for office nationwide are less diverse in terms of race and gender than the broader U.S. population. In the South, the situation is particularly dire for representation among women.

November 3, 2015 - News stories that ask what went wrong with the South too often fail to capture the context of its intergenerational poverty: centuries of enslavement and systemic discrimination that resulted in the immense racial disparities we see today. And it's not just a Southern problem — it's an American one.