slavery

May 11, 2023 - Ben Barber interviewed UNC law professor and anti-poverty scholar Gene Nichol about his new book, “Lessons from North Carolina: Race, Religion, Tribe, and the Future of America,” which offers insights from North Carolina politics aimed at countering the nationwide assault on democratic norms and values.

November 18, 2022 - Voters across the South weighed in on dozens of high-profile ballot initiatives in this year's general election, directly shaping policy on matters including reproductive rights, prison labor, and ballot measures themselves. In another election to be held next month, Louisiana voters will consider three ballot measures, including one to bar noncitizens from voting in local elections.

August 29, 2022 - Timothy B. Tyson, a historian of the South, calls Joshua D. Rothman's "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" one of the best history books he's ever read.

June 10, 2022 - Facing South talked with Kim Kelly, a labor reporter and author of "Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor," about the lessons from the past her book holds for workers organizing in today's increasingly diverse South.

May 4, 2022 - If you've never witnessed or experienced a school paddling, it may be hard to understand how terrifying they are to a child. Yet U.S. public school teachers and principals in 19 states are allowed to beat children with wooden paddles, which originated as a tool to inflict pain on enslaved people without causing permanent injury that might impede their work.

July 7, 2021 - Geeta N. Kapur, a North Carolina civil rights attorney and UNC-Chapel Hill alumna who has a book coming out in August about the school's fraught racial history, says it should come as no surprise that journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones — a Black woman bold enough to speak truth to power — was initially denied tenure by the school and then granted it only begrudgingly. Tenure would have given her a degree of academic freedom to reveal other truths that some don't want to hear.

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.