suicide

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.

March 3, 2022 - While reporting on the human rights crisis in Alabama's prisons, journalist Beth Shelburne began corresponding with incarcerated men in the state about their fight to read. She recounts their ongoing battles against censorship inside an irrational system where books and magazines are treated like dangerous contraband.

July 8, 2016 - With federal officials saying they've found nothing to prove the 2014 hanging death of the 17-year-old North Carolina youth was not self-inflicted, his death joins a list of other hangings of black men that have been ruled suicides despite suspicions of foul play. Another happened just this week in Atlanta.

September 1, 2015 - It's been a year since the body of an African-American teen named Lennon Lacy was found hanging from a swing set in Bladenboro, N.C. under circumstances that have led many to question the official suicide ruling. At last week's memorial service for Lacy, state NAACP officials provided updates on the still-open case, offering hope that the truth will be revealed.

December 5, 2014 - The August hanging death of a black teen in a small North Carolina town was quickly ruled a suicide, but the conclusion is being challenged by the victim's family and an independent pathologist hired by the N.C. NAACP. The incident is the latest in a disturbing series of hangings of black men that have some wondering whether lynchings have continued into the post-civil rights era.

December 1, 1989 - This article originally appeared in Southern Exposure Vol. 17 No. 4, "Facing the '90s." Find more from that issue here.