university of north carolina

September 27, 2023 - Facing South is republishing a piece from the 1985 Southern Exposure issue, “We Are Here Forever: Indians of the South,” with an introduction by author Forest Hazel, a historian for the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation in North Carolina.

September 21, 2021 - Chapel Hill has a reputation as a liberal town, but it's always been a racially unjust society — in large part because of the actions of the University of North Carolina, the nation's oldest public university. The same school that once denied clean water to its Black workers and their families now dumps toxic coal plant pollution on them.

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.

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.

February 14, 2020 - WUNC, a National Public Radio member station serving North Carolina's Research Triangle region, regularly airs promotional spots underwritten by Duke Energy. NC WARN has filed a complaint about them, saying they cross the line into ads, which are banned from noncommercial radio. The University of Arkansas recently settled a similar complaint against two stations it operates.

December 5, 2019 - As the N.C. Supreme Court decides whether to move a prominent portrait of a slave-owning justice, lower courts are hearing lawsuits involving Confederate monuments. One judge recently signed a controversial settlement order in which UNC agreed to give a pro-Confederate group $2.5 million to care for a statue toppled by anti-racist protesters.

May 2, 2018 - Despite years of protests by students, the "Silent Sam" Confederate memorial still stands in a prominent place on the campus of UNC's flagship school. This week UNC history grad student Maya Little doused the statue with her own blood in an act she said was aimed at providing needed context. This is Little's statement about her protest.