History
September 26, 2018 -
After former Confederate states drafted progressive constitutions that allowed black men to hold office for the first time, there was violent resistance to black power at the local level. During the Jim Crow era, legislatures rewrote those constitutions to give themselves broad power to override local governments.
September 13, 2018 -
In 1868, Southern states held constitutional conventions in which recently freed black men helped eliminate vestiges of the Confederacy and draft progressive blueprints for state government. While some of the provisions survived Jim Crow, conservative politicians today are chipping away at Reconstruction's radical legacy.
September 12, 2018 -
The state's refusal to move inmates being held in what are now hurricane evacuation zones puts lives at risk and violates international human rights standards.
September 12, 2018 -
Cooperatives have a deep history in the South, and especially in African-American communities. A growing number of co-ops in North Carolina are drawing on that rich history to fill gaps created by economic inequality.
August 31, 2018 -
Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh previously worked as an attorney for the George W. Bush White House, where he promoted the federal appeals court nomination of Charles Pickering — a Mississippi attorney with a history of hostility to civil rights.
August 22, 2018 -
Responding to protesters' toppling of the "Silent Sam" Confederate monument on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus this week, the student government's undergraduate executive branch issued this powerful statement praising the action and calling for further steps to ensure that every student feels welcomed.
August 14, 2018 -
Several lawsuits seek to keep proposed state constitutional amendments off the ballot this November — and one filed by the state NAACP and Clean Air Carolina seeks to have the racially gerrymandered legislature declared illegitimate and blocked from changing the blueprint of state government.