History
August 3, 2018 -
Thirty years ago, the Institute for Southern Studies published a special issue of Southern Exposure magazine on the human rights crisis along the U.S. border with Mexico. Here we reprint "Valley So Low," about how asylum seekers from civil war-ravaged Central America were being arrested and held in immigrant detention centers in Texas — a story that sheds light on U.S. immigration policy today.
June 29, 2018 -
Dealing a blow to the labor movement that will disproportionately affect people of color, the conservative majority's ruling that public-sector workers represented by unions should be able to pay nothing for that representation endorses a policy first promoted in the 1940s South by pro-segregation business interests hostile to organized labor because of its work on behalf of racial justice.
June 15, 2018 -
The workers said their arrests were meant to honor the "Charleston Five" — union members placed under house arrest nearly 20 years ago for taking part in protests to save union jobs at the Port of Charleston.
June 15, 2018 -
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. We look back at his historic tour of one of the poorest and most oppressed regions of the United States with a short documentary video by Facing South intern Junior Walters.
June 8, 2018 -
The United Daughters of the Confederacy didn't just memorialize Confederate veterans. It also memorialized the Ku Klux Klan and shared its ideology of white supremacy.
May 10, 2018 -
As federal courts have released some school districts from orders requiring desegregation, schools in the South have become more racially segregated than they've been in 50 years. Trump's judicial nominees and his Department of Justice could make things worse.
May 7, 2018 -
The photographs and reflections that follow describe sites of 19th- and 20th-century lynchings as they appear today. The images of the killing fields are not graphic. In fact, in their 21st-century forms, these and most other sites of Southern lynchings are disguised by natural beauty and the nothing-to-see-here normalcy of everyday life. Where the text conveys a history of brutality and details of depravity, the intent is not to shock but to offer an accurate record — long-hidden — of what happened in these places. It's a past that calls us all to witness and action.