Justice
June 16, 2020 -
The 2015 massacre of nine churchgoers in Charleston by a Confederate flag-waving white supremacist spurred a movement to remove symbols of the Confederacy from public spaces. The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has propelled that movement forward.
June 9, 2020 -
Demonstrations against the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and police violence generally have spread to small towns like Siler City, North Carolina, home to a chicken-processing plant that's been hit hard by COVID-19. Residents connecting police violence to ICE violence came out by the hundreds to say that "las vidas negras importan."
June 4, 2020 -
Herbert Lee Wright passed away at age 92 last month in Arizona from complications related to the coronavirus. Though he doesn't appear prominently in U.S. history books, he played a critical role in shaping the modern Civil Rights Movement as the NAACP's national youth secretary from 1951 to 1962, defending students who participated in sit-ins and criticizing older leaders who wanted to end the protests.
June 3, 2020 -
As people took to the streets nationwide to condemn last week's Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, they were met in many places by tear gas, which is banned from use in war but still deployed domestically by police for crowd control. The tear gas canisters fired in recent protests in Minneapolis and many other cities were made by Florida-based Safariland, whose products have also been controversially used against asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border.
June 3, 2020 -
Stacked with appointments from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Florida Supreme Court is quickly overturning previous decisions that barred the death penalty for some defendants with intellectual disabilities and those who were sentenced by non-unanimous juries.
June 1, 2020 -
Poultry plants in Northwest Arkansas are seeing a surge in cases of the novel coronavirus. Worker advocates are demanding they be shut down, despite President Trump's executive order that they remain open.
June 1, 2020 -
Several chronic health conditions that disproportionately affect residents of Southern states are now considered potential risk factors for severe illness from COVID-19. As the country moves toward reopening, public health experts fear the pandemic could wreak havoc on vulnerable communities across the South.
