Politics

April 8, 2021 - Riggs, an attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, led the successful legal fight against North Carolina's 2013 voter suppression bill. She talked with Facing South about the ongoing attacks on voting, legal strategies for combating new voter suppression bills, and her hopes for the future of voting rights.

April 1, 2021 - Young people are among those whose access to the ballot would be limited under a restrictive new voting law passed in Georgia, a state that once led the nation in empowering the youth vote. Congress should act to lift these limits and shore up young people's eroding faith in democracy by passing the For the People Act.

March 26, 2021 - Facing South recently spoke with Thomas Healy, author of "Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia." The book documents civil rights leader Floyd McKissick's pursuit of Black opportunity in the form of a Black-led model integrated community on a former slave plantation in Eastern North Carolina, and the lessons the quest and its failure holds for today.

March 24, 2021 - U.S. senators are currently considering whether to eliminate, reform, or protect the filibuster. The parliamentary procedure that gives the minority outsized power has a long history of being used to undermine civil rights legislation — and it now threatens to derail a bold Democratic agenda that includes voting rights and other pro-democracy reforms.

March 23, 2021 - The organizer who pioneered politically transformative get-out-the-vote efforts in Georgia is now using that existing infrastructure to get some of the state's most vulnerable residents vaccinated against COVID-19.

March 17, 2021 - The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the ongoing loss of hospital beds in rural communities across the South. The greatest losses were in Tennessee — among the states that haven't expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The rate of rural hospital closures in non-expansion states is six times greater than in states that expanded the program.

March 17, 2021 - Water being delivered by truck in Mississippi's capital city. The electrical grid collapse in Texas. The hacking of a Florida water treatment plant. All of these appear at first glance to be infrastructure failures, but at their root is a failure of politics.