Stories
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
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60 years after Bloody Sunday, legacy of martyrs guides fight for voting rights
Sixty years ago today, hundreds of ordinary Americans came together for one of the most historic protests in this nation’s history. They met in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge with an inflexible mission: to get the Voting Rights Act (VRA) passed and enshrine Black people’s right…
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
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60 years after Bloody Sunday, foot soldiers address current threats to democracy
If she hadn’t been Black, Lynda Blackmon Lowery’s mother would have lived. That’s what a then-7-year-old Lowery heard from the adults around her on Sept. 19, 1957. “That was the day I found out what hate really was,” Lowery said. Her mother had experienced complications during the birth of one of Lowery’s younger siblings, and…
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
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Alabama artist, activist takes on maternal mortality crisis facing Black women
Two years ago, Michelle Browder converted a camper van into a mobile medical resource center for pregnant women. She equipped the van with medical supplies to check vital signs, blood pressure and glucose levels, as well as information on health and nutrition. A local artist, entrepreneur and activist, Browder and her team hit the road,…
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
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Educators calculate their risks in class as states escalate anti-DEI pressure
At Miami Norland Senior High School in Miami Gardens, Florida, Renee O’Connor continues to teach students about Ida B. Wells, James Baldwin and The 1619 Project in her African American history class. She does this despite the ban on teaching the Pulitzer Prize-winning reexamination of African American enslavement and legacy in the state’s public schools,…
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
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How Meta’s policy updates could encourage hate and threaten democracy
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced significant changes to how the company will moderate its social media content. The changes could have far-reaching and dire effects for democracy and for people who have historically been targeted by online hate, experts and advocates say. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, revised its…
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
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Advocates fight for voting rights of formerly incarcerated people in Mississippi
Editor’s note: This story is presented as a tribute to the life of Cynetra Freeman and the work of the organization she founded, the Mississippi Center for Reentry, a Southern Poverty Law Center Vote Your Voice grant recipient. Freeman died late last year, after the SPLC interviewed her for this story. The SPLC extends its…
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- Eliminating Poverty
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Tour highlights race-based poverty and inequity across Mississippi Delta region
Interstate highways have dramatically compressed parts of the United States. But when you get off the big federal roadways, the ground unfurls for miles in every direction. Nowhere is that truer than driving into the Mississippi Delta. The green mile markers and clip-clop of expansion joints give way to huge expanses of farmland, the occasional…
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
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Vote Your Voice: Florida Justice Center critical to returning citizens
J.S. showed up at the Fort Lauderdale office of the Florida Justice Center (FLJC) this past fall to find out if he was qualified to vote in the presidential election. A 50-year-old Black man, J.S., whose name has been abbreviated in this story to protect his identity, had been out of prison for years after…
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
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Alabama’s newly elected Black member of Congress stands on shoulders of family
Shomari Figures has lived his entire life in the shadow of public service. His uncle was an assistant U.S. attorney. His father, Michael Figures, was a civil rights lawyer who served in the Alabama Senate for 18 years. When his father died in 1996, his mother won his seat and took up the fight for…
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
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Westside Atlanta entrepreneur heads SPLC project to build office complex there
Before it can build the springboard for the community outreach it envisions for its offices in Atlanta, the Southern Poverty Law Center is taking a community first approach. Who better than someone who has spent two decades doing just that? To bring to reality its dream of a vibrant office campus that will help…