Forty-eight years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. The message was clear: The voices of minority voters would no longer be silenced at the polls. Though our country has made progress since 1965, the flood of controversial voting laws pushed by states in the wake of this decision only underscores the need for the Voting Rights Act.
A year ago today, a neo-Nazi walked into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and opened fire with a 9 mm pistol. The Sunday morning attack left six people dead and four others injured. The gunman, a white-power musician, eventually turned the gun on himself after a police officer shot him in the stomach.
The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal civil rights complaint today alleging that the Florida Department of Education is discriminating against black and Hispanic students by adopting a plan that sets lower academic expectations for students of color.
Earlier this week, I was honored to testify before a special Congressional panel on race and justice in America. I talked about the Zimmerman case, the unfinished business of the civil rights movement, and our work for justice and fairness in the courtrooms and classrooms of our country.
In what is believed to be a first in Alabama, a judge in Mobile County, Alabama has granted standard visitation rights to a lesbian mother without any overnight restriction on unmarried partners.
As LGBT people continue making strides toward equality in the United States, hard-line U.S. religious-right groups that have spent decades demonizing them are focusing their attention – and propaganda – on a legal battle over the criminalization of LGBT sex in Belize, the outcome of which could affect criminal statutes in as many as a dozen other Caribbean countries, according to a SPLC report released today.
Though debtors’ prison is supposed to be a thing of the past, a 60-year-old man in Baldwin County, Ala., spent two weeks in jail after failing to pay an $88 trash bill.
A federal appeals court upheld a lower court’s decision to block sections of South Carolina’s anti-immigrant law today, allowing an SPLC case challenging the law to continue and to potentially block a section of the law that allows police to act as immigration agents and demand an individual’s “papers.”
The SPLC praised Alabama’s top public school official for taking action today to ensure students are not blocked or discouraged from enrolling because they lack a Social Security number, a U.S. birth certificate or a parent with a state driver’s license.
A judge has denied a New Jersey organization’s motion to dismiss an SPLC lawsuit that accuses the group of consumer fraud for offering conversion therapy services – a dangerous and discredited practice that claims to convert people from gay to straight.
