The Southern Poverty Law Center and civil rights groups filed an emergency lawsuit after Cobb County, Georgia, election officials failed to send out more than 3,000 absentee ballots to voters ahead of a Nov. 5, 2024, deadline to return their ballots by mail.
The...
After Georgia’s Walton County School District expelled and referred a Black middle school student with a disability to juvenile court, it denied the student the necessary support and services in its alternative school program, sparking two discrimination complaints by the Southern Poverty Law...
With about a month left until the general election in 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU of Georgia, the American Civil Liberties Union and Akerman LLP intervened in a lawsuit filed against election officials in Oconee County, Georgia. In that case, the plaintiff asked the court to...
In 2021, the state of Georgia enacted SB 202, a voter suppression law with provisions allowing state elections officials to usurp the powers of local officials, including the authority to purge individual voters from the list of active, registered voters.
In this 2024 case, two residents...
The Southern Poverty Law Center and its partners filed a lawsuit on behalf of parents of public school students facing discrimination under a state law that fails to provide them with a process for appealing decisions banning books from school libraries despite providing an appeals process for...
In March 2024, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed Senate Bill 1 (SB 1), a sweeping new voter suppression law that targets, restricts and severely punishes civic engagement efforts that encourage voting and enable access to the ballot box.
The following month, a coalition of civil rights, voting...
With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to deliver the most significant ruling in 40 years on the rights of people experiencing homelessness, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed an amicus brief defending their rights.
The amicus brief was filed in Johnson v. Grants Pass, which...
Katie Rinderle, a fifth-grade gifted specialist in the Cobb County School District in Georgia, was fired from her teaching job in 2023 for reading to her class My Shadow is Purple, an age-appropriate picture book about self-acceptance and navigating gender stereotypes.
In...
After a Florida law blocked transgender and nonbinary teachers from using the pronouns and titles that best express themselves, the Southern Poverty Law Center and its partners filed a lawsuit on behalf of three teachers challenging the anti-LGBTQ+ statute.
The lawsuit describes how the...
On Aug. 9, 2023, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, suspended Monique Worrell, a Democrat, from her elected position as state attorney for Orange and Osceola counties because of his opposition to her...
