Forty-eight years ago, SPLC founder Morris Dees stood at the Alabama Capitol at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march and heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak on the importance of the vote in democracy. In his view, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the section that contains extra voting rights protections that apply mainly to the South — is still necessary.
Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court is a blow to Arizona’s anti-immigrant law and similar copycat laws that have sprung up in other states. The court’s decision affirms that much about these laws is unconstitutional because many of their provisions are preempted by federal law. The decision also shows the court has significant concerns about the one provision they allowed to stand.
Fifty years after young people braved fire hoses and police dogs to end segregation in Birmingham, Ala., their courageous acts were commemorated in the nation’s capital last night as congressional staffers, SPLC members, civil rights advocates and journalists gathered for a screening of Teaching Tolerance’s Academy Award-winning documentary Mighty Times: The Children’s March.
Theo Shaw remembers searching through a law book for answers while sitting in a jail cell. It was 2006. Shaw and Robert Bailey Jr. were two teenagers desperate to find something in the law that could help them get out of jail. “We were looking for hope,” Shaw said. “We were looking to file anything we needed to file to get out.”
Despite a settlement agreement to end the abusive conditions at Mississippi’s largest juvenile detention facility, a court monitor's report shows that officials at the Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Center have failed to meet even one of the agreement’s 71 provisions.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is going to court today to help domestic farmworkers and foreign guestworkers recover millions of dollars in wages they were never paid after performing backbreaking work.
Teaching Tolerance Director Maureen Costello appeared yesterday on CNN to discuss National Mix It Up at Lunch Day and to address the American Family Association’s (AFA) bizarre attack on the anti-bias program.
Hannah Bradley and her classmates simply wanted to raise awareness about anti-gay bullying at their high school. So on Oct. 11 – National Coming Out Day – the students wore name tags stating their orientation.
