Stories
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- Eliminating Poverty and Economic Inequality
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Head Start, a lifeline for families with children, faces federal funding cuts
Editor’s note: This is the second story in the “Cuts & Consequences” series about the effects that federal spending reductions would have on people living in the Deep South. The path Sanquinn Jackson and his daughter followed from day care to Head Start began as a “dark before the dawn” story. Jackson’s daughter came home…
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- Eliminating Poverty and Economic Inequality
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Medicaid funding cuts may cause ripple effects on health care across the nation
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories about the effects that federal spending cuts would have on people living in the Deep South. During an annual exam last year, doctors spotted a mass on the abdomen of Angelica McCain’s 10-year-old daughter. They were sent immediately to the emergency room, where McCain…
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
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Struggle for control of public libraries in full swing across the Deep South
No one used to envision libraries as battlefields. But in 2025, that’s what they have become. Across the South over the last decade, control of what happens on bookshelves has turned into a pitched battle, with white supremacist and Christian nationalist groups on one side facing off against an unlikely coalition of progressives, educators, Black…
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
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Changes in tone, intent mark 60th Anniversary Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee
For the last six decades, people have returned to the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge each year. They have come to remember the pain and suffering early Civil Rights Movement foot soldiers endured. The 60th Anniversary Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee, a weeklong event, commemorated March 7, 1965, when marchers were brutally beaten by white Alabama…
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
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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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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
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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…