The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed suit against the town of Homer, La., and two of its former police officers on behalf of the family of an elderly black man who was shot to death by one of the officers while standing harmlessly on his front porch.
In one of the largest settlements of its kind, an Arkansas forestry company has agreed to pay $2.75 million to settle the legal claims of foreign guestworkers who say they were cheated out of the wages they earned planting trees for the company.
After a drastic decline in civil rights enforcement by the U.S. Justice Department over much of the past decade, President Obama's declaration during the State of the Union Address that his administration is "once again prosecuting civil rights violations" is a promising sign.
More than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education offered the hope of integrated classrooms, today's schools not only remain racially segregated, but are dividing along gender lines, sexual orientation and immigration status in the name of better education, according to the Spring 2010 issue of Teaching Tolerance magazine.
As we look forward to 2010, all of us at the SPLC would like to thank our friends and supporters for their help in our fight against injustice. Together, we will push back against the forces of hate and extremism, win justice for abused children and exploited workers, teach lessons of tolerance to millions of students and much more.
An Alabama student's school never evaluated him for special education services, even though his teachers and principals knew that he suffered from severe behavioral problems and that he lagged behind in his studies.
When Michael Austin was sent to an Alabama prison in 1995, he was subjected to a brutal practice from a bygone era — the prison chain gang.
The Southern Poverty Law Center today sued a Mississippi school district for violating the constitutional rights and derailing the promising academic and athletic career of a high school student over a tossed penny on a school bus.
Authorities near the East Texas town of Trinidad have been locked in a standoff with an antigovernment extremist and his family for almost 10 years, a stalemate that has raised the question of when it's worth risking bloodshed to enforce the law.
Schools struggling with student dropouts and discipline problems have an opportunity to tackle those issues with innovative programs funded by federal grant money, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Dignity in Schools Campaign said today.
