Stories
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- Eliminating Poverty and Economic Inequality
Tax targeting Gullah-Geechee landowners on Sapelo Island could force land loss
A community of Gullah-Geechee descendants on Sapelo Island, Georgia, are potentially facing a massive property tax increase that threatens to push them off their ancestral land and kick open the doors to massive development of the island into a vacation community for the wealthy. At its regular meeting on Dec. 3, the McIntosh County Board…
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- Eliminating Poverty and Economic Inequality
Lawsuit, investigation target Mississippi’s special education service failures
E.J. was diagnosed with dyslexia while she was in the first grade. She repeated the academic year, but without ever receiving specific dyslexia reading help, the sixth grader now reads at a second-grade level. B.W., an 11th grader, was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the second grade. His marks began nosediving two years ago…
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
Rosa Parks’ defiance — and the boycott it fueled — can teach us in this moment
Each year hundreds of visitors, many of them young students, travel to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the Rosa Parks Museum at Troy University. There they learn how, on Dec. 1, 1955, Parks’ refusal to vacate her seat for a white passenger on a crowded city bus would spark a movement, one that helped usher in…
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- Ending Unjust Imprisonment
Alabama youth used advocacy to rise above after unjust school suspension
There aren’t many people who can say that they’ve had an audience at the United Nations. But at 20 years old, CJ Jones has done it twice — on two different continents. Last year, he flew from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Geneva, Switzerland, to address the U.N. Permanent Forum on People of African Descent with a delegation…
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
SPLC grant helps AAPI voters build civic and electoral power from the ground up
As the fastest-growing racial group in the country, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) are becoming increasingly powerful at the polls. Over the past four years, the number of eligible AAPI voters has grown by 15%, or about 2 million, much faster than the 3% growth rate for all eligible voters over the same period,…
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
Georgia teacher suspended for posting Charlie Kirk quote on Facebook files suit
It started like any other day in Michelle Mickens’ high school English classroom at Oglethorpe County High School in Lexington, Georgia, near Athens. While teaching poetry to 18 teenagers on Sept. 10, she made a bargain with the class: Work through the day’s lesson and instead of starting the next day’s work early, they’d have…
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International ‘Critical Memory Project’ challenges US to reckon with its past
The pontoon boat cut through the murky brown water of the Alabama River as it motored past the former port where enslaved Black people were once unloaded as cargo in downtown Montgomery. Aboard the watercraft were American and German academics, museum curators and leaders of memorials and nonprofit foundations. They had traveled to Alabama searching…
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- Eliminating Poverty and Economic Inequality
Coastal elites push changes that threaten Gullah-Geechee communities, culture
Editor’s note: This is the fourth and final story in the “Gullah-Geechee vs. Greed” series about the fight to preserve the last of the Black communities on these islands off the southeast Atlantic coast. In the video: Amid a shrinking population, unending legal battles and decaying or nonexistent infrastructure, Gullah-Geechee culture and the people who…
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- Eliminating Poverty and Economic Inequality
Sapelo Island’s Geechee community fighting to keep its culture and soul intact
Editor’s note: This is the third story in the “Gullah-Geechee vs. Greed” series about the fight to preserve the last of the Black communities on these islands off the southeast Atlantic coast. Despite sprawling thousands of acres off the Georgia shoreline, Sapelo Island has managed to keep a low profile for a very long time. Traces…
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- Eliminating Poverty and Economic Inequality
On Hilton Head Island, Gullah people fight for their land — and their legacy
Editor’s note: This is the second story in the “Gullah-Geechee vs. Greed” series about the fight to preserve the last of the Black communities on these islands off the southeast Atlantic coast. Taiwan Scott eased off the gas as he turned onto Alfred Lane in the Spanish Wells community of South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island. Overhead,…
