Features and Stories
Children left behind in Alabama’s Black Belt region deserve more than education tax credits their families can’t use. An SPLC advocate wants lawmakers to look “endemic poverty” in the face.
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Features and Stories
The SPLC represented six students in a Gulf Coast school system where minor rules violations resulted in long-term suspensions. Now, new procedures are making a big difference.
Features and Stories
An SPLC advocate describes his visit to a municipal court where impoverished traffic offenders are sentenced to jail terms because they can’t pay their accumulated fines.
Features and Stories
An SPLC lawsuit seeks to overturn Alabama laws that prevent the recognition of legal, same-sex marriages from other states.
Features and Stories
The law is touted as a way to provide “school choice,” but in reality it discriminates against many impoverished families that don’t have the means to send children to distant public schools or expensive private academies.
After an Alabama man discovered that state laws refusing to recognize his lawful same-sex marriage from another state would prevent him from collecting the proceeds of a wrongful death lawsuit filed on behalf of his deceased husband, the SPLC filed a federal lawsuit to overturn the laws. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage, a federal judge ruled that he could collect the proceeds as the surviving spouse.
Features and Stories
Alabama’s vicious anti-immigrant law, which passed in 2011 amid warnings that it was unconstitutional, has been effectively gutted by an agreement the SPLC and other civil rights groups have reached with the state to permanently block key provisions of the law – adding Alabama to a list of states that have seen their anti-immigrant laws stopped by federal lawsuits.
Features and Stories
In Alabama, African-American children who were orphaned or neglected were routinely sent to live at a “reform school” for juvenile offenders, because state-licensed homes were segregated and few would accept black children. An early SPLC lawsuit changed that practice, opening the doors of such homes to all children in need.
Features and Stories
A federal judge denied a motion today by the Birmingham Police Department in Alabama to dismiss an SPLC lawsuit challenging the use of pepper spray on Birmingham public schoolchildren – a ruling that allows the case to move forward.
Features and Stories
This afternoon, I had the privilege of attending the Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony honoring Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley (Cynthia Diane Morris) — the four little girls who were killed in the Birmingham church bombing by Klansmen 50 years ago this month.
