South

The South Is Organizing — And There’s No One To Cover It

September 6, 2016 Mike Elk, www.psmag.com Educate! Labor, Organizing, South

By Mike Elk for Pacific Standard - The striking thing about being a recent northern immigrant to the South is how often I walk into a bar and hear people talking about Bernie Sanders. As an outsider to the region (I’m a native of the East End of Pittsburgh), I sometimes find it incredible: Go into any bar in the South and all the young folks are feeling the Bern. While Sanders lost big in these states, he did win among southern Millennials — yet another indication that the South is changing a lot faster than some folks realize.

Being Black Still Barrier To Rural Cooperative Board Membership

June 1, 2016 John Farrell, www.ilsr.org Educate! Black People, Cooperatives, Race, South

By John Farrell for ILSR - In 32 years, little has changed for electric cooperatives in the South. A recent study published by The Rural Power Project shared results of a similar survey (of 313 cooperative boards) and found just 90 blacks among the 3,000 board members. This 4% proportion of African American board leadership is in states where the black population represents more than 22% of the total. The disparity is even higher between men and women, with men representing 90% of board members but only half the population.

Guess Which Region Suspends Black Kids From School Most Often

August 28, 2015 Joseph Williams, www.takepart.com Educate! Education, Racial Justice, South

By Joseph Williams in Take Part - It’s a problem that echoes the “black codes” of the nation’s Jim Crow era: African American schoolchildren nationwide are up to three times more likely than their white counterparts to be suspended or expelled from school. But a new study shows that things are even worse for black grade-school kids in the South, where they are up to five times more likely than whites to be suspended or expelled—an eyebrow-raising disparity experts say is a big factor in the school-to-prison pipeline. The assessment, made by the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, found that African American students were consistently suspended and expelled at higher rates than their peers in each of the 3,000 school districts in the 13-state region.

Imagining A Progressive South

August 12, 2015 Chisolm Allenlundy, www.talkpoverty.org Create! Progressive, South

By Chisolm Allenlundy in Talk Poverty - “The South is not, today, one whole.” Those words, uttered by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in a March 30, 1963 essay for The Nation, are as true today as they were then. In that statement, Dr. King invoked the dedicated minority of progressive Southerners who were determined to bring racial justice to the region, while simultaneously putting pressure on the equally-dedicated majority hell-bent on maintaining the status quo. Indeed, if anything is true of the curious collection of states commonly referred to as the “American South,” it is that things never seem to change. Or, at least, that was the story told in a recent Politico Magazine article by Michael Lind that claimed the South is simply deadweight on the rest of the nation. Lind harps on some themes that we Southerners, and particularly progressive Southerners, are all too familiar with: our soaring economic inequality, our propensity for violence, our pitiful progress in advancing racial justice. In making all of these statements, Lind is by no means incorrect, yet the focus is wrong.

Winning With Each Other: Organizing The South

June 26, 2014 Ngoc Loan Tran, www.wagingnonviolence.org Strategize! Movement, Organizing, Solidarity, South

I have spent most of my life growing up in the U.S. South. I was raised in North Carolina and growing up here meant receiving perplexed looks, condescending questions and upsetting dismissals from non-Southerners because of the many stereotypes that comes with being from the South. Needless to say, I have learned a lot about how other people perceive this region. While most of these conversations have been between friends, comrades and allies, most of these perspectives — whether well-intentioned or not — are misguided. Oftentimes, it has been heartbreaking to find out what non-Southern organizers think they know about organizing in this region. Many have told me that organizing in the South isn’t worth it or assume that there actually isn’t any organizing happening in the South at all. And perhaps the one perspective that has been the most infuriating to me is the idea that Southern organizers need to be rescued from the supposedly most backward region in the country. What I want to speak to is how we start moving towards actually building relationships with each other across political, geographical and cultural lines.

Generational Struggle Needed To Re-Make The South

June 24, 2014 Chris Kromm, www.southernstudies.org Strategize! Activism, Civil Rights, History, Organizing, South

This month marks the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, the massive organizing project that brought more than 1,000 volunteers to Mississippi and drew national attention to the ongoing civil rights struggle in the South. Freedom Summer was launched as an assault on segregation and inequality on many fronts. Activists set up 30 Freedom Schools as an alternative to the state's underfunded and segregated education system. The Medical Committee for Human Rights offered free health clinics. While Freedom Summer went beyond electoral politics, a key focus from the beginning was breaking down voting barriers and harnessing African-American political power. Mississippi was chosen in part because less than seven percent of the state's black voters were registered in 1962, according to the Congress of Racial Equality, and Freedom Summer built on ongoing voter registration efforts. Organizers launched the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as a rival to the white-controlled state Democratic Party, and Freedom Summer helped pave the way for passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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