Skip to main content
Tag

Alabama

Legacy Pavilion

Alabama lynching memorial expands to cover the stories of 2,000 more people

By News & Current Affairs

Source CNN — The first monument in the United States honoring the victims of lynching has become a must-see civil rights attraction in Montgomery, Alabama, and now it’s been expanded. The Equal Justice Initiative opened its new Legacy Pavilion on Saturday — just in time to welcome visitors to the Alabama state capitol for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend. The Legacy Pavilion features a new memorial recognizing more than…

Read More
Cotton plants soak up the sun at a farm still operating in Limestone County.

In McConnell’s boyhood town where his family owned slaves, the reparations debate thrives

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

By Sandy Mazza, USA Today — ATHENS, Ala. – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was born about 40 miles from his great-great-grandfathers’ Alabama cotton farms, worked by slaves 100 years before. Like so many long-standing Southern white families, McConnell’s forebearers built their wealth with free slave labor and cheap land. Two of his great-great-grandfathers owned more than a dozen slaves, census records reviewed by the USA TODAY Network show. The…

Read More
The Alabama abortion ban has prompted new questions about why America’s elected officials don’t look more like America.

‘Democracy has been hijacked by white men’: how minority rule now grips America

By Commentaries/Opinions

The US is becoming more diverse and progressive, but white men’s grip on power is being exercised via the courts, gerrymandering and dark money in politics. By Tom McCarthy, The Guardian — The exercise of political power by legislative majorities of white, male elected officials in ways that disproportionately exclude or harm women and people of color is such a familiar part of the American political landscape that it sometimes…

Read More
The human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes virtually all cervical cancers.

Black women in Alabama dying of preventable cancer at alarming rate

By News & Current Affairs

Human Rights Watch report blames restrictive insurance policies, lack of physicians and poverty for failure to treat cervical disease. Jessica Glenza, The Guardian — Cervical cancer, a disease researchers believe is on track to be eradicated within 20 years in some industrialized nations, is killing a disproportionate number of women across the American south. Black women in Alabama are dying of cervical cancer at more than twice the national average, a trend…

Read More
Visitors at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, April 26.

Lynching Didn’t Disappear, It Just Evolved

By Commentaries/Opinions

By A.T. McWilliams — While visiting the newly opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama — a hallowed and harrowing enshrinement bearing the names of over 4,000 black people lynched in the Jim Crow South — I was reminded of stories my grandparents told me as a child. Stories of my great-grandfather, once chased by Ku Klux Klan members on horseback before swimming to safety, preferring possible death by drowning…

Read More