'Worn down by the stress': An update on the Warrior Met Coal strikers Facing South recently spoke with Larry Spencer, an official in the United Mine Workers district that represents the over 1,000 miners who unsuccessfully struck against Warrior Met Coal in Alabama for almost two years. He discussed conditions for the returning miners, relations between the long-time workers and the scabs who replaced them, and how the union — now facing a decertification petition — is challenging the company's refusal to take back 41 strikers, many of them union officials. (4/11/2023) Read More > VOICES: 'We will never quit' After the Republican-controlled Tennessee House voted to kick out two young, Black Democrats who from the chamber's floor had joined a vocal protest calling for stricter gun laws following a deadly mass shooting at a Nashville school, one of them — Rep. Justin Pearson of Memphis — delivered this powerful Easter-themed statement to the chamber. (4/7/2023) Read More > 'Am I a Man?': The fiery 1868 speech by an expelled Black legislator in Georgia The expelling of two Black lawmakers from the Tennessee House for participating in a nonviolent protest evokes an earlier removal of dozens of Black lawmakers from Georgia's General Assembly because of their race. Here's the defiant speech delivered in response by one of those lawmakers, the Rev. Henry McNeal Turner. (4/12/2023) Read More > From the Archives: Julian Bond on politics The expulsion and eventual reinstatement of two Black legislators in Tennessee calls to mind the opposition Julian Bond, a cofounder of the Institute for Southern Studies, faced when he was elected to the Georgia state legislature. In this 1975 interview in Southern Exposure, Bond discussed the role electoral politics can play in pursuing "a radical alternative for America's economic and political organization." (1/10/2023) Read More > | 
