Portside

Reader Comments - Songs of Immigration; Fruitvale Station; Blow the Whistle, Face Life in Jail; Bradley Manning; On Vultures and Red Wings: Billionaire Gets New Sports Arena in Bankrupt Detroit; U.S. Prison Population; North Carolina Worst Voter Suppression Law; Shorts - You Helped Cut the Pentagon Budget; Justice Department's Bold Voting Rights Move; Conference - The Global E. P. Thompson: Reflections on Making of the English Working Class after Fifty Years Oct. 3-5

Move aside Florida, North Carolina is now the new poster child for voter suppression. The Moral Monday movement in the state is now more important than ever. Maybe someday we’ll look back at this period as the turning point when the nation realized just how important the Voting Rights Act was and is.

Reader's Comments - North Carolina and Voting Rights; Socialist Youth Reunion; Zimmerman Acquittal; Internet & Inequality; Farmworkers; Wall-Mart; Petition - Save Worker Education Program at Brooklyn College; Announcements - Forgotten History of Civil Rights: The March On Washington - Book Signing & Forum- NYC- Aug 1; Confronting the Climate Crisis- Bay Area- Aug 2; Legacies of the March on Washington- NYC- Aug 16; Jean Damu, R.I.P.; Margrit Pittman Memorial - Oct 6

The bill even eliminates Citizens Awareness Month to encourage voter registration, notes Brent Laurenz, executive director of the nonpartisan North Carolina Center for Voter Education.

An inspiring grassroots movement is fighting back against the GOP’s outrageous budget cuts and attacks on democracy.

Over 120 arrested in latest NAACP-led action as earlier arrestees face trial for civil disobedience in North Carolina.

The Civitas Institute is publicizing the names, residence, political registration, employers, and other details of those arrested at the ongoing NAACP-organized protests at the legislature. The project calls to mind how Southern Dixiecrats and opponents of civil rights once published the names of NAACP supporters in newspapers to encourage retaliation against them.

Week by week, Monday by Monday, since April 29, a growing coalition assembled by the N.A.A.C.P. has challenged the newly conservative Republican leadership in North Carolina, raising its voice against the loss of the state’s centrist government and what they see as diminished recognition of the poor and minorities.

Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis at the Institute for Southern Studies argue in the latest issue of The American Prospect that a state can become both more progressive and more conservative at the same time, and that is actually happening in North Carolina -- creating an especially turbulent moment in the state's political history.