Portside

The Freedom Rides originated with a woman. Her name was Irene Morgan, and she was a 27-year-old wartime factory worker and mother of two traveling from Virginia to her home town of Baltimore on a July morning in 1944. Morgan, recovering from a miscarriage and unable to stand for any significant period of time, was sitting in the colored section of a Greyhound bus. At some point, she and her seatmate were asked to give up their seats to a white couple. She refused...

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Best-selling author Carl Hiaasen reflects on the national epidemic of police going after African Americans: When is the last time you heard of a white man in a Mercedes-Benz being pulled over for driving with a broken taillight? It has probably happened somewhere, some time, but there's a better chance of your car being hit by a meteor.

When we were founded as a nation, a fierce political battle erupted over who would have the vote. It was a fight over who was included in "We the People." We have been fighting that political war ever since, and continue to fight it to this day. The issue of who has the vote continues to be a fight because those who are well-served by the status-quo want to limit the voting power of those who they fear have good reason to be dissatisfied with the way things are.

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Here's an astonishing speech by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, one of just two African-Americans to have ever served as federal judges in Mississippi. He read it to three young white men before sentencing them for the death of a 48-year-old black man named James Craig Anderson in a parking lot in Jackson, Miss., in 2011. They were part of a group that beat Anderson and then killed him by running over his body with a truck, yelling "white power" as they drove off.

With funding on the line for President Obama's deferred action programs for immigrants, recent trends in immigration are affecting the current national debates. While the immigrant population is relatively smaller in the South, changes are rapidly re-shaping communities in the region, fueling new opportunities for growth as well as anxiety and backlash over the changing complexion of towns and cities that is evident in the response from many Southern leaders.

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