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North Carolina Open Thread: "Imaginative strategies for social change", Southern Exposure's 50 yrs [1]
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Date: 2023-03-19
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The Institute publishes the popular online magazine Facing South, featuring groundbreaking investigations into abuses of power, in-depth analysis of Southern trends and voices of people working for a better South. The Institute’s journalism has won dozens of prestigious awards, including two George Polk Awards, a National Magazine Award and honors from the National Press Club, N.C. Press Association and White House Correspondents Association.
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In honor of the Institute’s late founder and civil rights hero Julian Bond, in 2018 we will be launching the Julian Bond Fellowship program. The Fellowship will build a pipeline for journalists of color in the South and support cutting-edge research and writing about the South.
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Since 1970, the Institute has served as an incubator for dozens of innovative media, organizing and social justice initiatives in the South. Key projects sponsored and launched by the Institute in recent years include Carolina Public Press, Miami Workers Center, North Carolina Asian Americans Together and the Southern Working Group.
CHRIS KROMM / MARCH 17, 2023
More than 150 people gathered in-person and online last weekend to celebrate the legacy of Southern Exposure, the acclaimed journal of politics and culture published by the Institute for Southern Studies from 1973 to 2011.
"Pages from the Movements for Justice," held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on March 10 and 11, reunited dozens of early staff, writers, and others who worked closely with Southern Exposure over its 38-year history, and also included new generations of scholars, journalists, and activists reflecting on the journal's legacy and what it means for our work for change today.
The weekend kicked off with two events focused on staff and other close associates of Southern Exposure and the Institute: a Friday evening reception at the Love House — headquarters of the Center for the Study of the American South, a co-sponsor of the weekend events — and a Saturday morning program that included roundtable discussions around the themes of democracy in action, environmental justice, labor, and racism and the right.
"Being able to walk through the legacy of the Institute and Southern Exposure with some of the original founders and staff showed the importance of preserving this history and using it to guide current movements of Southern struggle," said Benjamin Barber, coordinator of the Institute's Democracy Program and a coordinator of the event's intergenerational roundtable conversations.
SUE STURGIS / MARCH 17, 2023
Year in which the Institute for Southern Studies (ISS), a research and journalism nonprofit founded by civil rights movement veterans, launched Southern Exposure magazine to offer what the editors called "imaginative strategies for social change": 1973
Number of years previously ISS had been formed as a spinoff of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank: 3
Amount of money ISS had in its earliest days, according to co-founder Sue Thrasher: "very little"
Year in which early ISS staffer Bob Hall penned a memo outlining his vision for the publication that would become Southern Exposure, writing that it "would be a means for reaching new people, for developing an audience and constituency for our ideas and for the Institute": 1972
Paid sales per issue of Southern Exposure, though its reach far exceeded that number: 5,000
Pages in Southern Exposure’s inaugural issue, titled "The Military and the South," which included stories by civil rights leaders Julian Bond and Leah Wise, corporate power researcher Bob Hall, and Howard Romaine, founding co-editor of the legendary Atlanta underground newspaper The Great Speckled Bird: 100
Year in which Southern Exposure won the George Polk Award for regional reporting: 1978
Year in which it won the George Polk Award for magazine journalism: 2003
Year in which it won the National Magazine Award for its reporting on the poultry industry: 1990
Year in which the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its reporting on the hog industry, which drew on reporting by Southern Exposure: 1996
Number of Southern Exposure issues digitized to date, with the rest to come throughout the year: 30
Year in which Southern Exposure ceased publication, with ISS focusing its resources instead on Facing South online magazine: 2011
Date on which ISS, in collaboration with the North Carolina Collection and the Southern Historical Collection in the Wilson Special Collections Library and the Center for the Study of the American South, held a public celebration of Southern Exposure at UNC’s Wilson Library, with many of the founders and early staff members present: 3/11/2023
(Click on figure to go to source.)
OLIVIA PASCHAL / MARCH 17, 2023
In 1970, as the civil rights and antiwar movements entered a new moment, several Southern organizers and activists asked what the times demanded of them. Their answer was a counter-institution, conceived as a hub for movement-oriented research and organizing. The Institute for Southern Studies was a scrappy collective of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Southern Student Organizing Committee veterans that in its early years focused on research about racism, labor, and the military in the South. A few years after its founding, the Institute launched Southern Exposure as a journal to disseminate its research with corporate investigations, oral histories, cultural pieces, and reporting meant to inform the Southern struggle for justice.
Throughout the last year, I have been working with a team of folks — including Marc Miller, one of Southern Exposure’s earliest editors, and Kevin Gomez-Gonzalez, a journalist and student at UNC-Chapel Hill — to digitize Southern Exposure’s archives for the first time. Now, on the 50th anniversary of the inaugural issue, the journal’s first nine years of issues are available to download as PDFs. Additionally, many standalone articles are now available to read online in full, which we hope will make them accessible to a broader public.
I write this on a beautiful spring morning in Charlottesville, Virginia, with the acute recognition that we are in a time of crises — crises that the stories and statistics contained in the pages of Southern Exposure remind us are not new. Racist violence, ecological devastation, economic exploitation, and the rupturing of communities and social fabrics due to capitalist profit-seeking are apparent throughout our region and our world as they were a half-century ago. The injustices unfolding across the U.S. South and the country — legislation restricting trans people’s access to health care, banning books and curriculum from schools, restricting women’s reproductive choices, restricting even the freedom to protest these state incursions on freedom — mount each day. The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath have made clear the ways in which workers are imperiled on the job by the corporations they enrich.
BONUS SUBJECT- CRT
North Carolina Policy Watch, Greg Childress, 3/17/2023
Rep. Ken Fontenot, a Wilson County Republican, vigorously defended House Bill 187 this week, contending that the bill restricting how educators teach about race, gender and sexuality, would prevent educators from teaching racially divisive doctrines.
Fontenot, who is Black, noted that HB 187, which is innocuously titled “Equality in Education” would prevent North Carolina educators from teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT).
CRT is an academic discipline that examines how American racism has shaped law and public policy. It emerged in the legal academy in the 1980s as an offshoot of critical legal studies.
Educators say CRT is not taught in K-12 schools.
Critics of the academic exercise fear educators will use it to teach young, impressionable students that America and white people are inherently and irredeemably racist.
“It [Critical Race Theory] largely brings out a one-way racism, and that is white to Black,” Fontenot said. “It does not acknowledge Black to white racism, Black to Asian racism, for instance. In the Asian hate crimes that we’ve seen in the last five years, they have been largely carried out by African Americans.”
The false narrative Fontenot shared about Black hate crimes against Asians was perpetuated during the pandemic after Black offenders committed several high-profiled attacks against elderly Asians.
Thanks for reading and contributing, wishing you a safe week.
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