Remembering Henrietta Boggs

Born during the 1918 flu pandemic, Henrietta Boggs died in her longtime home of Montgomery, Alabama earlier this month from COVID-19 at the age of 102. Boggs was best known for having been married to Costa Rican president and civil rights leader Jose Figueres Ferrer in the 1940s, but Boggs was a powerful activist in

Campaign Watch: Marquita Bradshaw vs Bill Hagerty

When Lamar Alexander, a genteel Tennessean who has served as United States Senator since 2003, retires at the end of this year, he will not be succeeded by another moderate Republican. The choices for Tennessee voters this November are Bill Hagerty, a Donald Trump loyalist who has divorced himself from any previous stance resembling moderate,

An Appeal to Young Southerners: Please, don’t leave us.

The South can be a frustrating place to live for young progressives. We regularly take two baby steps forward and one large step back. Mississippi legislators voted to remove and replace the state flag which bore a symbol of the Confederacy; the new flag, though, must include the phrase “In God We Trust.” Two years

Hurricane Laura and the South’s Growing Climate Crisis

Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina made its way to Mississippi and Louisiana, and just days after the landfall of Hurricane Marco, Hurricane Laura hit Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour. Meteorologists called Laura’s storm surge “unsurvivable.” The storm left at least ten dead, more than 200,000 without access

The Republican Party has abandoned you.

Compassionate conservatism, if it ever existed, breathed its last when Marjorie Taylor Greene won the Republican primary race for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District U.S. House of Representatives seat on August 11. George W. Bush labeled himself as a compassionate conservative, concerned with the needs of the poor, of Black Americans, of immigrants, and it worked.

Book Review: Memorial Drive

By Michael Foley Natasha Trethewey, along with writers like Jesmyn Ward and Greg Iles, has been a twenty-first century torchbearer for Mississippi’s literary legacy. Her book Native Guard earned her the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and she was named United States Poet Laureate in 2012. Her new memoir, Memorial Drive, is by far her

The State of Southern Schools

By Michael Foley “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!” the President of the United States tweeted on August 3. Well, that’s what’s happening, and so far, the results have been terrifying. That’s especially true in North Paulding High School in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area of Georgia, where members of the football team had already tested positive before the

Deep Dive: Exploring Healthcare in the South

By Michael Foley As COVID-19 continues to ravage the United States, the flaws in our healthcare system have become all the more glaring. This is especially true across the South, where Black Southerners are especially susceptible. Southern states consistently rank toward the bottom in nearly all healthcare and wellness metrics. That’s largely due to a

The South Will Rise Again

By Michael Foley In the years following the Civil War, as Reconstruction policies not only provided jobs for emancipated slaves in the South, but actively recruited Blacks from the North to former slave states for work and helped Blacks run (and win) in state and U.S. congressional elections, a violent political coalition called The Redeemers