Featured // SC Reader
Bounty Everlasting: Poetry from 25 years of Southern Cultures
A collection of poems from the archives that brings news of the personal, the political, the painful, and the joyful.
Our Past
Browse past issues and articles from the last 30 years
Food
Mudfish
by Zachary FairclothMisshapen paleozoic fish, atavist, tired of climbing the evolutionary ladder and waiting for a thumb or feet or the ability to breathe on land, one year you just stepped off and let the others pass you by . . . And do you ever wonder?—That is, what if you had climbed all the way to the »
Essay
These Are Revolutionary Times
Back Porch
by Marcie Cohen Ferris“The right to vote remains the most essential key to freedom and choice in all aspects of our lives.” As we move through these fraught days in America, watching with horror the incomprehensible destruction and death in Israel, Gaza, and Ukraine, I ponder if we are living in more historic, troubling times than generations before »
Essay
The South’s Democracy Struggle Reaches New Urgency
by Benjamin Barber“The current iteration of voter suppression that has swept across the South has been met by renewed organizing efforts that remain determined to fully restore the Voting Rights Act and secure the promise of democracy.” The South has often served as the crucible for democracy, and in recent years, the COVID pandemic, new voting restrictions, »
Essay
The Rhetoric and the Reality of the New Southern Strategy
by Courtland Cox, Nsé Ufot, Charles V. Taylor, Emilye Crosby“I think that white voters in the South are more nuanced than people think. I know that Black voters are more nuanced than folks think. And we have to begin to engage with the electorate in a different way because folks don’t want to engage with the South, but the South engages with you.” Courland »
Essay
Voting Rights in Georgia
A Short History
by Orville Vernon Burton, Peter Eisenstadt“[The 2020 Democratic victory] was the culmination of a century and a half of efforts by Black citizens in Georgia to be able to vote, and the first election in the state’s history when the power of white conservatives and the presumption of white supremacy were decisively defeated.” Before the enactment of the Voting Rights »
Essay
“White supremacy in North Carolina rests in woman’s hands”
Dr. Delia Dixon-Carroll and the Power of White Women Voters
by Angela Page RobbinsWhen women gained the right to vote in 1920, many southern suffragists worried about turnout. The antisuffrage campaign had vigorously questioned the wisdom of allowing women to step out of the domestic sphere, thereby upending conventional gender norms, and into the political sphere, where they might compete with men for power and influence. Dr. Delia »
Photo Essay
A Real Evidence of Community
Poll Worker Portraits in the North Carolina Piedmont
by Kate MedleyAs Georgia poll workers came under fire for alleged election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, the accusations stood in stark contrast to my own experiences as a poll worker in North Carolina during the same election. I had signed myself up in response to the urgent plea for poll workers amidst the pandemic, when »
Essay
“Blocks for Freedom”
Sewing for Voting in Post-Jim Crow Mississippi
by William Sturkey“‘Blocks for Freedom’ helped dozens of poor Black Mississippi women fight for the right to vote—not with marches and sit-ins but through making clothes, selling lunches, and hosting concerts.” In 1966, two women from drastically different backgrounds launched an innovative campaign to protect African American women’s voting rights in Mississippi. Oberia Holliday was a thirty-four-year-old »
Essay
The Voting Rights Act beyond the Headlines
by Emilye Crosby, Judy Richardson“It is tempting to think of universal voting rights as one of the fundamental pillars of our country, but access to the vote has been hard fought and remains under attack.” The Voting Rights Act (VRA), which was signed into law on August 6, 1965, was a significant victory for the Civil Rights Movement, southern »
Essay
Meeting the Moment for Democracy
by Errin HainesThree days after I turned eighteen, my mom, who was born in Jim Crow Florida, took me to register to vote at the same precinct where I grew up watching her vote. The experience taught me at an early age that voting was my birthright, something adults—and Black women in particular—did as good citizens. I »
Art
Dawoud Bey’s Meditations on History and Vision
by Grace Elizabeth HaleDawoud Bey’s Untitled (The Light on the Trail) could be anywhere that is warm and wet enough to produce this tangle of plant life. But stay still in front of this photograph and really look. Somehow all of the wild growth frames an opening. And inside that rough circle, the light spirals clockwise toward the »
Essay
The Uncanny Keep On Talkin’
Back Porch
by Regina N. Bradley“Unsolved Mysteries was the portal to my imagination running wild, and fear was the pilot.” Wednesday nights were reserved for Unsolved Mysteries. A man’s disembodied voice warned viewers that we were about to watch something that “was not a news broadcast,” followed by a crescendo of synthesizers and Robert Stack’s gravelly voice and direct stare »
