The South’s population is booming, increasing its influence on the rest of the country. The region holds a third of the Electoral College votes needed to take the White House, and it’s expected to gain five more after the 2020 Census. Thanks to immigration and reversal of the Great Migration,...
The local foods movement has become much more than a short-lived dietary or environmental trend. Can it actually fuel the new Southern economy?
The term “locavore” has become ubiquitous since appearing in the American vernacular about ten years ago. It represents a rapidly growing...
Despite improving employment numbers, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Wednesday the poverty rate in 2014 remained virtually unchanged from 2013 – its fourth consecutive year of statistical stagnation. At 14.8 percent, 46.7 million Americans lived in poverty last year (defined as $24,230 or less...
Pope Francis is making his first-ever visit to the United States this week, greeted by screaming crowds in Washington, New York City and Philadelphia. Unlike most dignitaries, he’s not only visiting the White House, Capitol Hill and the United Nations, but also a mostly immigrant school in a low-wealth neighborhood, a homeless shelter and a prison.
Dubbed “the People’s Pope,” Francis...
New Orleans’ politicians are slapping themselves on the back for a job well done, clinking glasses and proclaiming the city to be better off than it was before Hurricane Katrina pummeled the coastline ten years ago. But are they right?
The numbers paint a markedly less triumphant picture of the postdiluvian decade. According to a Data Center analysis , of the million-plus residents...
The ongoing paucity of public and private investment in the rural South has caused outsized harm to African-American women and girls. In a study published this week titled “ Unequal Lives: The State of Black Women and Families in the Rural South ,” the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative (SRBWI) found “on nearly every social indicator of well-being — from income and earnings to obesity and...
Race and ethnicity seem to dominate America’s headlines these days. A federal judge is hearing arguments in the NAACP’s challenge to North Carolina’s voting law. South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds after the racially motivated murders of nine black churchgoers. New York City reached a $5.9 million settlement with the family of a black man killed by a white...
Rural America has a greater need for investment but is getting less of it, according to two new reports by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. One analysis found more than one in four rural children lives in poverty. That number jumps to one in three or higher across much of the South, where manufacturing boomed in the 1990s but plummeted during the severe recession that began in 2007. The...
