Shirley and Charles Sherrod founded the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education in 1961 to educate, engage and empower through advocacy and community organizing. SWGAP has successfully addressed school segregation, welfare rights, voter rights and education, housing, land loss, economic development and unfair policies affecting school children and families.
After decades of...
As the wealth gap in America widens, one group consistently finds itself at the bottom of the economic opportunity chasm. “On nearly every social indicator of well-being — from income and earnings to obesity and food security — Black women, girls and children in the rural South rank low or last.” So finds an eye-opening new study by the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative of Black Belt...
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...
