In September of 2019, I was part of a team that broke national news about a Black dean who resigned after Breitbart News published a story about his past tweets, which were critical of systemic racism and American nationalism. The story had about 300,000 page views and...

In the summer of 2019, I was part of a team that conducted an investigation into the hiring and firing of a potential administrator who had allegedly censored a story about sexual assault. The investigation revealed that the candidate was hired before we published the...

View a formatted copy here.

Abstract

As U.S. newsreels showed African Americans fighting for freedom from a Jim Crow South, Cuban headlines informed readers of a colorblind revolution across the Gulf, in which its leader Fidel Castro sought to end racial discrimination a...

Jess Tomlinson doesn’t want to be called a survivor.

“For me, when you attribute [the term] to a whole community of people, the rhetoric behind it becomes almost a hero mentality,” said Tomlinson, a senior majoring in journalism. “It’s like, this is something you’ve sur...

Darcel Green didn’t think much of her quiet life in the small, West Alabama town of Livingston, until she took a car ride with her high school science teacher one day after school.

Like many teachers in Green’s majority-black high school, this teacher enrolled her daugh...

For the last five years as a history professor at The University of Alabama, Dr. Hilary Green has been searching for a man named William. But it took her about three years to realize it.

Since she received her Ph.D. in history from UNC Chapel Hill in 2010, Green has wri...

For our final project in Dr. Hilary Green's "Slavery at UA" Blount course, I and three other classmates curated an exhibit on Reconstruction-era black education in Tuscaloosa, which complemented other exhibits on family and politics and was displayed on campus on Nov....

Read on Chalkbeat TN here.

When teacher Shemena Shivers walked into her Melrose High School science lab for the first time, she couldn’t contain her excitement at the closet full of equipment and supplies. But after a closer look revealed long-expired solutions and outd...

Read on Chalkbeat TN here.

Teaching degree programs at four-year institutions nationwide are disproportionately white, according to new Urban Institute data. But things look different in Memphis, where two local colleges, the University of Memphis and Christian Brothers...

Read on Chalkbeat TN here.

Patrick Washington has teaching in his blood.  

Washington’s great-great-grandfather, Richard Adkins, was born a slave in Marshall County, Mississippi. After the Civil War, Adkins, who was separated from his parents early on, worked as a sharec...

Read on Chalkbeat TN here. 

Respect for others, being resourceful, and confronting biases are among the lessons four high-school-age students wanted to convey during a panel discussion for future Teach for America participants.

Teach for America Memphis trains recent col...

This was a 20-page literature review that I wrote and presented on for my sophomore significant contribution through the University Fellows program. I was interested in continuing research on Central High School and wanted to explore the forces that helped shape its na...

This was a 30-page white paper I wrote for my final project in Dr. Mary Givens' Education Policy class. This literature review analyzes causes of the school-to-prison pipeline through critical race theory and mixed mediums such as personal narratives, memoirs, movies a...

Read on The New York Times here.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — At every home game at the University of Alabama, where I am a sophomore, the fraternities sit in a reserved corner of the stadium. My freshman year, they wore Trump stickers. This year, they traded them in for Roy Moor...

Caleb Werth’s older brother Aaron was six years old when he promised his mother he wouldn’t smile in his school picture. When she opened the envelope, she saw he kept his promise. Why did he have to take one every year, after all? he wondered.

But that wasn’t the s...