About This Project:
Civil Wrongs is an investigative journalism project of the Institute for Public Service Reporting. The project includes an academic course to at the University of Memphis. In this interdisciplinary course, students examine unsolved and unresolved civil rights-related murders, police oppression and abuse, and the legacy of voter suppression, government surveillance, environmental injustice and human rights concerns. We’ll publish what we find in stories that will appear online, on public radio, and television.
Our mission is to investigate historical racial injustices in the Mid-South and analyze their effect on our present reality so that the public can make more informed decisions about our future.
For far too long, the truth about racial terror in our nation has been ignored, hidden, or downplayed. But we cannot fully heal without facing it head on.
We don’t necessarily expect to find new evidence to bring perpetrators to justice (though it could). We want to help readers understand how a past that we are prone to forget still affects us. There are so many stories that have never gotten the attention they deserve. We are committed to amplifying those stories and analyzing how they still reverberate today.
When we understand the historical root of our present problems, we are more informed about how to forge a better future.
Project in partnership with: The Institute for Public Service Reporting Memphis
-
In this episode of Civil Wrongs, Laura Kebede-Twumasi talks with wellness coach Dwania Kyles. In 1961, she was among 13 students to integrate Memphis schools. -
Personal wellness coach Dwania Kyles, among the first students to integrate Memphis schools, says the healing of internalized racial trauma begins with getting to the root of it.
-
Laura Kebede-Twumasi talks with artist Ephraim Urevbu about his "Naked Truth Project." -
Meditation, discussions and confronting the past help members of the Weakley County Reconciliation Project move toward better racial understanding. -
In this half-hour special, residents of a small town in the Arkansas Delta grapple with a massacre that occurred there more than a century ago. Healing, they say, is ongoing. -
Residents of a small town in the Arkansas Delta say a massacre that took place there over a century ago is still healing from those wounds. -
A century ago, a white mob attacked a small town in the Arkansas Delta. This two-part series examines the roots of the attack and why residents say it's time to give history its due.
