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
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"Work Therapy" programs, sometimes court ordered, say participants get needed help in exchange for free labor. But some health care professionals question the therapeutic benefits.
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In our latest installment of Civil Wrongs, a sheriff's deputy in Arkansas exploits the 13th Amendment's exception for convict labor as a tool of racial terror in the 1930s.
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After a confession was beaten out of Ell Persons, a Memphis mob skipped the trial and went straight to execution. But confessions, then and now, don't always lead to justice.
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Generations later, three people wrestle with the terrible history that brought their ancestors to a wooded area on the outskirts of Memphis a century ago,.
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In 1917, a Black woodcutter named Ell Persons was accused of murdering a white teenage girl on the outskirts of Memphis. The evidence against him was slim, but the white mob had more than one reason to abduct him from police custody and burn him alive.