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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened. Though James Dent could watch Central High School’s homecoming parade from the porch of his faded white bungalow, it had been years since he’d bothered. But last fall, Dent’s oldest granddaughter, D’Leisha,…

Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home. “Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the…

State regulators have routinely failed to enforce California’s landmark earthquake safety law for public schools, allowing children and teachers to occupy buildings with structural flaws and potential safety hazards reported during construction. Top management with the Division of the State Architect – the chief regulator of school construction – for years did nothing about nearly…

This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it.

Reporter Renee Ferguson coolly and convincingly uncovers racial discrimination by immigration agents at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Black women were disproportionately targeted for strip-searches by customs agents, who suspected them of carrying drugs. Customs guidelines were surprisingly vague and contradictory, yet immigration agents inspected black women twice as often as white women and subjected them…

For its disclosure of the links between the region’s rampant crime rate and corruption in the local criminal justice system. The reporting, largely the work of Melvin Claxton, initiated political reforms.