UNC-Chapel Hill assistant history professor William Sturkey discusses race in the American South and the toll the Silent Sam debate has taken on the university campus. Sturkey also discusses  his latest book: Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White.

Policy Watch environmental reporter Lisa Sorg discusses emerging contaminants, dangerous chemicals in compost and her latest investigative piece. Read Unregulated, untested, unknown. Follow more of Sorg’s coverage here.

Democracy NC’s Tomas Lopez discusses a new state law that has had a negative impact on voter turnout in many counties. Read their full report.

Chris Hodgson and Virginia Knowlton Marcus of Disability Rights NC on how NC Employment Services are Failing People with Disabilities. Read Moving into the Economic Mainstream.

State Rep. Susan Fisher talks about the shortcomings in the House budget related to education spending, her new bill to help homeless youth in North Carolina, and why the Medicaid debate may keep lawmakers in Raleigh well into the fall.

The United States is facing the largest number of measles cases in a single year, with 880 individual cases confirmed in 24 states between January 1 and May 17, 2019. Reporter Sarah Ovaska-Few reports on the rise in the number of toddlers in our state who are unvaccinated, raising the chance of contracting measles and other illnesses. Ovaska-Few talks about the risks and what NC pediatricians are doing to minimize the risk of infection.

It’s graduation season and we check in with Higher Ed Works executive director David Rice to discuss the status of North Carolina’s colleges and universities. Rice also discusses the results of a new Gallup poll that finds 64 percent of UNC respondents strongly agree their undergraduate education was worth the cost. Forty-nine percent of respondents said they had completed postgraduate degrees. Personal and household incomes were also higher among UNC system respondents.

Senator Valerie Foushee discusses Medicaid expansion, redistricting reform, education funding and student activism at the University of North Carolina.

Daniel Bowes, director of the Fair Chance-Criminal Justice Project at the North Carolina Justice Center, discusses the Senate’s passage of the Second Chance Act and other expungement legislation making its way through the NC legislature. Republicans and Democrats have come together to support this legislation in a rare move of bipartisanship. It’s estimated more than two million North Carolinians have a criminal record.