The State of Things

The death of Marcus Deon Smith was declared a homicide by the state medical examiner’s office. Within hours of this news, a Guilford County superior court judge authorized the release of the camera footage from the incident, which shows Smith wandering in the street and behaving erratically and Greensboro police placing him in a controversial restraint many compare to “hog-tying.”

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Board of Trustees issued their recommendation Monday for the future of the confederate Silent Sam monument. The board wants to see the statue housed in a $5.3M history center on south campus. The news prompted protest among the students and faculty on campus who do not want the statue re-erected on any part of the campus.

Al McSurely is a white man who has been fighting white supremacy for almost 60 years. McSurely’s activism began in the early 1960s with groups like the Congress of Racial Equity and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He worked alongside civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, and eventually became an attorney who fought on behalf of victims of racial discrimination.

The Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs are digging up hundreds of soldiers from the Korean War as part of a massive identification project. The disinterment operation is taking place at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu and is based on recent advances in DNA and forensic technology. 650 Korean War dead will be exhumed.

When Paula Dance started her campaign for sheriff of Pitt County, she knew her win would make history. Dance would become the county’s first African-American sheriff and the first African-American female sheriff in the state. What she could not predict, however, was the wave of black sheriffs that would join her. The November midterms ushered in black sheriffs in Buncombe, Cumberland, Durham, Forsyth, Guilford, Mecklenburg, Pitt and Wake counties. Five of these countries have never had an

A new women’s history trail in Franklin, North Carolina highlights the overlooked stories of entrepreneurial women in the western part of the state. The trail celebrates both individual women and women’s organizations, like the Main Street Milliners: a group of hat-makers and business owners who worked in Franklin in the 19th and early 20th centuries — a time when women rarely owned businesses.

More than 4,700 North Carolina students were eligible for migrant education services last year. These are the children of migrant workers who move from state to state as their parents follow seasonal crops. This frequent relocation means these students are often changing schools and even moving from one state to another.

One of the founding principles of the U.S. government is the separation of church and state. Yet there are many unseen ways in which the religion of America’s founders was baked into the legal system. Immigration attorney George Pappas traces the impact of religious doctrine on land rights in his new book “The Literary and Legal Genealogy of Native American Dispossession: The Marshall Trilogy Cases” (Routledge/2017).

From the mid-1970s to early 1980s, tens of thousands of Argentines who were believed to be political dissidents were kidnapped, tortured and killed by military and security forces. Those who were never seen again are called los desaparecidos.

Phaedra Boinodiris grew up in a family of technologists. As a kid, she and her sister tore down and rebuilt computers for fun and even designed their own games. But as they got older, they discovered the gaming world was not an inviting space for women, so they founded womengamers.com to fill that void. It grew quickly to become a well-known platform for women to review and discuss computer games.