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Nine months ago, Hurricane Helene barreled up from the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the rugged mountains of western North Carolina, dumping a foot of rain onto an already saturated landscape. More than 100 people died, most by drowning in floodwaters or being crushed by water-fueled landslides.

“We had no idea it was going to do what it did,” said Jeff Howell, the now-retired emergency manager in Yancey County, North Carolina, a rural expanse that suffered the most deaths per capita.

A week ago, the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry slipped up from the coast of Mexico, drawing moisture from the Gulf, then collided with another system and inundated rivers and creeks in hilly south central Texas. More than 100 people are confirmed dead, many of them children, with more missing.

“We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here — none whatsoever,” said County Judge Rob Kelly, the top elected official in Kerr County, Texas, where most of the deaths occurred.

The similarities between North Carolina and Texas extend beyond the words of these two officials. In both disasters, there was a disconnect between accurate weather alerts and on-the-ground action that could have saved lives.

Officials in each of those places were warned. The National Weather Service sent urgent alerts about potentially life-threatening danger hours in advance of the flash floods, leaving time to notify and try to evacuate people in harm’s way.

In Texas, some local officials did just that. But others did not.

Similarly, a ProPublica investigation found that when Helene hit on Sept. 27, some local officials in North Carolina issued evacuation orders. At least five counties in Helene’s path, including Yancey, did not. Howell said the enormity of the storm was far worse than anyone alive had ever seen and that he notified residents as best he could.

The National Weather Service described Helene’s approach for days. It sent out increasingly dire alerts warning of dangerous flash flooding and landslides. Its staff spoke directly with local emergency managers and held webinar updates. A Facebook message the regional office posted around 1 p.m. the day before Helene hit warned of “significant to catastrophic, life-threatening flooding” in the mountains. “This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era.”

Similarly, in Texas, the weather service warned of potential for flash flooding the day before. Also that day, the state emergency management agency’s regional director had “personally contacted” county judges, mayors and others “in that area and notified them all of potential flooding,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick later said at a press conference.

AccuWeather, a commercial weather forecasting service, issued the first flash flood warnings for the area at 12:44 a.m. on July 4, roughly three hours before the catastrophic flooding. A half-hour later, at 1:14 a.m., the National Weather Service sent a similar warning to two specific areas, including central Kerr County, where the Guadalupe River’s banks and hills are dotted with vacation homes, summer camps and campgrounds — many filled with July 4 vacationers slumbering in cabins and RVs.

“Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly,” the weather service alert said. Impacts could include “life threatening flash flooding of creeks and streams.”

A severity descriptor on that alert sent it to weather radios and the nation’s Wireless Emergency Alerts system, which blasts weather warnings to cellphones to blare an alarm.

AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist, Jonathan Porter, was dismayed to hear news later that all the children attending youth camps in Kerr County had not been ushered to higher ground despite those warnings.

At Camp Mystic, a beloved century-old Christian summer camp for girls, at least 27 campers and counselors were killed. Six still haven’t been found. Its director also died, while trying to rescue children. (People at the camp said they received little to no help from the authorities, according to The New York Times.)

“I was very concerned to see that campers were awoken not by someone coming to tell them to evacuate based on timely warnings issued but rather by rapidly rising water that was going up to the second level of their bunkbeds,” Porter said.

In the area, known as Flash Flood Alley, Porter called this “a tragedy of the worst sort” because it appeared camps and local officials could have mobilized sooner in response to the alerts.

“There was plenty of time to evacuate people to higher ground,” Porter said. “The question is, Why did that not happen?”

But Dalton Rice, city manager of Kerrville, the county seat, said at a press conference the next day that “there wasn’t a lot of time” to communicate the risk to camps because the floodwaters rose so rapidly.

Rice said that at 3:30 a.m. — more than two hours after the flash flood warnings began — he went jogging near the Guadalupe River to check it out but didn’t see anything concerning.

But 13 miles upriver from the park where he was jogging, the river began — at 3:10 a.m. — to rise 25 feet in just two hours.

At 4:03 a.m., the weather service upgraded the warning to an “emergency”— its most severe flash flood alert — with a tag of “catastrophic.” It singled out the Guadalupe River at Hunt in Kerr County: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!”

The local sheriff said he wasn’t made aware of the flooding until 4 to 5 a.m. He has declined to say whether the local emergency manager, who is responsible for alerting the public to approaching storms, was awake when the flash flood warnings went out starting at 1 a.m. The Texas Tribune reported that Kerrville’s mayor said he wasn’t aware of the flooding until around 5:30 a.m., when the city manager called and woke him up.

Local officials have refused to provide more details, saying they are focused on finding the more than 100 people still missing and notifying loved ones of deaths.

One challenge as disasters approach is that weather alerts often don’t reach the people in harm’s way.

In rural areas across Texas and North Carolina alike, cellphone service can be spotty on the best of days, and some people turn off alert notifications. In North Carolina’s remote mountains, many people live at least somewhat off the grid. The cell service isn’t great everywhere, and many aren’t glued to phones or social media. In Texas, Kerr County residents posted on Facebook complaints that they didn’t receive the weather service’s alerts while others said their phones blared all night with warnings.

Many counties also use apps to send their own alerts, often tailored to their specific rivers and roads. But residents must opt in to receive them. Kerr County uses CodeRed, but it isn’t clear what alerts it sent out overnight.

Pete Jensen has spent a long career in emergency management, including responding to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. He served as an official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency during Hurricane Katrina and often ponders why more people don’t receive – and heed – weather alerts.

“There’s an awful lot of denial,” Jensen said. “Disasters happen to someone else. They don’t happen to me.” That can include local officials who “don’t always understand what their responsibilities are. They very often react like most humans do – in denial.”

There is one big difference between the disasters in Texas and North Carolina. In Texas, residents, journalists and others have demanded accountability from local officials. Gov. Greg Abbott has called the Legislature into special session starting July 21 to discuss flood warning systems, flood emergency communications and natural disaster preparation.

But that hasn’t happened in North Carolina. The state legislature has yet to discuss possible changes, such as expanding its Know Your Zone evacuation plan beyond the coast, or boost funding for local emergency managers. (Instead, lawmakers went home in late June without passing a full budget.) Many emergency managers, including in Yancey County, operate in rural areas with small tax bases and skeleton staffs.

“There still has not been an outcry here for, How do we do things differently?” said state Sen. Julie Mayfield, a Democrat from Asheville. “It still feels like we’re very much in recovery mode.”

North Carolina’s emergency management agency commissioned a review of its handling of the disaster. The report found the state agency severely understaffed, but it didn’t examine issues such as evacuations or local emergency managers’ actions before Helene hit.

Erika Andresen also lives in Asheville, a mountain city in the heart of Helene’s destruction, where she helps businesses prepare for disasters. A lawyer and former Army judge advocate, she also teaches emergency management. After Helene, she was among the few voices in North Carolina criticizing the lack of evacuations and other inactions ahead of the storm.

“I knew right away, both from my instinct and from my experience, that a lot of things went terribly wrong,” Andresen said. When she got pushback against criticizing local authorities in a time of crisis, she countered, “We need accountability.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Upheaval at the nation’s top disaster agency is raising anxiety among state and local emergency managers — and leaving major questions about the whereabouts of billions of federal dollars it pays out to them.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency still has not opened applications for an enormous suite of grants, including ones that many states rely on to pay for basic emergency management operations. Some states pass on much of that money to their most rural, low-income counties to ensure they have an emergency manager on the payroll.

FEMA has blown through the mid-May statutory deadline to start the grants’ application process, according to the National Emergency Management Association, with no word about why or what that might indicate. The delay appears to have little precedent.

“There’s no transparency on why it’s not happening,” said Michael A. Coen Jr., who served as FEMA’s chief of staff under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

FEMA’s system of grants is complex and multifaceted and helps communities prepare for and respond to everything from terrorist attacks to natural disasters.

In April, the agency abruptly rescinded a different grant program that county and local governments were expecting to help them reduce natural hazard risks moving forward. The clawback of money included hundreds of millions already pledged. FEMA also quietly withdrew a notice for states to apply for $600 million in flood mitigation grants.

On top of that, on June 11, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem began requiring that she review all FEMA grants above $100,000. That could slow its vast multibillion grants apparatus to a crawl, current and former FEMA employees said.

FEMA did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the missed application deadline or the impact of funding cuts and delays, instead responding with a statement from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin that Noem is focused on bringing accountability to FEMA’s spending by “rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and working to ensure only grants that really help Americans in time of need are approved.”

The memo announcing the change arrived the day after President Donald Trump said he wants to begin dismantling FEMA at the close of hurricane season this fall.

All of this has left states — some of which rely on the federal government for the vast majority of their emergency management funding — in a difficult position. While Trump has sharply criticized FEMA’s performance delivering aid after disasters strike, he has said almost nothing about the future of its grant programs.

“It’s a huge concern,” said Lynn Budd, president of the National Emergency Management Association and director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security, which houses emergency management. The state agency gets more than 90% of its operating budget from federal funds, especially FEMA grants. “The uncertainty makes it very difficult,” she said.

In North Carolina, a state hit hard by a recent natural disaster, federal grants make up 82% of its emergency management agency’s budget. North Carolina Emergency Management leaders are pressing state lawmakers to provide it with “funding that will sustain the agency and its core functions” and cut its reliance on federal grant funding, an agency spokesperson said.

A forced weaning off of federal dollars could have an outsize impact in North Carolina and the other states that pass on much of their FEMA grants to county and local agencies. Many rural counties have modest tax bases and are already stretched thin.

In May, ProPublica published a story detailing the horrors of Hurricane Helene’s impact on one of those counties, Yancey. Home to 19,000 people, it suffered the largest per capita loss of life and damage to property in the storm. Jeff Howell, its emergency manager, was operating with only a part-time employee and said that for years he had been asking the county commission for more help. It wasn’t until after the storm that county commissioners agreed with the need.

“They realized how big a job it is,” said Howell, who has since retired.

But even large metropolitan counties rely on the grants. The hold upin opening the grant applications concerns Robert Wike Graham, deputy director of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Emergency Management, which serves an area of 1.2 million people and is home to a nuclear power plant. The training and preparation FEMA grants help the agency pay for are critical to keeping the community safe in the face of a nuclear catastrophe.

Yet Graham said he has resorted to scouring social media posts and news reports for bits of clues about the grants — and the future of FEMA itself.

“We’re all having to be like, hey, what have you heard? What do you know? What’s going on? Nobody knows,” Graham said.

Trump is on his second acting FEMA administrator in five months, and the director who coordinates national disaster response turned in his resignation letter June 11. More than a dozen senior leaders, including the agency’s chief counsel, have left or been fired, along with an unknown mass of its full-time workers.

“Every emergency manager I know is screaming, ‘You’re screwing the system up.’ We’ve all been calling for reform,” Graham said. “But it’s too much, too fast.

Shortly after President Jimmy Carter created FEMA in 1979 to centralize federal disaster management, the agency began to dole out grants to help communities grappling with large-scale destruction. Over the years, its grants ballooned, especially after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when huge new programs helped states harden security against this alarming new threat.

Today, FEMA operates roughly a dozen preparedness grant programs. Among other things, the money serves as a financial carrot to ensure that even spending-averse and tax-strapped states and counties employ emergency managers who help communities prepare for and respond to terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

Former FEMA leaders said states have been largely content to sit back and let the feds pay up. As a result, they said, the grants have created a system of dependence that leaves emergency managers vulnerable to ever-shifting national priorities and, at the moment, a president set on dismantling the agency.

Across the country, the percentage of state emergency management agencies’ budgets paid by federal funding ranges from zero to 99.4%, a 2024 National Emergency Management Association report says. A spokesperson declined to provide a state-by-state breakdown, so ProPublica canvassed a few.

Wyoming tops 90%. Texas’ agency gets about three-quarters of its operational budget from federal funding. Virginia gets roughly 70%. South Carolina comes in around 61% federal funding for day-to-day operations.

Most state emergency managers agree that their states need to depend less on the federal government for their funding, “but there’s got to be some glide path or timeline where we can all work toward the goal,” Budd said.

Some states would need upwards of a decade to prepare for such a seismic shift, especially those like Wyoming that budget every other year, she added. Its Legislature is in the middle of budget negotiations for fiscal year 2027-28.

ProPublica is continuing to report on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. If you are an emergency manager who would like to tell us about your needs or share your experience with recovery efforts, please email helenetips@propublica.org.

If emergency managers instead are scrambling, “the effects that we’re going to see down the line is a lack of preparedness, a lack of coordination, training and partnerships being built,” Budd said. “We’re not going to be able to respond as well.”

A key reason states have become so dependent on FEMA grants despite the risk of national political upheaval is that state legislatures and local elected leaders haven’t always prioritized paying for emergency management themselves despite its critical role. With FEMA’s grants, they haven’t had to.

W. Craig Fugate has seen reluctance to wean off FEMA grants from all levels of government. He served as FEMA administrator under Obama and, before that, as head of Florida’s emergency management division under then-Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist.

“My experience tells me locals will not step up unless they are dealing with a catastrophe,” Fugate said.

Because most of the preparedness grants require no match from state or local governments, he said, it strips away any motivation for them to do so — especially with other pressing needs vying for those dollars.

“The real question is how much of this is actually critical and should be the responsibility of local governments to fund?” Fugate said. “Neither local governments nor states have been very forward in funding beyond the minimums to match federal dollars.”

After Hurricane Helene, North Carolina’s Emergency Management agency commissioned a report that pointedly criticized the state’s “over-reliance on federal grants to fund basic operations.” Only about 16.5% of the state agency’s budget comes from state appropriations.

The report noted that this reliance had led to an inadequate investment by the state in its emergency management staffing and infrastructure. A staff shortage at the agency “severely compromised the state’s response to Hurricane Helene.” Among other things, a lack of staff hampered the State Emergency Response Team’s ability to maintain a 24-hour operation that was supposed to support local and county officials who were overwhelmed by the massive storm.

North Carolina state Rep. Mark Pless, the Republican co-chair of the House Emergency Management and Disaster Recovery Committee, said the state’s conservative spending and $3.6 billion in reserves have “afforded us the ability to fund ourselves for preparedness” if FEMA suddenly yanks its grants.

But Democratic Rep. Robert Reives, the House minority leader, worried that any financial flexibility would dry up if planned and potential tax cuts in the years ahead create a budget shortfall, as some have predicted.

In mostly rural Washington County, along North Carolina’s hurricane-prone coast, Lance Swindell is a one-man emergency management office. His county, home to 11,000 people, lacks a big tax base.

Like other emergency managers across the state, Swindell said he supports cutting FEMA red tape and waste, but “grant funding is a major funding source just to keep the lights on.”

One of the grants in the FEMA program that blew past its deadline for opening applications pays half of his salary. That grant can fund core local operations such as staffing, training and equipment. It is critical to local emergency management offices: Almost 82% of counties across the country report tapping into it.

Cuts to this particular grant under the Biden administration already reduced what North Carolina gets — and therefore what gets passed down the governmental food chain to people like Swindell. North Carolina was allocated $8.5 million in fiscal year 2024, down from $10.6 million two years earlier.

Looking ahead, Swindell is still waiting for the applications to open while wondering if FEMA will more drastically slash the grants — and, if so, whether his county could find the money to continue paying his full-time salary.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

A few weeks ago, the clerk of the South Carolina Senate called out each of the 46 members’ names, then directed them all to stand and raise their right hands. He needed to swear them in for the new session. Among the supermajority of Republicans, zero women stood.

Voters hadn’t elected a single one to the chamber in November.

Now, after more than a decade, the Senate’s Republican caucus is once again an all-men’s club, one that will make decisions about issues that directly affect women: abortion, in vitro fertilization and Medicaid coverage of lactation specialists, to name a few. November’s election ushered in only two women to serve in the entire chamber, and both are Democrats. Given Republicans control what legislation moves forward, neither will wield much power.

Women aren’t represented much more on the other side of the Statehouse. Female lawmakers make up just 10% of South Carolina House Republicans.

Similar postelection stories are playing out across the Southeast, a region long defined by traditional culture and conservative politics. All but one state that held legislative elections last fall in this region saw losses of Republican women, including Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas and South Carolina. Tennessee was the lone exception — its voters added a single net Republican woman to their legislature.

Most of the region’s legislatures were woefully short of women’s representation even before the election, as ProPublica reported at this time last year. Women constitute fewer than 1 in 5 state legislators across much of the Southeast, where most states consistently rank at the bottom of virtually all measures of women’s health and well-being.

Across the country, 2024 again saw gains for female lawmakers. One-third of state legislators nationwide are women, the most in history. In all of the country’s statehouses — 7,386 legislative seats — women gained 43 seats in November’s elections. Only four were Democrats, although Democratic women still hold almost twice as many seats overall.

But the gains of Republican women weren’t mirrored in the Southeast. The losses weren’t huge, 1 to 3 Republican women per legislature. But with small numbers to begin with, losing just one can make a big difference.

“It has a much more significant effect on the potential for particular voices and lived experiences to be raised in debate and conversation,” said Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor and director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, a key group tracking women’s political participation.

Dittmar didn’t see this trend in other regions. “There’s not one story,” she said, “but rather a lot of unique state-based stories.”

As of the counts the center had finished in mid-December, South Dakota and New Hampshire elected far more new women. Wisconsin lost 6 Republican women and added 11 Democratic women. Connecticut lost 5 Republican women while Democrats held steady. Maine lost 5 Democrats but gained 4 Republicans. In California, women from both parties gained seats.

“We saw a lot of gains around the country for women in legislatures, but the Southeast continues to be a real struggle,” said Sabrina Shulman, chief political officer at Vote Run Lead, which trains women to run for office. Entrenched gender roles still influence voting decisions, she said, and more tradition-minded Republicans — men and women — tend to see men as stronger, more qualified and able to lead.

Dittmar added that President Donald Trump’s campaign emphasized masculinity, which had a trickle-down effect. Republican voters seemed to prefer candidates, including female ones, who were perceived as more masculine or at least not “anti-male,” she said.

Some Republican women who might have considered running also balked at campaigning in the hypermasculine politics of the moment. The Center for American Women and Politics found the number of female candidates for state legislative seats was down across the board — but the largest drop was among Republican women.

Unlike Democrats, Republicans “have largely rejected any attempts at targeted support, recruitment, training and funding of women candidates,” Dittmar said. “Conservatives are still dominantly white and male. The party is made up of people who don’t think it’s a problem” that so few lawmakers are women.

All three Republican incumbent women in South Carolina’s Senate lost their races after they joined with the two other women — one Democrat and one Independent — in the chamber to fight a strict abortion ban. National headlines spotlighted the bipartisan group dubbed the Sister Senators.

Sen. Katrina Shealy was the most senior of the three and the Senate’s only female chair of a standing committee. When she won her first Senate election in 2012, she arrived in Columbia, the state capital, to an all-male Senate. More than a decade later, she leaves it as such again.

Yet, when she was first elected, female leaders had ascended across state politics. Then-Gov. Nikki Haley was a key ally. The state Supreme Court’s chief justice was a woman. Now, the governor is, once again, a man. So is the Senate president. And the House speaker. And the chief justice. The state Supreme Court had no men when it upheld the current abortion law in 2023; it recently added a single female justice.

“I think if men could take the right to vote away from women, they would,” Shealy said. “Just look at South Carolina and what we’ve done. We don’t want women to have a say in anything. That’s obvious.”

At the South Carolina Statehouse, Shealy was widely known as the top legislative champion for children. She blames her loss in the primary on the paltry runoff turnout — but also the fact that Republican women in her home state still often adhere to traditional gender roles.

“Women in the Republican Party always put themselves in the position that we need to support our men,” Shealy said. “They let themselves be subservient to men, especially in the South.”

She wonders how much they realize that men are now exclusively making decisions about issues that specifically affect women, notably reproductive healthcare. South Carolina currently has a six-week abortion ban, but a conservative flank of House members have prefiled a bill that would ban abortions from conception, or basically what Shealy and the other female senators opposed. The bill is sponsored by three women — and 29 men. If it moves to the Senate, not a single Republican debating the restrictions — or voting on them — will be a woman.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In South Carolina, where I live, rural towns often remain largely divided by race, especially those with larger Black communities. You’ll often hear people describe railroad tracks that run through these towns and how white people live on one side of the tracks, Black people on the other. That’s true. But I’ve often seen a different dividing line, a more impenetrable one. This one runs between schools: private and public ones.

While reporting in many of these small towns, I saw that Black children typically attend the local public schools while white kids head to private schools. Many of these private schools are known as “segregation academies” because they opened for white children while the federal courts were forcing districts across the South to desegregate. Hundreds of these academies still operate, and they continue to divide their communities.

When children don’t go to school together, they don’t interact much with peers of another race. Their parents don’t meet at the bus stop or at PTA meetings or on the sidelines of football games. Communities can remain almost as divided as they were before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled state-mandated school segregation was unconstitutional — 70 years ago.

I spent much of 2024 digging into “segregation academies” with my colleague, ProPublica research reporter Mollie Simon. Early on, we set out to compile a master list of segregation academies that are still operating, which we planned to use as a foundation for our reporting.

It’s difficult, impossible even, to identify these academies or even to understand local school segregation more broadly without knowing the racial makeup of each private school’s enrollment over time. And private schools aren’t always willing to hand over that information. Nor do they have to. But while putting together our list of segregation academies, we came across something incredibly useful — a 30-year trove of data kept by the U.S. Department of Education that lays out the story of racial segregation, school by school, across the country. It shows the racial breakdown of most private schools’ enrollments every other year since the early 1990s.

Outside of a handful of education researchers, the average person doesn’t know this data exists. Nor is most of it kept in an accessible format. Parents would need a high level of data literacy to use it to better understand education trends or to make their own school decisions.

ProPublica decided to create a Private School Demographics database, which we launched this week, that anyone, anywhere can use to look up a school and view the years of data we were relying on for our reporting.

The story behind this new tool began with our need to understand how many segregation academies still operate — and where. We wanted to focus only on those that continue to create segregating forces in their communities, not the ones whose student bodies had come to reflect their local areas.

We turned to the National Center for Education Statistics, which has demographic data about the students at most private schools in the country on its website. (Schools voluntarily reported their information to the center.) This was helpful, but it provided the racial breakdown of kids at each school only from the 2021-22 school year, the most recent data available.

We wanted to go back in time to see how the demographics of these schools have — or have not — changed over the years.

It turned out that this NCES data comes from something called the Private School Universe Survey, the dataset we came to rely on. It was practically hiding in plain sight.

While the most recent survey results are easily available on the NCES website, the rest are in formats that require experts to clean and organize into something usable. Luckily, we have those experts on our staff. Our colleagues Sergio Hernández and Nat Lash began digging into the older datasets, turning them into a searchable format. Then they compared each private school’s demographics to those of the public school district in which it is located.

This pointed us to illuminating stories about the effects of segregation academies in communities that weren’t on anyone’s radar, certainly not mine. In fact, the data could tell stories about myriad places all over the country where private schools educate millions of the nation’s children.

I used the database to point me to the segregation academies having the most dividing effects on their local communities. That led me first to a county in the rural shadow of Selma, Alabama, one of the most pivotal points on the Civil Rights movement’s map.

That community was 45 minutes to the south in Wilcox County, where I found people starkly divided by race, as they had been since the days when plantation operators hauled enslaved workers to the region to grow cotton. While Wilcox Academy was 98% white, the local county public schools were 98% Black. Local residents were dividing their scarce resources to operate two shrinking school systems, one private and one public — to the detriment of pretty much everyone there.

The story of Wilcox County formed the backbone of the first story in our segregation academy series.

Our database also steered me toward the last story in our series, this one based in Mississippi’s Amite County, where we found segregation academies that had some of the most profoundly dividing effects yet. One of them had never reported enrolling more than a single Black student at a time. The other had just hit an all-time high — 3.5% Black enrollment in a county where almost 40% of residents are Black.

Perhaps the most telling detail didn’t come from the data or our master list. I found it at a Friday night football game. One night while I was in Amite, the public high school played a home game — and so did the nearby academy. While the public high school played, its stands full of Black families, I interviewed a Black man who had graduated from the public high school and coached its football team.

As halftime neared, he and I decided to head over to the private school, a segregation academy just over the tree line. Over all his years living and working in this community, he had never stepped foot on the campus. Almost everyone there — people from this very small community — was white. But he recognized only a few of them.

As we walked toward the stands, he described feeling a million eyes on him. Nobody was unfriendly. But this threshold felt far more impenetrable than any railroad tracks I had ever encountered.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

On a brilliant mid-October morning, Harold Singletary stood before a teal shroud hanging from a building along one of the most famed architectural stretches in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. A Black businessman, he never imagined he would be standing here, for this purpose, along a street he had walked countless times, not knowing.

He prepared to address a group gathered to unveil a historical marker that announced to anyone walking by that the finely restored antebellum structure behind him once housed an auction firm that in 1835 “conducted the largest known domestic slave sale in United States history.”

In all, 600 enslaved people were put up for sale.

The new marker is notable because these streets, once bustling with businesses critical to the slave trade, yield little of that story to the average passerby. Singletary grew up in this coastal city — once the nation’s busiest slave port — where racial atrocities went largely ignored by white locals until recently.

He held prepared remarks in one hand. But before speaking, he walked over to hug Lauren Davila, a stranger who in 2022 discovered an ad for the sale of 600 people when she was a College of Charleston graduate student. Last year, a ProPublica reporter traced the sale to a wealthy plantation operator named John Ball Jr., which enabled Singletary to connect his own family members to those sold — and opened the door to additional research into the fates of the 600 people advertised for sale.

Until Davila’s discovery, the largest known slave auction in the U.S. was one that was held over two days in 1859 just outside Savannah, Georgia, roughly 100 miles down the Atlantic coast from Charleston. At that auction, 436 people were sold.

A small group then spearheaded creation of the marker Singletary was prepared to unveil.

“This is a big moment in representing ancestors,” Singletary began. Among those sold by the auction firm housed here were the mother and grandparents of an ancestor Singletary so reveres that he named his business, BrightMa Farms, after her. Its corporate office sits a four-minute walk away.

“America has to face some hard facts,” Singletary said. “And those facts change stories that change narratives.” He thanked the people “who helped change the narrative.” Among them is the man who owns the salmon-colored building at 24 Broad Street and agreed to hang the marker on it.

Attorney Stephen Schmutz bought the two-story building in 1989 and has operated his law firm there since. He had no idea it once housed a notorious slave auction firm.

“I just started thinking of the irony of it all,” Schmutz said. He grew up in segregated schools. Until he attended law school, all of his classmates were white. But when he was a young man during the Civil Rights movement, men like Martin Luther King Jr. “opened my eyes to the injustice of segregation.”

Among others, Schmutz has represented families of those killed in the 2015 Emanuel AME Church massacre, in which a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshippers. Standing before the marker, he applauded work to compile a more honest accounting of the city’s history.

The marker, about 2 feet tall, reads: “SLAVE AUCTIONS OF THE DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE.” The auction firm Jervey, Waring & White, which operated in the building from 1828 to 1840, was “part of a network of similar enterprises” around it that included banks and insurance companies, the marker explains.

The marker’s story began in March 2022 when Davila, now a doctoral student at Tulane University, was scouring newspaper archives from her home in Charleston. As part of an internship, she was logging ads for slave auctions.

On that day, she clicked on Feb. 24, 1835. From a sea of classified ads, she read:

“This day, the 24th instant, and the day following, at the North Side of the Custom-House, at 11 o’clock, will be sold, A very valuable GANG OF NEGROES, Accustomed to the culture of rice; consisting of SIX HUNDRED.” She was stunned.

But the ad she found was brief. It yielded almost no details beyond the size of the sale and where it would be held.

A ProPublica reporter then found the original ad for the sale, which ran more than two weeks earlier. Published on Feb. 6, 1835, it revealed that the sale of 600 people was part of the estate auction for John Ball Jr., scion of a slave-owning planter regime. Ball had died the previous year, and five of his plantations were listed for sale — along with the people enslaved on them.

A descendant of Ball’s named Edward Ball wrote a bestselling book in 1998, “Slaves in the Family,” which detailed his family’s skeletons and the horrors long minimized by a Lost Cause narrative of benevolent slave owners. Ball had located descendents of people his ancestors had enslaved — including Harold Singletary.

Davila’s research was supported by the College of Charleston’s Center for the Study of Slavery and a white Charlestonian named Margaret Seidler. At 65, Seidler had discovered notorious slave traders in her own family tree, and then she began identifying others — including Jervey, Waring & White.

Seidler wrote a book about her findings and has been reaching out to other white Charlestonians urging them to help provide an honest account of the city’s slave history. She and historian Bernard Powers, the Center for the Study of Slavery’s founding director, pushed for the marker.

“Truth can be a tonic,” she said.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

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One young researcher from Alabama is unearthing the origin stories of schools known as “segregation academies” to understand how that history fosters racial divisions today.

Another is measuring how much these private schools — which opened across the Deep South to facilitate white flight after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling — continue to drain public school enrollment.

And a third is examining how these academies, operating in a “landscape marred by historical racial tensions,” receive public money through Alabama’s voucher-style private school tuition grants.

All three researchers are white women raised in Alabama, close in age, who grew up near these academies. The women — one recently received a doctorate and the other two are working on theirs — approach their research from the varied disciplines of economics, education and history. Their inquiries are probing the very schools some of their family and friends attended.

In an ongoing series this year, ProPublica is examining the continued effects of hundreds of segregation academies still operating in the South. One of the three researchers played a key role in our initial story. Her experiences, both personally and academically, provided essential context to understanding how one segregation academy in rural Alabama has kept an entire community separated by race.

The research conducted by all three women is especially important now. It comes at a time when Southern legislatures are creating and expanding school-voucher-style programs that will pour hundreds of millions of public dollars into the coffers of private schools, including segregation academies, over the coming years.

Annah Rogers was working on her undergraduate degree at Auburn University in 2013 when Republican lawmakers suddenly rushed to pass the Alabama Accountability Act. The legislation created a voucher-style system to pay private school tuition for low-income students. As Rogers followed the debates, she wondered just how accessible private schools are to families with few resources, especially in rural areas. She knew that some of those communities don’t have private schools — and where they do exist, they’re often segregation academies.

Rogers hails from Eutaw, Alabama, a town of 3,000 people located in the Black Belt, a stretch of counties whose dark, rich soil once fueled large cotton plantations. Her parents sent her 45 minutes away to a private Catholic school. (Catholic schools generally aren’t considered segregation academies because most dioceses integrated willingly.) Rogers’ father attended a now-defunct local segregation academy, and her mother went to one in another county.

While working on her doctorate in political science at the University of Alabama, she devoted her 2022 dissertation to examining the state’s voucher-style program and its effects on private schools, including segregation academies. She had expected segregation academies to balk at participating in the program given that more than 60% of students who use it are Black. Yet she found that many do. In fact, they take part at a slightly higher rate — 8% more often — than other private schools.

That discovery prompted more questions: Are the tuition grants enabling Black students to attend segregation academies, making the schools more diverse? Or are the academies merely siphoning off the white students who use the grants?

“The biggest problem is that we don’t know,” said Rogers, who’s now an assistant professor at the University of West Alabama’s education college. She hit a huge hurdle when the state refused to break down by school the demographics of students who use the publicly funded program to pay private school tuition.

Despite that roadblock, she continues to probe these questions while working on related studies, including one that demonstrates how school segregation patterns have continued and even worsened across Alabama’s Black Belt over the last three decades.

Her research will become more critical in the coming years, as more students, including students from wealthier families, will be receiving state money to attend private schools. In March, Alabama lawmakers created a universal voucher-style program to fund private school tuition. It will be open to all children, regardless of household income, starting in 2027.

Danielle Graves grew up in Mobile on the Gulf Coast, where she attended a mostly white private Episcopal school. Although it opened long enough before the Brown v. Board ruling that academics don’t label it a segregation academy, its enrollment still grew substantially during desegregation.

Graves left the South to pursue her master’s and doctorate in economics at Boston University, where she is a fourth-year Ph.D. student. While in the Northeast, she realized that private schools there tend to be much older than in the South. The private school tradition didn’t really catch on in the South until white people thought Black students might arrive at their children’s public schools.

Graves also realized how few people outside of the South knew about segregation academies. Economics literature rarely mentioned them at all.

“I felt like it was this missing piece,” she said.

A lot of economic research on school desegregation and white flight focuses on cities rather than on rural areas “where segregation academies really play a big role,” Graves said. She jumped into that largely empty research lane.

Graves tackles questions like: How have segregation academies affected the average public school enrollment? Are there differences between rural and urban areas?

She taught a class on the economics and history of school segregation at Harvard University this spring and has spent the last two years researching and presenting her work on the impact that segregation academies have on local public schools.

For the dissertation she is finishing, Graves found that on average, when segregation academies opened in Alabama and Louisiana, they caused white enrollment in neighboring public schools to drop by about a third — and the white population did not return over the 15 years that followed.

Now she is measuring the effects of segregation academies on local public school funding, the students who attended them and the communities where they operate.

Unlike the other two researchers, Amberly Sheffield went to her local public schools, which were predominantly Black. As she watched other white families pay to send their children to segregation academies, she wondered: why?

Sheffield grew up in Grove Hill, a town of 2,000 people, where her father briefly attended a local segregation academy. After earning her undergraduate degree, she landed a job teaching history at a segregation academy in neighboring Wilcox County. ProPublica’s first story in its series on these academies focused on Wilcox County and the lasting effect that school segregation has had on community members — including, for a time, Sheffield. 

Almost all of her students at Wilcox Academy were white. The entire faculty was white. Yet Wilcox County is 70% Black.

Like most segregation academies, Wilcox Academy doesn’t advertise itself as such. Some of these schools include their founding years on their websites or entrance signs — as Wilcox Academy does — but mention nothing about the fact that they opened to avoid desegregation.

Sheffield wanted to shed light on the context of the schools’ openings. In her 2022 master's thesis at Auburn University, she chronicled Wilcox County’s history of sharecropping, violence against civil rights advocates, and resistance to school integration.

She also documented the many fundraisers white people held to pay for the segregation academies they rushed to open before many Black students arrived at the white public schools. Families forming one academy held a skit night, barbeque, fish fry, bingo party, pet show and pancake supper. The money raised paid for school equipment and salaries “but equally important, it created a new community for its founders, sponsors, and families,” she wrote.

The schools also joined a new group that provided their accreditation and organized sports events. “These academies allowed whites to gain complete control over their children’s education — they no longer had to answer to any form of government but their own,” Sheffield wrote.

Today, she is continuing her research as a doctoral student in history at the University of Mississippi.

“History is very important in understanding how we’ve gotten to where we are today, especially when you look at public schools in rural communities in Alabama,” Sheffield said. Many of these schools are mostly Black, underfunded and struggling. “I want people to understand how it got that way, and the answer usually is segregation academies.”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

I recently traveled to rural Wilcox County, in Alabama’s Black Belt, to understand the origins of the local “segregation academy” and how it still divides the broader community. It was the first story in our series about segregation academies, private schools that opened across the Deep South after the U.S Supreme Court released its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. White Southerners opened hundreds — perhaps thousands — of these schools, which allowed white children to flee just as Black children arrived in the public schools. Now, 70 years later, ProPublica has found that hundreds of these academies still operate. Where they do, schools often remain segregated — and as a result, so do entire communities.

While I was in Wilcox County, I wondered: How would things be different if the segregation academy didn’t exist? Locals I met in the county seat of Camden mentioned another small town just a short drive over the county line where people had chosen a different path.

So I headed to Thomasville, Alabama, to meet current school leaders and a group of Black former students who were on the front lines during desegregation. They described the critical turning points when Black and white residents alike made decisions that resulted in integrated public schools and a very different future for the town’s schoolchildren.

When Jim Emerson arrived in rural Alabama’s Wilcox County to work as a paper mill executive, he saw opportunities for development in its rolling hills, lush riverbanks and charming small-town county seat of Camden.

He tried to steer new hires toward moving there.

Join us on June 5 for a virtual discussion of how private schools known as “segregation academies” in the Deep South continue to preserve divisions within communities even 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

But he hit an obstacle: The local schools were sharply divided by race. Virtually all of the public school students were Black, and most white students attended Wilcox Academy, one of the hundreds of private schools in the Deep South that researchers call “segregation academies.”

Many of the paper mill’s new employees instead moved to Thomasville, a small town in a neighboring county.

In Thomasville, Emerson sees what Camden could have been.

The two small towns’ futures diverged, in many ways, starting in 1970. That year, the fairly new Thomasville City Schools came up with a court-ordered desegregation plan that called for shuttering A.L. Martin, the high school for Black students, and sending its students to Thomasville High, the school for whites. A segregation academy also opened in Thomasville that year.

Several former A.L. Martin students recalled that when they arrived at Thomasville High, they were sent to separate classrooms from the white students. Gone were their Black coaches. Their principal was relegated to a job as the superintendent’s clerk.

“It destroyed the fabric of the community. This was the nucleus of the Black community,” said G.B. Quinney, a student then who’s now director of a museum in the A.L. Martin building.

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By fall 1971, they’d had enough. Every Black student got up and walked out of school together in protest. A large majority stayed out for nearly the entire school year, organizing protests and a boycott that cost local white businesses money. Their demands included eliminating segregated classes, hiring a Black administrator and more Black teachers’ aides, and increasing the participation of Black teachers in planning school activities.

What happened next separates Thomasville from Camden and many other Black Belt areas.

White leaders eventually invited Black protestors to negotiate a return to school — and to their businesses. Many white parents also either never left the public schools or did so but soon returned.

Some students also transferred from Wilcox County to Thomasville “to escape the almost all-black Wilcox County public schools and to avoid the cost of tuition at private academies,” according to a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report issued in 1983.

In the 1970s, the chair of the Thomasville school board also stood firm: The district would not hire teachers who sent their children to private schools, nor would it beg students who left to return.

The superintendent agreed: “If they leave, I don’t want them back.”

In 1987, the segregation academy in town closed. Today, Thomasville High School’s students are about 60% Black and 40% white, far more integrated than many schools in Alabama’s Black Belt.

Annette Davis was in 10th grade when the district moved her class from A.L. Martin to the white high school in 1969, the year before the entire school was merged. She was among the student protesters who were arrested.

Today, when she returns to Thomasville High for football games and other events, she is proud to see white and Black students in class together — and a Black principal at the helm. “When I walk into that school now, I feel good,” Davis said.

Many families who can afford private school tuition still choose the city’s public schools. They use their resources to help other students with everything from transportation to winter coats and wrestling uniforms. They become alumni who support the school through fundraisers involving their businesses, Thomasville Superintendent Vickie Morris said.

In downtown Thomasville, a sign in a storefront reads, “Let’s Go Tigers!” — the public high school mascot.

In contrast, a sign in the window of a downtown Camden business reads, “Proud Supporters of the Wilcox Wildcats” — the local private academy.

“We’ve got the whole city’s support,” said Thomas E. Jackson, who graduated in one of A.L. Martin’s final classes and now is a longtime Democratic state legislator. In 1966, when he was a junior, he and three other Black students fled gunfire after entering an ice cream store through the front door, which was reserved for white patrons.

Morris, the current superintendent, described parents from surrounding districts, who pay $400 a year to transfer students in, tearfully begging her to admit their children when classes are full. “We are the choice,” she said.

Among those transfers are 71 students from Wilcox County.

“It shows you what can happen when the community makes up its mind not to be divided,” said Emerson, the paper mill executive who’s now retired. Wilcox County’s white citizens chose another path in the 1970s, “which, in retrospect, was a very, very bad decision.”

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This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

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Join us for a virtual discussion of how private schools known as “segregation academies” in the Deep South continue to preserve divisions within communities even 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

A mile of Alabama country road, and a history of racism, separate the two schools. At the stop sign between them, even the road’s name changes. Threadgill Road, christened for a civil rights hero, becomes Whiskey Run. Black students take Threadgill to one campus; white students turn off Whiskey Run toward the other.

Both schools are shrinking. Wilcox County, a notch in the swath of old plantation country known as the Black Belt, struggles with declining population — a common scenario across this part of the South. In such places, the existence of two separate school systems can isolate entire communities by race.

The private school, Wilcox Academy, is what researchers call a “segregation academy” due to the historic whiteness of its student body and the timing of its opening. It’s down to 200 students across 12 grades. Housed in a single-story building with beige siding and brown brick veneer, the school offers chapel and core academic classes but not music, theater or band programs.

Down the road, the county’s public high school has more students and course options. Wilcox Central High’s building, with a medical-training lab and competition-sized swimming pool, could house 1,000 students. Instead, it barely draws 400, virtually all of them Black, from across the entire 888-square-mile county.

Divisions like this have long played out across the region. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. As the federal courts repeatedly ruled against the South’s massive resistance, many white people pivoted to a new tactic, one that is lesser known and yet profoundly influences the Black Belt region today: They created a web of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private schools to educate white children.

Now, 70 years after the Brown decision, ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating. Some have flourished into pricey college-prep behemoths. Others, like Wilcox Academy, remain modest Christian schools. Many have accepted more nonwhite students over the years, and some now come close to reflecting the communities they serve.

But across Alabama’s 18 Black Belt counties, all of the remaining segregation academies ProPublica identified — about a dozen — are still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority Black. And in the towns where these schools operate, they often persist as a dividing force.

Even when rural segregation academies offer fewer amenities than their public-school counterparts, white parents are often unwilling to voluntarily send their children to majority-Black public schools. That can be to the detriment of all students, especially in struggling communities where money is tight. It means doubling up on school overhead costs, and fewer students at each school means neither one can offer the robust programs that they could provide if their resources were combined.

“You’re dividing money you don’t have in half,” said Bryan Mann, a University of Kansas professor who studies school segregation and school choice.

And soon, far more tax dollars will be flowing into private schools. Republican lawmakers are adopting plans for massive infusions of state money to help thousands more students who want to attend them. It’s part of a movement barreling across the country, particularly the Southeast — where, in Black Belt counties like Wilcox, a segregation academy may be the only nearby private school option.

In March, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who is from Wilcox County, signed the CHOOSE Act. It creates a program of voucher-like education savings accounts and directs the state legislature to devote no less than $100 million a year to fund them. Students can apply for up to $7,000 a year to pay for private school tuition, among other costs.

Since the start of 2023, North Carolina, Arkansas and Florida have joined Alabama in opening voucher-style programs to all students over the coming years, as opposed to limiting them to lower-income students or those in low-performing schools. South Carolina created one that extends to middle-income and some upper-income families. Georgia adopted its own for children in low-performing public schools. Governors in Texas and Tennessee pledged to continue similar fights next year.

To Alabama native Steve Suitts, history is repeating.

After the Brown decision, Southern legislatures provided state money to help white students flee to the new academies. Alabama was among the first states to do so, said Suitts, a historian and author of “Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.” Even the language used — framing the movement as parents’ right to “freedom” and “private school choice” — was the same then as it is now.

“I cannot see how there will be any difference,” Suitts said of recent laws. He dubbed Alabama’s new voucher-style program the Segregation Academy Rescue Act.

Republican lawmakers strongly disagree. They argue that today Black and white students alike can use the money to attend private schools. The new law bars participating schools from discriminating based on race, though it does allow them to choose which applicants they want to admit.

During House debate earlier this year, Republican state Rep. Danny Garrett, the education budget chair, heard many Black legislators argue that the law is about race, its aim to bolster segregation. “Of course, neither of these statements are true,” he told them.

In Camden, the pastoral county seat of Wilcox, Black and white residents said they would like to see their children schooled together. But after so long apart, they aren’t sure how to best do that.

High school juniors Jazmyne Posey and Samantha Cook hadn’t met until they started working at Black Belt Treasures, a nonprofit in downtown Camden that sells the wares of hundreds of Black Belt artists.

On the surface, the teenagers appear to have little in common. Jazmyne is Black; Samantha is white. Jazmyne likes rap and hip-hop; Samantha likes indie pop. Jazmyne goes to the public school; Samantha goes to Wilcox Academy.

But they soon bonded over similar life experiences and problems, both teenagers navigating high school relationships. They wonder what it would be like to be in class together. Would their friends get along?

Once, when they hadn’t worked together for a while, Jazmyne missed talking to Samantha. “I caught word that she said she missed me too,” she said.

Samantha has watched her class at Wilcox Academy shrink from 22 to 13 students. She likes her writing classes but wishes the school offered more, especially a theater program. “I definitely would have been a theater kid,” she said. One day, she hopes to join her sister in Atlanta: “There’s so many different cultures, so many people to meet.”

Jazmyne’s grandmother, who died this spring, attended the public high school a few years after desegregation. By then, most white students had left for the new academies. Although racism caused segregation, Jazmyne doesn’t think it’s the cause of the ongoing divisions.

“Nobody around here is really racist,” she said. “We just haven’t come together. We’ve been doing our own thing all the time.”

Sheryl Threadgill-Matthews grew up immersed in the urgency and hope of the Civil Rights Movement. Her father was a prominent activist and chaplain of Camden Academy, a private Presbyterian school for Black children. Her mother taught at the school. The entire family lived, learned and worshiped on the campus, perched atop a grassy knoll called Hangman’s Hill.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of her father’s college classmates, spoke at commencement in 1954. The grounds soon became a hub for staging civil rights marches and boycotts — landing it in the crosshairs of white school officials.

In 1965, the Wilcox County school board exercised eminent domain to take over the property. They kept the school open for several more years but evicted the Threadgills from their home and forced her father and his parishioners to tear down the school’s church.

She witnessed the dismantling. Someone burned a cross in their yard.

The family pressed forward. A year later, when she was a freshman, Threadgill-Matthews arrived at Wilcox County High, then a public school for white children. It was Sept. 23, 1966, and she would become one of the first nine Black students to cross the county’s racial line that day.

Grand white columns flanked the front door to the red brick building. She was grateful that her father walked her inside. Even after he left, the morning passed quietly. But it was a fleeting relief. Over the coming months, students rammed her desk with their chairs. They ripped her books apart. They brushed chalk dust into her hair. They smacked her head with crutches.

One day in science class, a boy sneered: “Nigger, if you make more than me on the test, I’m gonna kill you.” When she did so, he hurled something at her head so hard that she fell unconscious in the hallway.

She endured for the school year, then pleaded to return to Camden Academy. So did most of the students who’d come with her.

By then, white families across the South had launched the segregation academy movement.

In Alabama, it ramped up after a federal court ordered Tuskegee High School to desegregate. White parents scrambled to open a segregation academy, which Gov. George Wallace soon toured. He urged more like it to open — and called on state lawmakers to help.

In 1965, the state’s legislature approved $3.75 million — worth about $36 million today — to fund tuition grants that paid for students “to attend private schools rather than go to public school classes with Negroes,” the Alabama Journal reported.

Six other Southern states adopted similar programs, which “enabled the largest growth of private schools in the South’s history,” Suitts wrote in the journal Southern Spaces.

Across the old Confederacy, newspaper headlines announced private schools opening with names like Robert E. Lee Academy, Wade Hampton Academy, Jefferson Davis Academy. The Rebels were a favored mascot.

In March 1970, Camden’s local newspaper reported, “Promoters of additional private school facilities in Wilcox County got a shot in the arm this week.” The federal government had filed a plan for desegregating the local schools.

“The action is expected by many to spur interest in the construction of new private school facilities at Camden and Pine Hill,” the article said.

Two weeks later, another headline reported: “Private School Plan Shaping Up.” The story said 119 families in Wilcox had formed a new foundation, voted to start a private school, and secured 16 acres of land in Camden. It was the birth of Wilcox Academy.

Despite the obvious implications of the timing, many white people across the South argued their motives for embracing the new academies weren’t racist. Publicly, they cited “choice,” “freedom” and higher-quality (often Christian) education.

But those sentiments were hard to square with the fact that many academies opened hastily, often in people’s homes, churches or vacant buildings. Researchers who visited some of the new schools in the 1970s wrote that most were “dilapidated, worn, a little dirty, short on supplies and materials, cramped, offering few opportunities for enrichment.”

Wilcox Academy, however, enjoyed substantial financial support from the start. When it opened in September 1970, it was “generally regarded to be one of the most beautiful and well-equipped new schools in the area,” the Wilcox Progressive Era newspaper reported.

The nearby public school started the year with half the students it had the year before. Just two years later, Wilcox County public schools enrolled 3,733 Black students and only 109 white ones.

Now five decades later, only a handful of white students are enrolled.

Under drizzly clouds one day this spring, Threadgill-Matthews accelerated up the grassy knoll where Camden Academy once stood. With her 5-year-old great-nephew in the back seat, she approached J.E. Hobbs Elementary, a public school that now operates on the academy’s former campus in a hodgepodge of structures. Her nephew’s classroom was to one side in a low-slung building, painted blue with sunshine-yellow doors.

On her other side, a timeworn sidewalk leads to nothing but a stand of pine trees. Before the school district evicted her family and condemned it, their home stood in that spot.

Her nephew slipped from the car with his Spiderman backpack, gave her a hug, and headed into a classroom filled with Black children — just as she once did on this campus.

Now 71, she tries not to dwell on the disappointment. So little has changed since Brown v. Board, or the day when she and other Black children made history and suffered terribly for it.

“It is really heartbreaking,” she said.

Several years ago, an Auburn University history student reached out to Threadgill-Matthews, hoping to interview her for a master’s thesis. Amberly Sheffield had taught at Wilcox Academy, an experience that left her so intrigued by the school and its origins that she was devoting her thesis to the topic of segregation academies.

Sheffield grew up in the early 2000s in a neighboring county. Her hometown was down to 1,800 people. Despite the small population, she said, two segregation academies operated within a 20-minute drive of her house.

Sheffield didn’t go to either of them. Although she is white, her parents chose the public high school. About 70% of her classmates were Black.

She liked it there. An honors student and cheerleader, she had Black and white teachers. She hung out with a mix of friends and got to learn about their different backgrounds. So she often wondered: Why did so many other white parents pay to send their kids to the academies?

She decided to find out.

In 2019, fresh off earning her bachelor’s degree, she landed a job teaching high school history at Wilcox Academy. She moved to Camden, 40 miles south of Selma, and rented an old plantation house.

Heading into downtown, she saw attorneys, restaurants and clothing boutiques operating from rows of storefronts adorned with flower boxes. At one of the three stop lights, she passed the antebellum red brick county courthouse. Down the road, the white paint peeled on Antioch Baptist Church, where the KKK had once harassed congregants and a white man shot a Black man dead as people gathered for a funeral.

On her first day at work, Sheffield headed into the academy’s building, which was flanked by athletic fields and stands of trees. Although the county is more than two-thirds Black, the classrooms inside bustled with white children and teachers. The only Black staff she saw were two custodians.

It felt like 1970, the year the school opened.

As she got to know her students, she probed: Why didn’t they go to the public schools? She expected them to cite the academy’s Christian education or the alumni in their family. And some did.

Others figured Wilcox Academy’s academics were better. But it was hard to know. Unlike the public schools, private schools don’t have to release test scores that would allow for comparisons.

To her surprise, many of her students spoke of fear. The public schools were dangerous, they said. They might get shot. They didn’t say it was because the students there are Black, “but that was the sense I got,” Sheffield said.

She realized her students moved in bubbles of whiteness. Virtually all of their friends were white. Their parents’ friends were white. And they were never mentored or disciplined by Black teachers.

By then, Alabama was several years into a tuition scholarship program for lower-income families that was used mostly by Black students and could have helped more African American families apply to mostly white private schools. But Wilcox Academy has chosen not to participate.

Nor have many of the segregation academies in neighboring counties, state records indicate. Private schools in Alabama whose student bodies are more than 94% white have been least likely to opt in, one researcher found.

Wilcox Academy’s principal did not respond to ProPublica’s multiple emails and calls seeking to discuss the academy’s impact on local school segregation, why it doesn’t participate in the existing tuition-grant program and whether it will participate in the new program.

Sheffield concluded that many families still chose the academy due to race — the comfort of their own, discomfort with another — even if they didn’t recognize it as such.

She stayed for one school year, then got to work on her master’s degree. (She’s now a doctoral student at the University of Mississippi studying segregation academies.)

In her master’s thesis, she tracked the formation of these schools across Alabama, particularly “a tidal wave” of openings in 1970. That fall alone, 23 sprang up across the state, including Wilcox Academy. By 1978, public school enrollment in seven Black Belt counties — including Wilcox — was more than 90% Black.

“These segregation academies proved to be white resisters’ most successful tool of resistance,” Sheffield wrote.

In small towns like Camden, where everyone could know one another well, people often don’t. It’s been that way since white settlers arrived to bankroll new cotton plantations. They brought so many enslaved laborers that the county became, and remains, predominantly Black.

Descendants of both enslavers and the enslaved still share the community. But in so many ways, they remain separated. Because they go to school apart and always have, only a few white children ride the buses to school with Black peers. Black and white parents rarely build friendships at high school football games or PTA meetings. They don’t often carpool or invite each other over for a meal.

Wilcox County Superintendent André Saulsberry has lived this. He graduated from the public schools he now leads. “Will we ever know each other as people here?” he asked. “I’m not sure.”

He noted that it’s difficult to imagine how to create an integrated school system where one has never existed. Black and white residents in Willcox still eye each other across a chasm formed by centuries of history.

“We don’t trust one another because we are so separate,” he said.

Two years ago, some of the county’s mostly white large landowners got Alabama legislators to derail the county and school board’s request to bring a property tax increase to a local vote. Half of the money would have gone to the nearly all-Black schools, including a new building for the elementary school Threadgill-Matthews’ nephew attends. Its aging structures have suffered two fires.

People who don’t send their children to public schools can lack a reason to invest in them, Black residents here lamented. Many wonder how Wilcox County would have fared if, instead of investing in the academies, white families had devoted their time and resources to the public schools.

“If people are together, they will understand each other in more ways — and trust more,” Saulsberry said. “And we won’t continue to die as a county.”

But some places in Camden have begun to draw Black and white people together in ways that foster deep relationships. One is Black Belt Treasures, where employees coordinate arts programs for public and private school students. They make a point of welcoming all comers. A Black artist, Betty Anderson, who runs a small civil rights museum across the street, has become close friends with the white women who work there.

One recent day, two of those women stood in the gallery judging a public school’s art poster contest. Both were active with a local racial reconciliation group that halted during the early days of COVID-19. Both want the community to come together more.

Both also sent their children to Wilcox Academy. The decision, they said, wasn’t easy or simple.

One of them, Vera Spinks, knows that people wonder: Why not just send your kids to the public schools?

“It’s not as cut-and-dried,” she said.

The women vehemently deny the decision had to do with race. The schools had long been divided by the time they faced the decision of where to enroll their children. Both are Christians and said the academy’s religious education was a key factor, along with its small class sizes and personal attention from teachers.

Strong family ties also bond people to the academy. Kristin Law, the other woman working with Spinks at the gallery that day, is an alumna herself. “You now have three and four generations of students that have gone to the school,” she said. “It’s become more about school pride or tradition.”

Then there is the tremendous sweat equity parents put into the school. There’s almost always fundraising underway. The academy’s annual turkey hunt that raises money for the school dates back to 1971. Parents and students create, haul, assemble and gather donations for an annual prom extravaganza. The tradition has been passed down for 40 years.

Both women also said they are glad to see more Black and other nonwhite students at the school. “We’re ready for coming together,” Law said. “How do we do that?”

Integration may yet come to places like Wilcox County — though not in the public schools.

Alabama’s new school-choice program will be open to most of its students in January 2025 and to all students in 2027. Under Alabama’s existing tuition-scholarship program, about 60% of students who have received the money in recent years have been Black. The new program, which will open the door to wealthier families, could fund more than four times as many students.

In places like Wilcox and many other Black Belt counties, the largest pool of potential new private school enrollees is Black children.

In 2019, the year Sheffield arrived there, Wilcox Academy hired Michael Woods, its first Black coach, to revitalize the basketball program. Four years into the job, he now wrestles with the thorny implications of the new voucher opportunities.

Black children still account for barely 5% of students in more than half the schools in the South that likely opened as segregation academies. That leaves white parents and students still firmly in control, even in majority-Black communities. Now these academies will confront an important question: If more Black students apply, how many will white leaders accept?

Woods grew up in Camden’s public schools and describes the “broken bridge” between the two communities. He never imagined that he’d one day work at the academy and was surprised when its leaders reached out to him. He arrived to see two Black students and no Black teachers.

But he felt welcome enough that he brought his niece and nephew to the academy, along with another Black student. Some have told him about hearing racially insensitive comments but nothing he considers outright racism.

“We are still set in those old-time ways,” he said. “But God has made it better, and it’s time to let it go.”

He wants Black children to have the same opportunities that white kids have long enjoyed. But for them to have a real choice, they need to feel valued at the academy. Woods said he’s told the staff, “We still have to give something to show these kids that we appreciate them to get them there to the school.”

Saulsberry, the superintendent, doesn’t expect many to apply regardless. “I’m not sure how comfortable, in some cases, it will be if the Black child went there.”

Given that few public school students score at the proficient level on math or reading assessments, leaders there know the district’s standardized test results could be used against it. But Saulsberry contends his schools provide far more than test scores can capture.

His teachers must be certified, unlike at some private schools. Students at the public high school also can become certified nursing assistants, patient care technicians, medication assistants, welders, brick masons and heavy equipment operators. They can get certified to work in forestry. Plumbing is coming in the fall.

His students also can get mental health care, special education services, bus services and free meals — which few area academies offer.

“We try to look at the total child, not just the academic side,” Saulsberry said.

Public school leaders know they will have to do more to sell strengths like these. Wilcox Central High Assistant Principal Donald Carter expects private schools to follow the college football playbook: “They’ll be out to recruit now.”

When Woods coaches the academy’s teams, the stands in the gymnasium fill with mostly white parents. The other teams are mostly or entirely white as well. He wonders how it would feel if more Black families filled those seats.

Woods said that he fields almost daily phone calls from Black parents. “A lot of parents I have talked to want their kids in a private school,” he said. “But they just couldn’t afford it.” Now, in cautiously curious tones, they ask a question that echoes back 70 years: How would “the white school” treat their children?

To identify schools that likely opened as segregation academies, ProPublica adapted existing research using data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Private School Universe Survey to identify K-12 schools that were founded in the South between 1954 and 1976 and were more than 90% white as recently as 1993-1995, the earliest years for which student demographic data is available. We also filtered out schools with certain unique focuses, such as special education, or that were opened around the same time for reasons that may not have primarily been due to desegregation — many Catholic schools, for example, met this criteria. To determine which schools were still operating, we compared those schools to the most recent Private School Universe Survey data, from 2021 to 2022. Our estimates may be an undercount, since data about private school demographics was not collected until 1993, almost two decades after desegregation ended, and because not all private schools respond to the survey. To determine which schools were both still operating and still disproportionately white, we compared their demographics data to U.S. Census Bureau estimates for the counties in which each school was located.

Help ProPublica Report on Education

Mollie Simon contributed research. Sergio Hernandez contributed data analysis.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

London Lamar rose from her chair in the Tennessee Senate last spring, stomach churning with anxiety as she prepared to address the sea of men sitting at creaky wooden desks around her. She wore a hot pink dress as a nod to the health needs of women, including the very few of them elected to this chamber, none of whom were, like her, obviously pregnant. She set her hands onto her growing belly.

The Senate clerk, a man, called out an amendment Lamar had filed. The Senate speaker, also a man, opened the floor for her to speak. The bill’s sponsor, another man, stood near her as she grasped a microphone to discuss the matter at hand: a tweak to the state’s near-total ban on abortion access for women.

Lamar glanced around at her fellow senators, three quarters of them men. The imbalance was even more stark in the state’s House of Representatives, where almost 9 in 10 members were men. And Tennessee is no anomaly. Across much of the Southeast, state legislatures are more than 80% male.

On this day, the Tennessee Senate was poised to take a final vote on a bill that would allow abortions to prevent a woman’s death or “serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” Lamar stood to pitch a broader health exception.

A Democrat in the substantial minority, she could have appealed to her female Republican colleagues. Although they oppose abortion, they bring to the debate their personal knowledge of women’s bodies and experiences. But there were only three of them in the 33-member Senate. Instead, Lamar turned to the two dozen Republican men.

She reminded them that four years earlier, she was 32 weeks pregnant and serving in the House when her blood pressure suddenly spiked. Her placenta ruptured. Her son died in utero, and she faced a terrifying risk of a stroke. “It’s personally one of my biggest fears that this thing would happen again to me,” she told them. If it did, she feared the proposed law would prevent her doctor from protecting her health.

She implored the men to see her as a family member: “I’m telling you as your own colleague, as your niece, baby girl. I love you all. It is real, not only for me but for women all across the state.”

Scenes like this play out across the Southeast, even as the U.S. as a whole saw a record number of women elected to statehouses last year. Nationally, one-third of legislators are women, the most in history. In recent years, three states — Nevada, Arizona and Colorado — achieved parity.

But much of the Southeast lags far behind.

Women made up less than half of the state legislatures in nearly every state.

More than a century after the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, women constitute fewer than 1 in 5 state legislators across much of the region: in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, which studies women’s political participation. West Virginia has the lowest percentage of any state; less than 13% of its state lawmakers are women.

As Lamar spoke, 14% of Tennessee’s legislators were women. The Republicans, including two of the three GOP women in the Senate, swiftly rejected her amendment. She sank into her chair and pressed one palm over her heart, the other onto her belly, and practiced deep breathing exercises to help keep her blood pressure from soaring again.

Soon after, another Black woman in the chamber stood to speak. Holding the microphone, Sen. Charlane Oliver read prepared remarks calling for an exception in cases of rape. Then, she paused. She glanced to her right and bit her cheek. She cleared her throat.

Fighting tears, she began again: “I rise before this body as a sexual assault survivor.”

Sitting nearby, Lamar listened intently. She hadn’t known this about her fellow senator, yet Oliver felt compelled to share her trauma so publicly to try and sway the men around them. Tears welled in Lamar’s eyes as well. She passed her colleague a tissue.

Three decades have passed since a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee composed entirely of men grilled Anita Hill on live TV. Some of the men were dismissive, others downright hostile toward her testimony that Clarence Thomas, her former boss, had sexually harassed her. Millions watched it on live TV, and the Senate later confirmed Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The following year, voters elected a record number of women to Congress in what became known as the “The Year of the Woman.” Yet while Congress and many states have seen steady growth in numbers of female lawmakers over the years since then, much of the Southeast has stagnated or barely inched forward.

Tennessee has fewer female legislators than it had 20 years ago. Mississippi improved less than 3 percentage points since then; South Carolina fared only slightly better. Louisiana gained 6 percentage points, and Alabama gained 7.

This leaves large majorities of men controlling policy — including laws that most impact women — at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is sending more power to statehouse doorsteps. Abortion, a key issue of the day, provides one window: A ProPublica analysis of comprehensive legislative data kept by the Reflective Democracy Campaign found that with few exceptions, the states with legislatures most dominated by men as of July have some of the nation’s strictest abortion bans.

Of the 10 states where men made up the biggest share of the legislatures, eight have strict abortion bans, and one outlaws it at around six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. Five don’t allow exceptions for women who are raped.

Seven of the 10 states have trigger laws in place that went into effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Those were adopted by legislatures years earlier. But the passage of time hasn’t always resulted in more women at the table. Four of the seven legislatures have more female lawmakers today, albeit barely, than when they passed their trigger laws. One state has remained stagnant. And two have fewer female lawmakers than when they passed their trigger laws.

These are all conservative states, so it doesn’t mean women who oppose abortion rights would have voted differently. But their voices were hardly at the table.

Men’s numeric dominance means they also control what issues get debated in the first place — and which do not. Female lawmakers have been more likely to champion issues like maternal health, children’s welfare and education, said Jean Sinzdak, associate director for the Center for American Women and Politics.

“Women’s presence is correlated with more conversation and more issues on the agenda that are related to women,” said Anna Mahoney, executive director of the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College who wrote the book “Women Take Their Place in State Legislatures.”

Women haven’t run for legislative seats as often as men for many reasons: money, history, incumbency. But no factor plays a bigger role in the Deep South than its entrenched patriarchal culture and gender norms, female legislators and experts say.

“Traditional gender roles are more deeply enforced in Southern states,” Sinzdak said. “There’s more of a paternalistic streak that runs through them culturally.”

For instance, across party lines, virtually every Southern female legislator ProPublica interviewed for this story said voters had asked her who would care for her family if she won. Carla Litrenta, a South Carolina attorney, was breastfeeding when she filed to campaign for a House race that she ultimately lost in 2022. Voters often looked at the Democrat’s two young children and asked how she would find time to serve in office. “It was ironic because the male candidates had full-time jobs,” she said, “and I was working part time.”

Statehouse gender disparities are more acute among Republicans. Across the country, two-thirds of female state legislators are Democrats. The 20 states with the lowest percentages of women in their legislatures are almost all led by Republicans.

Republican organizations “are not recruiting as many women to run and not giving as much support to run and be successful candidates,” Sinzdak said. “You reap what you sow.” South Carolina state Rep. Sylleste Davis, a Republican, agreed that the GOP needs to seek out more female candidates but added, “I don’t get the sense that they are.”

ProPublica reached out to Republican Party leaders in Southeastern states with the fewest female lawmakers asking why more women weren’t running and what they could do to recruit more female candidates. Only one responded.

Scott Golden has worked as chair of Tennessee’s Republican Party for seven years. He said the party doesn’t target recruitment based on gender. During his tenure, including working for a prominent female lawmaker, the barriers he has seen for women are primarily structural ones. The state’s legislature operates part time but requires substantial attendance during those months, and the capital of Nashville sits a four-hour drive from some districts. Both make legislative seats less appealing for women with young children who want to stick closer to home.

“Families with volleyball and softball and senior dances and homecoming parades, it’s difficult for anybody to do it — much less women to do it — during those years,” Golden said. Instead, he sees far more Republican women running for local elected offices where they can earn full-time salaries and travel less. “It’s time, money and proximity,” he said.

Indeed, like other female Republicans ProPublica interviewed, Davis did not seek a legislative seat until her children were older. Yet that decadeslong wait for women like her to run means that legislatures have fewer members who bring current firsthand experience with pregnancy, birth and child care — knowledge critical to crafting the policies that govern these issues.

Women also are also less likely to consider running unless they are asked. Rep. Anne Thayer, a Republican who hails from a particularly religious and conservative area of South Carolina, said she didn’t consider seeking public office until people approached her. Even then she demurred.

“I gave that good Southern Christian girl response in that I’ll pray about it,” she recalled. A small-business owner and mother, she had worked behind the political scenes but “never wanted to be the one driving the bus.”

Supporters kept asking, however, and today she and Davis are two of four female committee chairpeople out of 28 standing committees in a statehouse whose rolling grounds are adorned with a dozen monuments to white men. Only one specifically celebrates female South Carolinians — and it stands behind the domed building to honor Confederate women “reared by the men of their state,” as the inscription reads.

When Republican Katrina Shealy was elected to the South Carolina Senate a decade ago, she was the only woman in the chamber. A few years later, she made national news for rebuking a male colleague who had called women “a lesser cut of meat,” referencing the biblical story of God creating Eve from Adam’s rib.

Shealy made national news again last spring. By then, she had four female colleagues in the 46-member Senate. All five women united across racial and party lines to help thwart a near-total abortion ban. (A sixth woman, a Democrat, was elected to the Senate on Jan. 2.)

Whatever their views on abortion, Shealy noted, women bring to the debate personal experience with menstrual cycles, pregnancy complications and motherhood. Male lawmakers around her simply don’t have that. “When they get up and talk about women’s issues,” she said, “it is just so frustrating because they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

After she joined her female colleagues to filibuster the strict abortion ban, they called themselves the Sister Senators and later received the JFK Profile in Courage Award. But they couldn’t defeat a bill that outlawed abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy.

Months earlier, South Carolina’s legislature — one of the most male-dominated in the country — had replaced the state Supreme Court’s lone female justice with a man. (Two of the three nominees for the seat were women.) The female justice had penned the lead opinion rejecting a similar six-week ban the previous month. The newly all-male court, now the country’s only state supreme court without a female justice, promptly upheld the six-week ban.

The case that overturned national abortion rights, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, originated in Mississippi, the state where white men in particular are most overrepresented in the Legislature. They hold more than 60% of the seats even though they account for only 28% of the state’s population. That means every white man is represented more than two times over in the body, according to a ProPublica analysis of comprehensive legislative and census data tracked by the Reflective Democracy Campaign.

Women, however, are underrepresented by more than a factor of three. It’s about the same for Black women and white women.

Yet when it comes to the impact of abortion restrictions the Legislature passed, Black women are disproportionately affected. They are four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white women. They also are more likely to experience unintended pregnancies. And in 2021, 80% of abortions reported in Mississippi were performed on them, the highest percentage of any state in the nation.

This is happening against history’s disturbing backdrop: centuries of white men controlling Black women’s reproduction. Enslaved women’s health once was only as important as the human property their bodies could produce. Black women had to birth the children of white men who raped them. They were forced to breastfeed white babies.

Michelle Colon, co-founder of a reproductive justice organization in Mississippi called SHERo, said this history has created a culture of devaluing Black women that persists today. Many state lawmakers “are the descendants of white men who basically controlled Black women’s bodies,” she said.

Black women in Mississippi aren’t alone. Across most of the Southeast, a region of former slave states, the more white men are overrepresented, the more Black women are underrepresented. This relationship doesn’t exist in other states that also have at least 5.6% Black women, the national average.

In most Southeastern states, white men are overrepresented at the expense of other groups, especially Black women.

This imbalance is most pronounced in Mississippi, the state with the nation’s largest percentage of Black residents. “It’s not the year of the woman here,” said Tracy DeVries, executive director of the Women’s Foundation of Mississippi. “There’s no priority for women’s health. None. It’s just not important.”

Democratic Rep. Omeria Scott, a Black woman, has served in the Mississippi House of Representatives for three decades and sits on its public health committee, made up of 24 men and five women. The chair is a white man. As long as she could remember, it has always been a white man.

Scott also serves on the House’s Medicaid committee. Its chair also is a white man. He and the House speaker, another white man, stymied efforts in 2022 to extend Medicaid coverage, which pays for almost 60% of births in the state.

“White men handle those appropriations,” Scott said. “They handle the policy and the money in Mississippi.”

In 2022, House Speaker Philip Gunn spoke to The Associated Press after blocking a Senate-backed effort to extend Medicaid for the state’s poorest new mothers from the federally required two months to a year postpartum. Gunn said that he was aware of the state’s high maternal mortality rate, but he had not seen evidence that extending coverage would save money. When asked if the move could save lives, he told the AP, “That has not been part of the discussions that I’ve heard.”

Only after the state’s strict abortion ban went into effect did Gunn agree to stop blocking the extension.

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves posted on social media, “In a post-Dobbs world — we may even have to be willing to do things that make us ‘philosophically uncomfortable.’” He would support the Medicaid extension as part of a pro-life agenda. “As I’ve said many times, it will not be easy and it will not be free. But it will be worth it, as more children of God are brought into the world!”

Neither Reeves nor Gunn responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Scott was pleased that the men finally stopped thwarting the extension of coverage for mothers. But it also felt like a consolation prize.

Not quite a year had passed since the Dobbs decision when a Black woman named Nancy Davis sat before a Louisiana House committee. She urged the panel, chaired by a white man, not to punish women’s doctors if they abort nonviable fetuses.

“Step out of yourself for one minute, and try to envision what it’s been like for women in Louisiana,” she said.

During her visit to the capitol, Davis wondered: Where were the lawmakers who looked like her? Only nine Black women served in the entire Louisiana State Legislature — 6% in a state where they constitute 17% of residents. Yet Davis had just experienced very personally how a policy the Legislature passed directly affected women like her.

About a month after the Dobbs decision’s release, the 36-year-old mother arrived at a hospital for a routine check up. She was 10 weeks pregnant and thrilled. When an ultrasound technician slid a wand across her belly, Davis peered eagerly at the gossamer image emerging into view on the monitor beside her.

Then, she felt everything pause.

“Why does my baby look that way?” she asked. The top of his head looked amorphous, like mist fading into the dark.

The technician slipped from the room.

Davis burst into sobs. Leaping up, she tugged on her clothes and stared at the image through tears. A physician soon explained that it appeared the top of the skull had not formed, a fatal anomaly. Davis recalled her also assuring, “This is one of the reasons for an abortion.” The doctor was referring to a narrow exception in Louisiana’s trigger ban, which had just gone into effect.

But Davis was enrolled in Medicaid, which did not cover abortions. The procedure would cost $6,000 out of pocket at the hospital, she said, so the doctor sent her to an abortion clinic. Davis found it shuttered.

When she returned to the hospital, a woman explained that the doctor could no longer provide her an abortion. “The director of the hospital shut it down because of the Louisiana abortion law and the fetus still having a heartbeat,” Davis recalled her saying. (Debate later ensued over whether the state’s abortion laws would have allowed her to get an abortion.)

For a month, Davis carried a fetus she knew would die. Some nights, she slipped outside and clutched her stomach, crying alone in the darkness so she didn’t wake her fiance, Shedric Cole, or their other three children. But what could she do?

Desperate, she emailed local news outlets. A TV reporter came to interview her, and the video went viral. She wound up in touch with Planned Parenthood of Greater New York and The Brigid Alliance, which helped her book flights to New York and pay for a hotel, child care and meals.

On Sept. 1, Davis and Cole arrived at a Manhattan clinic 1,400 miles from home. An abortion wasn’t something she could imagine a woman wanting. But she did want their nightmare over.

After they returned home to Baton Rouge, Davis became determined to give more of a voice to women. She wants to run for office.

After Lamar, the Tennessee senator, pleaded for broader abortion exceptions to protect women’s health, she drove home to Memphis, a majority-Black city in a county with the state’s highest ratio of pregnancy-associated deaths. She felt exhausted and disregarded.

“Black women are telling you, basically you’re killing me, and it’s like you don’t give a damn,” Lamar said. “My life is less valuable than theirs, and that is what hurts the most.”

Four months later, in August, she gave birth to a baby boy. Although she developed postpartum preeclampsia, she recovered and celebrated her healthy son with round brown eyes and chubby cheeks.

Yet, despite much-appreciated help from her own mother, the 33-year-old single mom quickly learned why many women with young children often don’t run for office. One day shortly after her maternity leave ended, she handled a phone call while greeting her mother, saying goodbye to her baby, saying goodbye to her mother and then rushing to her car to head to an assignment for her job overseeing a program that develops the Black teacher pipeline, stopping to fill the air in her car tires on the way.

“It’s overwhelming,” she said. “You feel like no one understands or cares, but also you know that you represent the masses of women dependent on you to be their voice.”

With January’s arrival, the Tennessee General Assembly is among legislatures across the Southeast getting back to work. Behind the door of her Senate office, Lamar hung a white board to track the bills she cares about most. It lists abortion, maternal mental health, doula certification and timely processing of rape kits.

She mustered hope for the months to come. Last year, she discovered a tactic that helped her pass a bill to study the expansion of doula services in Tennessee. She planned to employ the strategy again. To gain support from her male Republican colleagues, she had learned to present her bills as “pro-life” rather than pro-woman.

ProPublica obtained a database detailing the demographic makeup of state populations and legislatures from the Reflective Democracy Campaign. The database includes race and gender information for all state legislators and was last updated in July, prior to the 2023 state elections. The state demographic data is from the 2020 census, with additional information from 2022 annual population estimates.

To assess representation of demographic groups, ProPublica calculated the ratio of percent representation of the group in the state legislature to percent representation in the state as a whole. A ratio of 1 can be interpreted as the proportion of a demographic in the state legislature equaling the proportion of that demographic among the state’s general population. A ratio larger than 1 means that the demographic is more present in the legislature than in the state population, and a ratio less than 1 means that the demographic is less present in the legislature than expected, given their prevalence in the state population. For instance, a ratio of 2 should be interpreted as there being twice the proportion of a demographic group in the state legislature as in the state population, and is described as overrepresentation by a factor of 2.

To be sure, an individual is not solely represented by the politicians who share their identity, nor does an individual politician work only towards the interests of constituents of the same identity. However, the expectation that a demographic group should be proportionally represented among politicians as in the population as a whole is intuitive and widely used as a proxy for representation in news reports.

When assessing the representation of Black women and white men, we limited our analysis to states with a meaningful proportion of Black women. Black women make up between 0.2% to nearly one-fifth of state populations. As a result, we used the average proportion of Black women in state populations, 5.6%, as a threshold and focused on the 21 states with a higher-than-average proportion of Black women. We used the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s definition of the Southeast and used linear regression to assess trends in representation within and outside of the Southeast.

Irena Hwang contributed data analysis.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The woman turned her car onto the campus of Harvard University, a place she had never been, and parked near a museum renowned for its invaluable cultural artifacts. But on that day in 2010, Tamara Lanier did not come to see ancient Mayan murals or African masks. She arrived to view historic photographs of enslaved people she had recently come to believe were her own ancestors.

Though excited, she steeled herself. She had seen the images online. She had felt gripped by the steely gaze of a man named Renty. And she had grieved for his daughter, a young woman named Delia, seated with the top of her dress unbuttoned, pulled down and bunched in her lap. Tears blurred her eyes.

Photography was a fairly new technology back in 1850 when a group of white men 1,000 miles away from Cambridge, Massachusetts, conspired with a famous Harvard professor to use it. Louis Agassiz, a pioneer of natural science, had traveled to South Carolina hoping to prove that different races did not share a common origin, a theory called polygenesis.

To aid his effort, the men had selected seven Black people, most from nearby plantations, and hauled them to a posh photo studio in downtown Columbia. Someone forced the seven to partly or fully undress before a camera. A photographer then captured them from the front, side and back like the specimens Agassiz considered them to be.

Now, 173 years later, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology holds within its vast collection the resulting 15 images, a kind of early photograph called daguerreotypes. They are among the oldest known photographs of enslaved people in America.

When Lanier entered the Peabody that day, after driving for two hours from her home in Connecticut, she clutched a document she’d prepared for Harvard in hopes its experts might review it with her. It detailed the genealogy research she thought could demonstrate her ancestral ties to Renty and Delia. A white woman who would oversee her visit greeted her, in what Lanier recalled as a professional but distant tone. Lanier signed a standard legal form that stated if she was allowed to examine anything in the museum’s archives, she would need permission to publish any part of it.

Then she relinquished her purse and cellphone and anything in her pockets. She had come expecting to feel welcome as a potential descendant. A longtime probation officer, she instead felt like she was entering a prison.

The experience left her shaken. Over the next nine years leading up to her 2019 lawsuit against Harvard to gain control of the photographs, Lanier grew increasingly offended by its dominion over them. As she attempted to get Harvard to engage with her, she grappled with nausea and insomnia. She found it outrageous that the institution whose celebrated employee prompted the taking of the pictures controls the stories of the people he subjected to such degradation.

“Harvard has ruled over them with an iron fist,” Lanier said. “But this ugly history will always be in the way of anything they try to do with these images.”

Yet she has little recourse.

Last year, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court agreed with a lower court that had dismissed Lanier’s claim to ownership of the photos. The justices ruled in part that no legal avenue allows descendants to obtain possession of artifacts that resulted from their ancestors’ enslavement. (The court did allow her to pursue an emotional distress action in which she accuses Harvard of “publicly and cavalierly dismissing her claim of an ancestral connection to Renty and Delia.” Harvard denies this claim — and that she has proven she is a lineal descendant. That case is pending.)

As Justice Elspeth Cypher noted during oral arguments, “There are systems in place for repatriating remains for Native Americans and their objects. We unfortunately don’t have something in place through Congress to do that for African Americans and descendants.”

Cypher was referring to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. ProPublica has been investigating the failure of federally funded museums, including the Peabody, to repatriate their holdings of Native American remains and artifacts under the law.

Among other things, NAGPRA allows lineal descendants of Native people who owned certain objects to pursue their return. But enslaved ancestors couldn’t own property — they were the property.

And because they were treated as property, exhuming enough records to clearly connect generations of enslaved ancestors also borders on the impossible, as Lanier has discovered during her 13-year odyssey.

But more is at stake than who gets to claim “ownership,” a fraught concept in a battle over coerced pictures taken of captive people. Lanier’s ultimate goal is not to possess the images for herself but to reclaim a story. She sees revealing the brutality of the imagery, and the humanity of the subjects, as being as important to the broader understanding of the nation’s legacy of slavery as the images themselves.

“She is involved in a conversation that goes to many broader issues of African American empowerment — and disempowerment — in the telling of their own story,” said Michael Blakey, a bioarchaeologist and professor at the College of William & Mary and co-chair of The Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains of the American Anthropological Association.

Lanier’s quest is about finding a rightful steward to make decisions over the handling of the photographs and how they are presented. She has a new potential home in mind, one that she feels would finally set the people captured in them free.

Before she’d ever heard of the daguerreotypes, Lanier had learned from her mother about the Rentys of her family. Mattye Thompson Lanier was born in the 1920s to sharecropper parents in rural Mount Meigs, Alabama, where she heard stories handed down by her grandfather, a cotton farmer born into slavery in South Carolina.

His name was Renty Thompson, and he hailed from a line of enslaved men named Renty.

They began with an African-born man called Papa Renty, who held a place of special reverence to the family in part because he had taught himself to read English, and then taught others, at great personal risk. Teaching enslaved people to write was illegal.

Mattye absorbed her grandfather’s oral history with determination that the legacy of Papa Renty and the generations that followed him not be forgotten. Throughout the Montgomery bus boycott, her brother Renty, who went by “Willie,” walked to his plumber job every day. For long after, he kept the worn and broken shoes with pride, calling them his “civil rights shoes.”

Mattye treasured those stories. As she lay dying in 2010, she grew insistent with her daughter: “I want you to write this down.”

Lanier agreed. With the younger of her two daughters in college, and retirement from her job as a chief probation officer on the horizon, she figured that she’d soon have more time to preserve this oral history. In reality, she had no idea of all that her promise would entail.

Shortly after her mother’s death, Lanier stopped by a sandwich shop she frequented and mentioned to its owner the promise she had made and the man called Papa Renty.

When Lanier returned another day, the shop owner beamed: “I found your Papa Renty on the internet!” He emailed her a link, which she opened at home that night. Staring back in the daguerreotypes was Renty, who appeared to be about 70 at the time. She felt her eyes lock on his.

“I knew in my heart that this was the man I’d heard about for so many years,” said Lanier, who’s now 60.

The shop owner had sent her two links. The second one pulled up a story that mentioned Louis Agassiz. Among the most acclaimed scientists of his time, Agassiz founded Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and was the first scientist to hypothesize a global ice age. But Lanier also read that after encountering Black hotel workers one day, the Swiss-born professor had written to his mother that he “experienced pity at the sight of this degraded and degenerate race” and found it “impossible for me to reprocess the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us.”

In early 1850, Agassiz traveled south to address a scientific conference in Charleston, where he voiced support for polygenesis. Then he headed inland past vast cotton plantations toward South Carolina’s capital city of Columbia. His cohorts there included Robert Gibbes, a paleontologist and physician to the wealthy plantation operators who facilitated Agassiz’s field research.

The seven enslaved people soon faced a camera. All five men were African-born. Along with Renty and Delia were Jack and his daughter, Drana. The other men were Alfred, Fassena and Jem.

It is unclear whether Agassiz directed the photography in person. But a few months later, he wrote in the Christian Examiner that he had recently "examined closely many native Africans belonging to different tribes.”

As she read, Lanier grew convinced these were pictures of her own family members.

Her family called Papa Renty the Black African because he was African-born. And although Lanier’s mother grew up in Alabama, Renty Thompson, Lanier’s great-grandfather, was born in South Carolina. Mattye Thompson Lanier called one branch of their family the “Carolina Geechees.”

How many men named Renty, African-born, were held in bondage at the time in South Carolina? Likely not many. Renty wasn’t an especially common name in slave inventories. And a dwindling number of African-born captives remained alive at the time given four decades had passed since Congress banned the importation of enslaved people.

This has to be the same man, Lanier thought.

She set out to prove it.

In 1855, Frederick Douglass lamented how little he knew of his parents or the time of his birth: “Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves,” he wrote. No enslaved person he’d ever met could relay a birthdate. Life and law routinely tore fathers from children. Mothers marked births by seasons and harvests too soon forgotten.

“They keep no family records, with marriages, births, and deaths,” Douglass wrote.

African Americans researching ancestors today often hit an archival black hole before the end of the Civil War in 1865. The 1870 federal census is the first one that even records all formerly enslaved people with their names.

Despite having no experience searching archives, Lanier began to scour census, death and probate records. For 13 years now, she has worked to craft a narrative about her lineage. It fills three-ring binders, Google and Word documents, timelines and spreadsheets.

“When I talk about a jigsaw puzzle from hell,” she said, “that’s what it has been like.”

In March, Lanier stood gazing at the waters where a wharf once reached into Charleston Harbor to greet a glut of slave ships. Beneath her feet lay an artist’s carvings of the outlines of bodies resembling captives stuffed into those vessels’ hulls. It is possible that some or all of the five African-born men subjected to the photography arrived into enslavement here.

Lanier turned away to head inside a new 150,000-square-foot homage to the Black experience. The International African American Museum opened in June, but Lanier was getting a sneak peek with faculty from the College of Charleston’s Center for the Study of Slavery. In a few hours, she would give a talk at the college about her journey.

She never imagined the promise she made to her mother would lead to people across the country seeking out her story — and those of Renty and Delia. A movement dubbed Free Renty had sprung up around her quest. Students at Harvard had backed her. So had 43 of Louis Agassiz’s descendants, who signed a letter supporting her efforts. In 2019, two had even marched with her to the president’s office to hand-deliver a copy.

Now she walked up the wide front steps to this grand new museum in the state where Renty and Delia had lived and probably died. Wandering among its galleries, she examined shackles that once held people in bondage, tools that Black midwives used to birth new life and baskets woven by enslaved women who brought the skill from their homes in West Africa. She paused in one room to read walls filled with people’s first names like so many she had seen on slave inventories during her research.

“Maybe Harvard should fund the caring for the daguerreotypes here,” she mused. Bringing the images to South Carolina, to a “first voice” institution like this one — an African American-led museum telling African American stories — would mark what Lanier described as “a homecoming.”

Three months later, on July 1, Harvard welcomed its first Black president. Claudine Gay, professor of African and African American Studies, is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. Following her selection, ProPublica asked leaders at Harvard and the IAAM what they thought of Lanier’s idea of transferring the images to Charleston.

Rura, Harvard’s spokesperson, didn’t address the IAAM specifically but also didn’t dismiss the idea.

She wrote to ProPublica that “it is Harvard that has long suggested placing the daguerreotypes — all 15 of them — in another institution that would allow them to be more accessible to a broader segment of the public, to be understood in an appropriate historical context, and to tell the stories of the enslaved individuals they depict.”

She added, “It is difficult to arrange for such a transfer while the litigation is pending.”

Matthews, the IAAM’s president, said the museum is equipped to store the images, which are housed at Harvard in custom-made cases in a facility with controlled temperature and humidity. Matthews added that she would welcome a conversation about moving them to her museum, particularly if approached by the holding institution and a descendant.

“It definitely fits within our collection philosophy,” she said. “South Carolina is ground zero for a lot of this.”

The notion of a “homecoming,” she added, resonated with her.

After leaving Charleston, Lanier continued to mull that word, too. It gave her a sense of welcome and comfort. She envisioned a celebration for the daguerreotypes akin to the Black funeral tradition of a homegoing, when loved ones cherish and exalt those who have passed and set their spirits free.

Lanier was luckier than most. Her mother had passed on a fairly detailed oral history. And despite the disturbing nature of the daguerreotypes, they yielded important clues. Gibbes had jotted onto scraps of paper a few words about each person photographed.

Inside one velvet-lined leather case about the size of a cell phone, a frame holds a photograph of Renty in profile. The note affixed to the lining facing it reads: “Renty. Congo.” Below that, Gibbes added, “B.F. Taylor Esq. Columbia S.C.”

In fact, it appeared that four of the seven people photographed — Renty, Delia, Jack and Drana — were associated with B.F. Taylor. Knowing who enslaved them would be hugely helpful because morsels of detail about human property linger among the preserved letters, receipts and estate records kept by white elites.

Lanier easily identified B.F. Taylor. He was Benjamin Franklin Taylor, part of a family of Columbia-area plantation owners who bore titles like colonel and governor. Indeed, the names Renty and Delia showed up on several of the Taylors’ slave inventories, which were filed with their probate records. Although these handwritten lists yielded only captive people’s first names and dollar values, they provided Lanier glimpses into their locations and the names of family and friends around them.

One such inventory, filed after the 1833 death of Benjamin Taylor’s father, Col. Thomas Taylor, became a backbone of Lanier’s research because it listed two men named Renty and grouped people by family units. One Renty headed a group of seven who included Delia. The other man, called Big Renty, was listed above two people.

Nothing in the inventory obviously links the two family units. They don’t appear near each other on the page, but another Taylor document named a person from each group as siblings, bolstering Lanier’s view that they were in fact one family.

She posits that Big Renty is her Papa Renty, evidenced by the Black family tradition of referring to a father whose son shares his name as Big Jim or Big George. She contends the two Rentys in the inventory are father and son — her Papa Renty and his son Renty Taylor, the name of Renty Thompson’s father. (Lanier still doesn’t know how Renty Thompson got his last name. He might have been sold to a Thompson or, as a freed man, chosen the surname.)

Someone else on the Taylor inventory, listed with a separate family unit, also caught her eye: a person named Tena.

Renty Thompson’s mother was named Tena Taylor.

Was it mere coincidence?

Lanier found little to connect Renty Taylor, her great-great-grandfather, to Alabama. But Tena Taylor, her great-great-grandmother, clearly was born in South Carolina and moved, at some point, to Mount Meigs, Alabama, a rural area where she lived and died — as did Renty Thompson.

What also became clear: Benjamin Taylor and his immediate family enslaved several women with variations of the name Tena. And when a slew of Taylor’s brothers and nephews left Columbia to extend their plantation riches, where did they move? Mount Meigs, Alabama. One of them bought Chantilly Plantation in the Pike Road area, near where Lanier’s family later lived.

The Taylors surely brought with them the people they kept in bondage. And that could explain why, as Lanier’s mother had said, Tena Taylor traveled back and forth between South Carolina and Alabama to visit loved ones after she was freed.

But making a definitive case about the connections between all of these people is difficult without more documentation. Adequate records might not even exist. Gregg Hecimovich, an author and English professor, has spent more than a decade researching the seven people in the daguerreotypes and contributed a chapter to a 2020 book of scholars’ essays about them. He described “stalking the vapory trail” left by all seven.

“The people behind the images embody, to my mind, mini-histories of the American experience, only this time a history that white Americans willfully tried to erase, and still try to bury,” said Hecimovich, who teaches at Furman University, northwest of Columbia, and is finishing work on a book about the seven during a year-long fellowship at Harvard.

The research continues, although for Lanier it is not only an academic pursuit.

“So many people like me are out there trying to piece their families back together,” she said. “There is always this yearning. You’re driven to keep digging and keep searching.”

After 1865, a paper trail begins to illuminate the lives of newly freed people.

The 1870 census shows an 86-year-old man named Renty living in Columbia with people whose names also appeared on Benjamin Taylor’s slave inventory. This Renty was African-born, a distinct rarity by then. It likely means that the man whose visage has come to define the daguerreotypes lived to experience freedom again.

Lanier’s odyssey is a case study for scholars and lawmakers who have called on Congress to adopt protections akin to NAGPRA that would provide African Americans a path to seek repatriation — an AAGPRA, if you will.

“Where is the same consideration for the descendents of American chattel slavery?” Lanier asked. If she’d had a framework to pursue control of the daguerreotypes, perhaps she and Harvard might have avoided ongoing litigation and years of public conflict.

“Giving museums and communities no legal tools, no set of processes to navigate these problems leaves everyone shortchanged,” said Chip Colwell, an anthropologist who wrote the book “Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture.” In 2021, he co-authored a call for an AAGPRA in Nature magazine.

But because enslaved people faced a particular degree and type of harm, an AAGRPA would need substantial differences from its namesake.

For instance, tribal governments often make repatriation claims under NAGPRA by citing their ties to the lands that ancestral remains and items were taken from. That wouldn’t work for African Americans whose enslaved ancestors were typically stripped of such basic rights as owning land.

“The abject denial of humanhood and all of the rights that come with that during this period does make it incredibly different,” said Tonya Matthews, president and CEO of the International African American Museum in Charleston, which has a genealogy center. “The challenge is you’re dealing with the history of a people who were deliberately mishmashed together but also constantly separated.”

Despite the difficulty that has created for descendants researching their family histories, Harvard has countered Lanier’s efforts largely by asserting that she hasn’t proven a direct link to Renty or Delia. Harvard spokesperson Nicole Rura told ProPublica that experts within the university, and one outside, have examined Lanier’s claims of lineage “and we have not been able to find a connection between Ms. Lanier and the individuals in the daguerreotypes.”

Museums, she added, cannot just accept at face value a person’s claim of lineage to items in a collection — especially when, as in Lanier’s case, the person has sued to gain control of the items as a direct descendant.

“Harvard of course recognizes that there are practical limitations that encumber exhaustive genealogical research related to African American lived experiences,” Rura said in an email. “But at the same time, educational institutions and museums obviously cannot automatically accept claims of ancestry.”

Lanier wondered how the university examined her evidence of lineage, which she insisted is strong, given nobody from Harvard had sat down with her to review her ongoing research. (Rura said Harvard invited Lanier to share her additional findings multiple times.)

To Lanier, Harvard officials’ treatment of her is indicative of the problem she is pointing out: Rather than actively engage with her as even a potential descendant, she contends, they have preferred their own narrative told by people of their choosing.

“Beyond the academic arrogance, it is just a denial of Renty and Delia’s basic humanity — their history, their legacy,” she said. “It is a perfect example of cultural appropriation.”

Even if Lanier cannot definitively prove she is their direct descendant, she would have a stronger case if the threshold was only that she had to prove she is related to the community of people who were enslaved by the Taylors.

Instead of emphasizing direct descendants seeking repatriation, an AAGPRA would need to rely more on such “descendant communities,” Blakey said. He pointed to a national rubric on best practices that defines these communities as the families of people enslaved at a certain site or a surrounding region, or people who feel connected regardless of a proven genealogical tie.

“That community piece — who it is, what sort of authority the lineal descendants have compared to people who claim to be historical, social, spiritual descendants — that’s something we are going to have to work out” as a society, said Rachel Watkins, a biocultural anthropologist and department chair at American University.

Many museums don’t even know what human remains and objects they possess related to African Americans because they kept such poor records regarding people they viewed as research objects. No central repository tracks them either. An AAGPRA could require that museums review their collections and then publicly report what they have, allowing for more accountability.

NAGPRA requires federal agencies and museums to do just that for human remains and items that were taken from Native American graves. As institutions have completed these inventories, sometimes while also embarking on racial reckonings, they have reported finding remains and items connected to African Americans as well.

In 2021, Harvard’s then-president, Lawrence S. Bacow, issued a stunning announcement: Harvard had cataloged the remains of more than 22,000 human beings in its collections. They included the remains of 15 people of African descent who might have been enslaved. (This number has since grown to 19.)

“These individuals represent a chapter in our history that we must confront,” Bacow wrote. He apologized for “Harvard’s role in collection practices that placed the academic enterprise above respect for the dead and human decency.”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

When attorneys arrived for oral arguments in South Carolina’s high-profile abortion case last fall, state Supreme Court Justice Kaye Hearn took her seat up front, a ruffly white shirt beneath her black robe, the only woman on the dais. With piercing blue eyes, she scanned the courtroom.

A sea of white men jammed one side of the room. Before them, at a wooden table, sat three male attorneys there to argue in favor of the state’s law banning abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy.

On the other side of the room, a group composed mostly of women crowded benches behind a female attorney who had challenged the law.

Even in these polarized times, the starkness of the divide stunned Hearn.

South Carolina’s high court was among the first to hear an abortion law challenge after the U.S. Supreme Court released its Dobbs v. Jackson decision last June, overturning the country’s landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade and kicking the combustible issue to the states. Hearn knew the nation was watching. But she didn’t anticipate that the arguments about to begin in that divided courtroom would contribute to an even starker gender divide on the court where she sat.

Three months later, on Jan. 5, the justices struck down the deep red state’s abortion law. By a 3-2 vote, the majority ruled that the law violated the state’s constitutional right to privacy. Hearn wrote the lead opinion, a capstone of sorts given she had reached the mandatory retirement age of 72.

While abortion rights supporters rejoiced, the ruling outraged the General Assembly’s new supermajority of Republicans, many of whom derided her as an activist jurist. They also saw an opening.

In South Carolina, unlike all but one other state, the legislature alone selects judges. And in just a few weeks, they would vote on Hearn’s replacement.

The three candidates, who’d been put forward by a legislative commission, were all widely respected judges on the state Court of Appeals: one man, two women. Both women had longer tenures on the state’s second-highest court than the man. One had beat him before: She’d won over legislators in the 2014 race for her appeals court seat. He arrived three years later.

It wasn’t certain how any of the candidates might rule on an abortion case. (Before Dobbs, federal courts handled nearly all abortion law.) Nor were the candidates’ political views obvious; state judicial canon strictly forbids commentary on controversies or issues that may come before the court.

But before lawmakers could cast their votes, the overwhelmingly male lot of Republicans rallied behind the male candidate, Gary Hill, ultimately creating the only all-male state Supreme Court in the nation.

“It’s all kind of clandestine, cloak and dagger,” said Barbara Rackes, president of SC Women in Leadership, which works to boost women’s influence and representation in the state. “It was not happening in the committee chamber or on the floor. The decision was made in the backroom.”

As Republican lawmakers coalesced behind Hill, people who know the female candidates described them as grappling with intense pressure to withdraw quickly. Neither judge responded to requests from ProPublica for comment. Hearn said she had spoken to both, and they were “very hurt by the process.”

Democratic Rep. Beth Bernstein, an attorney on the state House Judiciary Committee who also chairs the House women’s caucus, called outrage over the abortion decision “the reason we don’t have a Supreme Court justice who is a female.” A contingent of lawmakers “felt a woman couldn’t vote on this issue objectively maybe, which is mind-boggling to me because its impact on women is most substantial.”’

Justice Hearn agreed: “I do think the fact that he was a man was important to some of them.”

Republican Rep. Micah Caskey, a former prosecutor, said he supported Hill because of the acumen he witnessed during Hill’s 13-year tenure on the circuit bench. But he said the abortion ruling, so fresh at the time, motivated other Republicans.

“There are certainly people who voted for Judge Hill on the basis of their understanding of where he would be on abortion,” Caskey said.

Following Dobbs, South Carolina’s race underscores the newly starring role of states’ top courts in determining abortion access — and the resulting impact on who gets chosen to serve on them. The machinations have left many in the state fearing increased politicization of their already unusual judicial selection process, which gives near-total power to politicians.

Consequences of an all-male high court are especially pronounced in this state, which consistently ranks at the bottom of lists measuring women’s well-being.

Women there already have among the weakest representation in the country. Only 14.7% of state lawmakers are women. The house speaker and pro tem are men. Ditto for the senate president. The governor is a man. (The lieutenant governor is a woman.)

Only two women have ever served on the state’s Supreme Court.

And now there are none.

All three judges who vied for the seat are highly regarded in legal circles across the state. Among them, Judge Aphrodite Konduros brought the most experience.

After almost 15 years on the Court of Appeals, she had written more than 400 opinions, signed on to another 800, and served far longer than the other two candidates. The granddaughter of immigrants, she also had been a family court judge and served as counsel for two state agencies.

Earlier in her career, Judge Stephanie McDonald left a law firm during a very difficult pregnancy, then started her own firm so that she could best raise her daughter. She persevered to become a successful trial attorney, circuit judge and appellate judge — the seat she took after beating the male candidate she would face again for the Supreme Court post.

But the women also worked in a state long known for its “good old boy” culture and the generational legal legacies that elevate certain men in the halls of its courthouses — and in its Statehouse. These men enjoy long-standing relationships with their fellow male attorneys in the legislature, which, in turn, holds near-total power over electing judges.

A key gatekeeper in the process is the state’s Judicial Merit Selection Commission, a group comprising mostly legislators who screen candidates and choose up to three they deem qualified for each open seat. The entire General Assembly then votes on them.

At a commission hearing in November to interview the candidates, then-Chairman Luke Rankin, a powerful Republican senator, welcomed Hill with familiarity.

“Obviously, I know you. We were in law school together. I think maybe I’m substantially older than you, but we were there at similar times. But your father and my father were contemporaries,” he said before lauding Hill’s late father, a former president of the South Carolina Bar whom he described as legendary.

“I remember meeting him when you and I were punks at Hilton Head with the thought of law school perhaps ahead of us,” Rankin said.

Hill, who can trace his family lineage in South Carolina back at least to the 1850s, also clerked for former 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Wilkins, an esteemed figure in the state’s judicial circles. After clerking, Hill went on to join his father’s law firm, and they later opened a firm together.

Yet, early on, it appeared at least one of the women had a decent shot, especially in a contest to replace the only female justice. Hearn and others figured Konduros was the likely front-runner. Although quick to praise all three judges, she called Konduros “one of our superstars.”

Then, on Jan. 5, came the abortion ruling.

At the time, a new far-right group freshly empowered by gains in November’s election had grabbed hold of the party’s right flank on abortion. Called the Freedom Caucus, its 18 members were determined to get a justice who would uphold a future abortion ban. None of the members ProPublica contacted would comment.

Joining with other Republicans, they coalesced around the male judge, leaving many to wonder if that support stemmed from two intermingled factors: abortion and gender.

“Nothing in the judicial record of the two female candidates seemed to be at issue. It was entirely their gender that disqualified them,” said Lynn Teague, a lobbyist for the League of Women Voters of South Carolina.

But Republican lawmakers insist they saw important differences among the candidates.

Rep. Anne Thayer said far more people in the legal community in her district, which sits in a conservative part of the state not far from where Hill lives, contacted her to praise him. Konduros was also seen as Hearn’s close friend and perhaps hand-picked successor. “I think that probably hurt her a lot” due to Hearn’s opinion in the abortion case, Thayer said.

McDonald, meanwhile, had practiced law with Republican Sen. Sandy Senn, who opposes the strictest abortion bans, creating the perception she might be like-minded, several lawmakers said.

Republican Rep. Sylleste Davis said of her vote for Hill: “I’m focused on the person I think is best for the job.”

She was among a group of lawmakers who met privately with the candidates to question each of them. She said she came away most impressed by Hill: “I could tell he was very thoughtful about every question and every answer.”

Republican Rep. Matt Leber had a similar experience meeting with the three candidates after the abortion ruling. He said Hill “can quote the Federalist Papers and all this, and he just outshined the other two.”

McDonald came across as “completely capable,” he said. Konduros did as well, although Leber said she came across as a bit more “aggressive” and “abrasive.” That wasn’t a deal breaker for him, he said, but given all three candidates were impressive, “every little thing counts.”

For many women, that observation may echo expectations that they soften their edges so men don’t find their assertiveness off-putting. One former judge said this can be especially challenging for female judges who must control their courtrooms — and the men who appear before them — to ensure fair and proper proceedings.

Some Republicans also said that Hill struck them as the most reliably strict constructionist — meaning he will interpret the literal meaning of language when it was written — something of key importance given they had blasted the abortion ruling as judicial activism.

But when ProPublica asked several of them to name a specific appeals court case in which Hill ruled in a way that made him appear more of a strict constructionist than either female judge, none of them did.

On Jan. 17, mere hours after the judges were allowed to begin seeking vote pledges from lawmakers, the two female candidates bowed out. The move shocked some observers, who accused Republicans of backroom deals and partisanship that pushed the women to quickly withdraw.

“That would be like me running for Senate, and then on the day of the election I pull out 15 minutes before the polls open,” said Sen. Senn, the Republican who practiced law with Judge McDonald until a decade ago.

In South Carolina, judicial candidates cannot seek commitments — nor can lawmakers give them — until the Judicial Merit Selection Commission issues its final report regarding judges’ qualifications. It released that report on Jan. 17 at noon.

The House GOP caucus met that morning. Several legislators told ProPublica that one of the female judges began communicating to close supporters that she was withdrawing around that time, before any votes could be legally offered or tallied.

At 4:40 p.m., the commission’s counsel emailed members notifying them that both women had formally withdrawn, lawmakers said.

It is customary for judicial candidates who lack support to politely back out before the legislature formally votes. But that doesn’t typically happen before at least a few days of jockeying once everyone can discuss pledges.

“You could not have run around the House floor fast enough” to solicit votes before the two bowed out, Teague said.

Senn soon publicly voiced allegations that she’d heard her colleagues in the Republican House caucus had conducted a secret poll before they were allowed to pledge commitments — then used the result to force the women out.

Republican Sen. Katrina Shealy, once the only woman in the Senate, said pressure on the women meant that anyone who wasn’t in the House caucus meeting, particularly senators and Democrats, had almost no time to pledge — and try to spread support — for them. She said that she didn’t doubt Hill’s talent but was angry the women dropped out without more of a fight. “We had two qualified women running and didn’t have an opportunity to vote for them,” she said.

Citing caucus confidentiality, nearly all House Republicans reached by ProPublica refused to address whether they took a poll that morning. Speaker Murrell Smith declined to be interviewed, although a spokesperson said the speaker maintains the allegations are “baseless.”

The few Republicans who would discuss the caucus meeting denied wrongdoing.

“I don’t think that there were any lines that were crossed or anything like that,” said Republican Rep. Neal Collins, who sits on the House Ethics Committee. “Nobody was forced into commitments. Nobody asked for any commitments. Nobody made any commitments.”

Caskey, who was vice chair of the Judicial Merit Selection Commission at the time and is now chairman, is a former prosecutor who also sits on the House Ethics Committee. He wouldn’t elaborate on the caucus meeting other than to say they discussed the race, but he noted that decisions made there are not binding regardless.

Yet, even to him, the women’s withdrawal came unusually early: “I can’t recall any other instance of a judge in any race or any candidates — certainly not both, or certainly not two of three candidates — getting out of the race on the first day.”

As the clock ticked on Jan. 17, Hearn began receiving messages that the women lacked support.

“My heart sank,” she said. “I was devastated.”

A few days later, Senn blasted her Republican colleagues for pushing out two qualified women. “We know it isn’t really about the smartest judge or the best candidates,” she told the Senate. “It is about who you know will demand forced birth.”

In early February, 140 of the state’s 170 legislators voted for Hill, the only candidate left. Eight voted against him; three voted present. None of the five women in the 46-member Senate cast a vote in his favor.

Shealy was among those who voted present. “It was a statement,” she said.

Back in 1999, Hearn was elected the first female chief judge of the state appeals court on the same day the first and only woman on the Supreme Court was elected its chief justice. A decade later, Hearn joined Justice Jean Toal on the high court.

As other states set records for electing female justices, Toal and Hearn remain the only two women to reach South Carolina’s highest court. Many other Deep South states aren’t faring much better. Mississippi’s Supreme Court has one female justice and eight males. Louisiana has one woman and six men.

Alabama and North Carolina each have two female justices. Neighboring Georgia comes closer to a representative court, with four females and five males. Tennessee is a notable outlier, with a high court comprising 60% women. However, the court is small — only five justices — and one of its three women has been on the bench for 27 years.

In South Carolina, women are better represented on the lower court. Half of its Court of Appeals judges are women. Yet, the glass ceiling to the top court remains remarkably shatterproof.

“The stakes are higher there. That body is the checks and balances for the legislature,” Hearn said from her chambers in Conway, a county seat about 15 miles inland from Myrtle Beach. (Retired justices continue to write opinions and do other work on cases they heard previously.) She wore a pale pink suit to signify the importance of women on the bench.

Jessica Schoenherr, who teaches about America’s judicial system at the University of South Carolina, examines challenges to diversifying the bench. She called South Carolina unique in going from at least one woman on the court to none. “They went backward, and across the world, that almost never happens,” she said.

Agree with it or not, Hearn’s ruling that overturned the six-week ban was informed by her personal knowledge of the way a woman’s body works and when she realizes she’s pregnant. “I do think women have an understanding that this business of six weeks” is “just impossible,” she said. “It's not workable.”

As she looked out over the divided courtroom that day back in October, she was well aware of the perspective she brought to the case at hand.

Quizzing a male attorney for the male governor, she asked about a privacy provision in the state constitution that some legal experts had argued protects the private and personal right to abortion. “What could be more personal than a woman’s decision to have an abortion?” she asked.

The lawyer began to invoke Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court’s now-defunct 1973 decision that guaranteed a right to abortion.

She interrupted: “I’m asking you. I know you’re not a woman, but what could be more personal than that decision?”

“Your honor, there could be any number of things that could be more personal…”

She cut in: “Name me one.”

In the months since the South Carolina court’s explosive ruling, Republicans have repeatedly tried to pass a new abortion ban.

Just this week, the Senate’s president tried yet again, pushing for a vote on a bill the House passed that would prohibit the vast majority of abortions after conception. But he couldn’t overcome a substantial obstacle: the Senate’s five women. The three Republicans and two Democrats banded together to control debate until the chamber voted to scrap the bill for the session, leaving the House and Senate at an impasse.

If the two chambers ever do agree on a new abortion law, one thing is clear: It will almost certainly reach the Supreme Court. And this time, the women gathered in its stately courtroom would face a bench filled with men.

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.