Jim Crow Rises Again: Election Dispatches from North Carolina

Dispatch from Battleground North Carolina

by Greg Palast

Tuesday, 4. November, 2014 

Greensboro, NC - Here in Greensboro, Reverend Barber recites local history. It was in this small southern town that, in 1960, the beating of students conducting a sit-in at the local Woolworth’s launched the wave of non-violent protests that became the Civil Rights Movement. The state has made it an official tourist destination.

Rev. Barber’s rally also marks the 35th anniversary of the killing of five protesters by the remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, an event without a tourist marker. 

Jim Crow has risen from the crypt of Segregation. But now he’s working as Dr. James Crow, database expert. Read Greg Palast’s Election Day dispatch from Dixie, for Al Jazeera.  

“We’ve been through too much to go backwards!" his deep voice rising with the gospel sound of Sam Cook’s “A Change is Gonna Come.”

Greensboro is the residence of an astonishing 3,735 voters who supposedly cast ballots in the presidential election illegally in both North Carolina and Virginia. Or, at least, that is how they are listed in the Interstate Crosscheck files.

Read today’s complete report for Al Jazeera, Crosscheck in the Crosshairs, about the swift actions taken by voter groups across the South and across the nation to stop Interstate Crosscheck from bleaching the voter rolls whiter than white.

If you haven’t read Greg Palast’s original investigative report on Interstate Crosscheck, read it now, right here, "Jim Crow Returns,".

Also check out if your own name is on Crosscheck’s voter hit list.
 

Greg Palast is one of those inconveniently stubborn journalists – much like Glenn Greenwald and the late Gary Webb – who gets his teeth into a story and shakes it bloody right there in the middle of the parlor. And, this week, writing for the Al Jazeera America news site, Palast dropped a bomb into [today’s] elections that has left credibility shrapnel all over the democratic process, if anyone cares to look for it. –– Esquire Magazine

For 15 years, Greg Palast has been uncovering voter suppression tactics in investigative reports for BBC Television, The Guardian, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.

Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.

Palast is a Puffin Foundation Fellow for Investigative Reporting.
Follow Palast on Twitter | Like Palast on Facebook | Forward to a friend
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter | Podcasts