In November, Scalawag celebrated a decade of collaboratively strengthening Southern social movements with our reporting. Thanks to Beloved Community, we remain a part of cultivating a liberated South.
In late 2014, editors were waiting on the first round of final drafts to be submitted, and the next summer—amidst many uprisings and rebellions calling for dignity and protection of Black lives—Scalawag published its first print magazine.
In the time since Scalawag was first launched, we've gone from being a volunteer-run print magazine to a formidable online Black-led news organization where we tell the stories of the South, for the South, by Southerners like us. Scalawag has since become a place where Abolition is a practice through platforming incarcerated writers and workers get paid dignified wages, all while we consistently dedicate ourselves to reframing distorted and misleading narratives that have been told about the South for far too long.
In that spirit, and as we root ourselves in the long haul for justice, let us reflect on and learn from the not-so-distant past in these most-read articles from each year:
2024
Rest is Not Resistance, and That is OK
"I want to challenge the popular notion of rest as a choice. I want to recognize rest as both a tool and an outcome of resistance."
Keep reading2023
This is the Atlanta Way: A Primer on Cop City
The struggle today around Cop City is the result of a decades-long fight over who Atlanta belongs to, who is run for, and who it stands against. Making sense of it requires understanding the city's history of shifting dynamics of class and racial domination.
Keep reading2022
This couple wants you to know that conjugal visits are only legal in 4 states
There are only four U.S. states that currently allow conjugal visits. Couple Steve Higginbotham and Jordana Rosenfeld discuss the rules strangling intimacy on the inside.
Keep reading2021
Soul City: A Black dream killed just as it was coming true
Floyd McKissick Jr.'s dream is an example of how white supremacy and its twin, anti-Blackness, intervene in the most basic life processes.
Keep reading2020
During Civil Rights Era, Native American Communities in the South Armed Themselves Against the Klan
What can happen when the targets of white supremacist violence take violence into their own hands? The Lumbee Indians found out when they challenged the Klan.
Keep reading2019
"I listen for the night:" Two Poems by Destiny Hemphill
New poetry from Destiny Hemphill, the featured poet in our Summer 2019 print magazine.
Keep reading2018
To my thirteen-year-old son
"As a single mother by 22, raising you alone weighed on me, but there was an absoluteness about us. Your very existence made life worth living."
Keep reading2017
The massacre men
When Shelton Laurel and the Appalachian war are mentioned at all, they are too often perceived as an exception, wiped off with a "war's hell" or blamed on the ways of those peculiar mountain folks.
Keep reading2016
Where do the police come from?
With new attention on racial inequality in policing and police violence, America is wondering how its police forces should change and what they should become…. But where did police come from in the first place?
Keep reading2015
To stay in the loving arms of our mountains
We want to be able to stay in these mountains, to bring our full selves into our communities here, to provide younger queer folks with examples of queer adults who are thriving here.
Keep readingWe can't help but feel a little nostalgic for the reporting, lessons, analysis, heartfelt reflections—and even a quality opine for the Southern pine—published during Scalawag's existence. Our archive teems with Radical Southern life with a host of articles and essays that read like they could be published today.
We're so grateful to all of our contributors, and for each of you—for every reader, every share, and every dollar of support that has helped keep spaces for Radical Southern thought and creativity open. If you believe in another robust decade of unbought, unbossed publishing at Scalawag, invest in our work!