All results / Stories / Joe Atkins
Politics
Danny Glover and the Rights of Workers
I'll never forget Danny Glover as the drifter Moze in the 1984 film "Places in the Heart." It was a Depression-era story of a widowed mother in the South trying …
National
Political Homelessness
It's hard not to feel a little politically homeless these days. I'm thinking of that old folk song, "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child."
National
A Cold War Mentality
Back in the summer of 1992, just months after the failed coup that led to the fall of communism and Boris Yeltsin's rise to leadership in a new post-Soviet Russia, …
National
Why Hillary Clinton Lost
Neal Gabler and many of the anti-Trump post-election protesters are wrong when they issue a blanket indictment of all Trump voters, millions of whom voted out of an economic desperation …
National
Political War Stories
Many American voters are profoundly unhappy with the candidates from both major parties this election. Fifteen years of war are enough, you two! Americans are sick of war.
National
A Topsy-Turvy World
I didn't make it to the recent Donald Trump rally in Jackson, but I'm sure my ears would have perked up as soon as the Republican presidential candidate began attacking …
Business
The Rights of Working People
A longstanding French tradition upholds the rights of working people—and it goes back as far as the 1789 revolution with the so-called "sans-culottes" who were too poor to afford the …
Rebelling Against the Rebellion
Newt Knight is described as a "deserter, renegade and assassin" on the website of the local Sons of the Confederate Veterans chapter in Jones County, but Lew Smith in nearby …
State
Told You So About #MSLeg
In the poorest, most woe-begotten state in the United States, the Mississippi Troika and their loyal minions have managed to cut even deeper into woefully underfunded state education, health care, …
Business
A French Government Official Weighs in on Nissan
A top deputy in the French National Assembly is calling on the French government to weigh in on behalf of workers at the giant Nissan plant in Canton who want …
Business
Mississippi: Amazing for Film
Mississippi and its local communities benefit when the cameras roll here, whether they're big studio Hollywood cameras or those of independent filmmakers.
Politics
Bernie Sanders: For the People
Southerners are friendly folk, so Bernie Sanders is going to hear a lot of "Y'all come!" as he takes his populist presidential campaign to Dixie. The question is: Will they …
Business
Seeing Hope in Hard Times
Seeing voters in Louisiana and workers in Mississippi and Tennessee finally stand up to the political and corporate fog machine and assert their rights gives me hope for 2016.
Immigration
The Music of Immigrants
We're in the century-old Confiteria Ideal listening to the mother of all tangos, "La Cumparsita," and I'm thinking about the somewhat different world into which the tango was born.
Tav Falco’s Evanescent South
Tav Falco, enfant terrible of the 1980s, walked onto the stage at Lafayette's Music Room here, dressed in black, his hair a Nuevo-'50s coif, picked up his guitar and let …
Civil Rights
Waving the Wrong Flag
Working-class southern whites have a right to feel rebellious. The problem is they're waving the wrong flag to show it.
Politics
Howard Industries’ Secret Life
Many of Howard Industries' predominantly black workers say they're underpaid for the hard, grueling work they do, but negotiations with management went nowhere after at least 16 meetings.
Answering a Need Not Being Met
Dorothy Day House is the only refuge for homeless families in Memphis, Tenn., the nation's poorest large metropolitan area.
Business
Roll the Farmers Union On
A closing sentence in a 1937 Southern Tenant declaration of rights speaks to the hope that union still inspires: "To the disinherited belongs the future."
B.B. King’s Universal Language
Blues music may be singing the "No Future Tomorrow" blues once B.B. King hangs up his guitar for good, Alligator Records founder Bruce Iglauer warned back in 2004.
