A special #WeTheCivic: America 250 series from Nonprofit Quarterly and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation

Overview

Across 2026, this “America 250” anniversary year, official commemorations have presented the United States as a finished achievement: a nation steadily advancing toward freedom, racial equity, and democracy.

The 4th of July fireworks are over. The fight over America’s story is not. Because those stories cannot be told without an honest reckoning with and recognizing of the South.

Across the many Souths, this country built some of its most enduring systems of extraction and exclusion: Indigenous removal, slavery, Jim Crow, convict leasing, dispossession, labor exploitation, environmental racism, and attacks on voting and bodily autonomy.

But Southern communities have also built some of the country’s most important infrastructures of freedom: mutual aid networks, Black churches and schools, labor movements, voting rights organizations, immigrant and Indigenous coalitions, community-controlled institutions, and movements for land, reproductive, environmental, racial, gender, and economic justice.

The South’s story doesn’t end there. It is one of the primary places where a fight is being waged now for the country’s democratic future.

We’re inviting pitches for “South at 250,” a special subseries of #WeTheCivic: America 250 that interrogates and uplifts how people, institutions, and coalitions across the South have contested power, built civic infrastructure, and expanded who can participate in shaping our collective life.

We are interested in work rooted in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

These states do not constitute a single South, and we are looking for stories grounded in those differences. The South is not one place. We want stories rooted in its differences.

The South should not appear only as the setting. Its particular histories, cultures, movements, institutions, political economy, and relationships of power should be essential to the story.

We welcome reported articles, essays, interviews and conversations, criticism, creative writing, photo essays, visual art, and other forms that help readers understand how Southern communities have shaped—and continue to reshape—the meaning and practice of democracy.

Strong pitches might examine: 

• How people are contesting electoral, legislative, administrative, judicial, corporate, or narrative power
• The civic institutions communities created when public systems excluded, exploited, criminalized, or abandoned them
• Struggles over voting, labor, education, public budgets, health care, housing, migration, reproductive autonomy, incarceration, land, climate, energy, or community ownership
• How slavery, Indigenous dispossession, Jim Crow, border-making, segregation, extraction, or labor exploitation structures a specific present-day conflict
• What Southern organizing traditions reveal about building durable multiracial or cross-class power—including the tensions and failures that determine whether coalitions hold
• How Black, Indigenous, immigrant, queer, trans, disabled, rural, low-wealth, and working-class communities are building structures of care, belonging, political participation, and material survival
• The cultural workers, faith communities, local journalists, libraries, schools, legal advocates, community lenders, and nonprofit institutions shaping civic life
• Places—including rural communities, small cities, the Black Belt, Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, and the borderlands—that rarely control how their own stories enter national narratives

We are especially interested in work arising from lived, professional, and community knowledge.

A pitch may grow from an organization’s work, but the resulting piece should not read as an organizational profile, program description, grant report, or celebration of a single leader. It should help readers understand how power operates, how people are attempting to change it, and what becomes possible when they do.

What Pitches Should Include

We honor your time and want to support you from the start, before you start writing. Rather than submit a draft, we’d ask that if you’re interested in submitting you first send us a pitch with three short sections:

• What: What is the hook? What’s the specific scene, development, conflict, person, place, object, decision, or finding at the center of the proposed piece? What is happening—or what has been uncovered, built, lost, won, or contested—that gives readers a concrete reason to enter this story now?
• So What: Why does it matter? This is your opportunity to explain the larger civic stakes. What history, policy, institution, economic structure, or relationship of power must readers understand? Why does this story matter beyond the organization or individual directly involved?
• Now What: What can or should happen next? What does the story, history, analysis, wisdom, or reveal about building power or advancing a more just and equitable society? What must change? What should nonprofit, movement, philanthropic, governmental, civic, or community actors understand or do differently?

After those three sections, please include this background information: 

• Your proposed format and approximate length (we accept written, video, and visual pieces, as well as asks for other types of pieces)
• Any relationship to the people, place, or subject that you think is relevant, if not already included in the pitch

What Is Unlikely to Be Selected 

We are unlikely to commission:

• Broad commentary about “the South” without a specific place, conflict, scene, or body of evidence
• National stories with a Southern example added to them
• Organizational profiles, program descriptions, grant reports, or promotional content
• Historical accounts that do not make the history materially relevant to a present struggle or future choice
• Pieces that document harm without examining power, resistance, strategy, or what should happen next
• Familiar arguments that do not contribute new reporting, knowledge, interpretation, or perspective
• Previously published work, unless proposed explicitly for republication, adaptation, or a substantially new treatment

Submission Process Details

Send your pitch overview (250–400 words, following the What/So What/Now What structure above) to michelle@npqmag.org by Oct.16, 2026, with “South at 250 Pitch” in the subject line. 

We review on a rolling basis and will aim to respond with initial feedback within two to three weeks of the deadline. 

NPQ publishes:

• Reported and analytical articles of approximately 750–1,500 words
• Long-form articles of approximately 1,500–2,500 words

NPQ pays:

• $300 for written articles up to 1,000 words
• $500 for written articles more than 1,000 words
• Photo essays, video, visual art, and other non-written formats are compensated case-by-case—please note your proposed format in your pitch and we’ll discuss a rate with you before commissioning

Payment is processed during the week in which a piece is published, and we aim to pay contributors within two weeks.

Writers whose proposals are accepted will develop their pieces with an NPQ editor, and commissioned work will undergo editing, copyediting, and proofreading.

Submissions should be original, exclusive to NPQ, and not previously published, except where republication or adaptation has been explicitly proposed and approved.

Selected work will be published by NPQ as part of #WeTheCivic: America 250 and amplified by NPQ and participating nonprofit, civic, and independent media partners.

This call is being shared with a closed network — #WeTheCivic: America 250 coalition partners and our #WeTheCivic partner networks, as well as the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation rather than posted as an open public call at this stage.

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Appendix: Related Published Pieces 

South at 250 will build on a substantial body of work already published through NPQ’s #WeTheCivic: America 250 initiative, as well as earlier NPQ reporting and analysis that could be formally incorporated into the collection. 

Together, these stories demonstrate the collection’s intended range: voting rights, incarceration, labor, land, public memory, environmental justice, faith, culture, disability justice, rural journalism, queer and trans organizing, Indigenous sovereignty, and community-built democratic infrastructure. 

Pieces marked with an asterisk were published before or outside #WeTheCivic and are recommended for formal addition or retagging. 

Alabama 

1. The Freedom Quilting Bee and America’s 250-Year Story
   Jason Collins recounts how Black women in Alabama’s Black Belt transformed quilting into economic independence, institution building, and material support for the freedom movement. The piece brings art, labor, cooperative economics, and democratic participation into one distinctly Southern history. 
2. Her Grandparents Fought to Join American Democracy. She’s Fighting to Complete It
   Errin Haines profiles Black Voters Matter cofounder LaTosha Brown through the history of her grandparents, who were denied the vote in Jim Crow Alabama. The piece connects inherited struggles over citizenship to contemporary Black-led power building across the South.

Georgia

3. Georgia’s Judicial Industry Is Built on the Backs of the Incarcerated Poor
   Jimmy Iakovos traces Georgia’s prison-labor economy from slavery, Black Codes, and convict leasing to a contemporary system that extracts unpaid labor from incarcerated—and disproportionately Black—people. It exposes how a foundational Southern system of racialized extraction persists through modern governmental institutions. 
4. Why Repression in the US South and Global South Are Interconnected: An Interview with Azadeh Shahshahani
   Rebekah Barber speaks with Atlanta-based human rights attorney Azadeh Shahshahani about the shared systems connecting immigrant repression, policing, surveillance, militarism, and attacks on dissent in the US South and abroad. The conversation gives the collection an essential internationalist Southern perspective. 
5. Of Liberty
   Rural Georgia artist Nancey B. Price reimagines the Statue of Liberty around the Black bodies and histories commonly excluded from national representations of freedom. The work allows South at 250 to treat Southern visual culture not as illustration but as civic argument. 
6. Things We Carried
   Price’s collage depicts the cultural, spiritual, agricultural, and political inheritances enslaved Africans carried despite forced displacement. Her rural Georgia practice brings Black Southern folklore, collective memory, and survival into the country’s 250-year narrative. 
7. Reparation Vacation
   Price imagines reparations not only as a policy demand but as something Black people can possess, enjoy, and use freely. The piece contributes a Black Southern visual vocabulary of abundance, atonement, rest, and freedom beyond survival. 
8. Beyond What Is: Reimagining the American Project
   This Atlanta-rooted contribution refuses to treat the existing American political order as the limit of democratic possibility. It adds Southern Black political imagination to a collection otherwise weighted toward documenting existing institutions and conflicts. 
9. White Oak Pastures and Farming for Future Generations
   Set in rural Georgia, the piece examines regenerative agriculture, land stewardship, nonprofit infrastructure, and succession across generations. It extends the collection’s treatment of rural economies and land, although its relationship to democratic power should be made explicit in how it is presented. 

North Carolina

10. The Gap Between the Spectacle of America 250 and Reality: Lessons from North Carolina’s Fight for Voting Rights
    Caitlin Swain and Ashley Marshall contrast official America 250 spectacle with North Carolina’s continuing attacks on the voting power of Black communities, students, immigrant citizens, and rural residents. This should be a flagship South at 250 piece because it directly names the gap between national commemoration and Southern democratic reality. 
11. The Long Arc of Movement Making: A Conversation on the Democratic Principles of the Environmental Justice Movement with Three Movement Pioneers
    Cameron Oglesby speaks with Dollie Burwell, Peggy Shepard, and Vernice Miller-Travis about the democratic principles that emerged from the 1982 Warren County struggle and shaped the environmental justice movement. The conversation positions Southern community organizing as a source of national democratic practice. 
12. Built From the Ground Up: Why Environmental Justice Belongs to Communities
    Drawing on the Environmental Justice Oral History Project and the Warren County struggle, the piece argues that environmental justice derives its power from locally accountable organizing. It asks institutions to fund, amplify, and defer to community leadership rather than attempting to control the movement. 
13. Designing Counternarratives for the Nation’s 250th Anniversary
    Rooted in a gathering in Asheville, the piece considers how Black and Indigenous writers can challenge national narratives structured by anti-Blackness and Indigenous dispossession. It makes narrative practice itself part of the struggle over American history, belonging, and repair. 
14. A Sacred Responsibility: The Struggle to Restore Native Cultures in the South
    Crystal Cavalier-Keck, a citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, connects Virginia’s colonial history and the dispossession of Native peoples to contemporary cultural revitalization, land defense, and sovereignty in rural North Carolina. This is one of NPQ’s strongest existing pieces for disrupting the Black–White binary that often governs narratives of the South. 
15. Grassroots Movements Against Toxic Waste Disposal
    By placing Warren County in conversation with another grassroots struggle against toxic-waste disposal, the article demonstrates how locally rooted resistance can produce political knowledge that travels across borders. It complements—but should not substitute for—the newer environmental justice oral-history pieces. 

South Carolina

16. When She Didn’t Grow Up Seeing Herself in Books, She Became the Librarian She Never Had
    Cassie Owens Moore built a South Carolina school library where students could encounter themselves and their communities on the shelves. The story shows how a local institution can become a defense against cultural erasure, unequal access to knowledge, and efforts to determine whose lives children are permitted to study.

Tennessee

17. Energy Is a Human Right: A Photo Essay on Energy Affordability and Environmental Justice in Memphis
    Candice Fortin documents how residents of majority-Black South Memphis are organizing against extreme energy burdens, utility disconnections, pollution, and the arrival of energy-intensive data centers. It makes visible the relationships among corporate development, public utilities, racial inequality, and democratic participation.

Texas

18. The Hidden 100-Year Legacy of Latina Labor Activism in Texas
    Through Jovita Idar, Emma Tenayuca, and Cecilia Rodríguez, the piece recovers a century of Tejana labor, educational, journalistic, and community organizing. It demonstrates that Mexican American women’s organizing has been central—not peripheral—to the history of labor and democracy in Texas. 
19. Preserving Texas’s Forgotten Mexican Cemeteries
    Marianne Dhenin examines efforts to preserve more than 200 Mexican cemeteries across Texas. The piece shows how community-controlled preservation contests the exclusion of Mexican and Indigenous histories from official archives, protected landscapes, and public memory. 

Virginia 

20. The First American Play Is Missing, but Its Lessons Endure
    Cason Murphy returns to a Virginia tavern in 1665, where three men performed what is considered the earliest documented English-language play in the future United States—and were summoned to court for doing so. The missing play becomes a meditation on public assembly, official scrutiny, cultural expression, and who has the authority to perform in America. 

Appalachia

21. #WeTheCivic: How Appalachia Is Rebuilding Civic Infrastructure One Rural Newsroom at a Time
    Lauren Sowers examines how locally controlled news organizations are rebuilding accountability, public connection, and access to essential information in Central Appalachian communities long narrated by outsiders. The piece expands the collection beyond the Deep South and treats journalism itself as civic infrastructure. 

Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas

22. America 250 Demands That We Carry Forward the Legacies of Resistance by Trans and Indigenous Movement Leaders
    Shelby Chestnut connects histories of Indigenous and trans resistance to present-day organizing and institution building in New Orleans, Texas, and Arkansas. The piece brings a genuinely cross-state Southern perspective to the collection while showing how politically targeted communities build mutual aid, advocacy, and collective care. 

Regional and Multistate Perspectives 

23. How Black Churches Built the Civic Infrastructure That Kept the Nation Alive
    Augustina Boateng traces how Black churches fed families, funded schools, supported mutual aid, developed leaders, and sustained political organizing when public institutions excluded Black Americans. Southern examples—including Reconstruction political networks, Montgomery, and Freedom Summer—show that democracy survived through institutions the country rarely recognizes as democratic infrastructure. 
24. To Defeat Christian Nationalism, We Must Understand Its Impact on Black Faith Communities
    Chelsea Fuller and Takara Pierce examine how Christian nationalism recruits Black and Brown Christians into a national story that ultimately excludes them. Although the piece is not organized around one Southern location, its treatment of faith, race, political power, and national belonging makes it relevant to a region in which Black churches and Christian political institutions have played foundational civic roles. 
25. What Is Movement Lawyering Really For?
    Law for Black Lives presents movement lawyering as a legal practice accountable to organized communities rather than to lawyers, courts, or nonprofit institutions alone. Its analysis is directly relevant to Southern struggles over incarceration, policing, voting, migration, protest, and state power. 
26. Race, Disability Justice, and the South: A Conversation with Kehsi Iman
    This conversation examines how racism, ableism, institutional exclusion, and regional conditions intersect in Southern organizing. Including it would help ensure that disability justice becomes part of the collection’s governing analysis rather than an issue added after its core framework has been established. 
27. Organizing the South—How Black Workers Are Challenging Corporate Power
    The piece considers how Black workers are building power in a region shaped by low wages, anti-union policy, corporate extraction, and chronic philanthropic underinvestment. It establishes labor—not simply employment or economic development—as a central Southern democratic struggle. 
28. Why We Should Not Abandon the South
    Rebekah Barber argues against treating the South as politically disposable, grounding her case in a long history of people who deliberately remained, organized, and changed the country from within the region. Its argument could serve as a framing essay for South at 250. 

What the Existing Archive Establishes 

This body of work gives South at 250 a credible foundation across: 

• Voting rights and political participation 
• Prison labor and racialized economic extraction 
• Black cooperative economics 
• Tejana labor activism 
• Mexican American public memory 
• Black churches and civic institutions 
• Environmental and energy justice 
• Rural journalism 
• Movement lawyering 
• Indigenous sovereignty and cultural survival 
• Trans and Indigenous resistance 
• Disability justice 
• Public education, libraries, and cultural erasure 
• Visual art and counternarrative
• Rural agriculture and land stewardship
• Internationalist and cross-border movement strategy