Author: Jordan Meadows

By Jordan Meadows Staff Writer Last Wednesday, North Carolina House lawmakers opened the new legislative year with a contentious first meeting of the House Select Committee on Government Efficiency, focusing heavily on DEI policies in Asheville, Buncombe County and the City of Raleigh. Much of the scrutiny centered on allegations that local governments and publicly funded programs have unlawfully prioritized race and gender in violation of federal and state civil

By Jordan Meadows Staff Writer Owen Lun West Smith was born into slavery on May 18, 1851, in Giddensville, Sampson County, North Carolina. At the age of at most 14 he initially followed the Confederate Army as a personal servant. As the war drew to a close, Smith's path changed dramatically when he left his mother and joined General William T. Sherman's Union forces on their return north. He was

By Jordan Meadows Staff Writer There are more than 67 million people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home, and at least 38% report speaking English less than very well. With over 500 languages tracked by the U.S. Census Bureau, public agencies face growing pressure to serve diverse populations efficiently. Advances in bilingual and real-time translation technologies are rapidly reshaping how governments, schools, police departments,

By Jordan Meadows Staff Writer The Wake County Board of Commissioners held its first meeting of 2026 on Monday afternoon, marking a new year of leadership and fiscal planning for the county. During the meeting, Chair Mial presented a proclamation recognizing October 28 as the Cary, NC Alumni Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Inc. Day of Service. "Through a comprehensive body of service and community engagement, the young development

By Jordan Meadows Staff Writer To celebrate Emancipation Day, the Pope House Museum on S. Wilmington Street in Raleigh, North Carolina, presented "Fighting for Freedom: Black Civil War Reenactors" on Saturday. The free event brought history to life as reenactors portrayed United States Colored Troops (USCT) and their allies, sharing the incredible stories of Black soldiers and their lives both in the camps and on the front lines. During the

By: Jordan Meadows Staff Writer Angie Brooks was a diplomat, jurist, and global leader whose life reflected intellectual achievement and courage, particularly as a black woman in the mid-20th century navigating education, law, and international politics. Because her parents could not afford to raise her, she was fostered to a widowed seamstress in Monrovia. By the age of eleven she had taught herself to type and earned money copying legal

By: Jordan Meadows Staff Writer North Carolina's public schools are facing renewed scrutiny after the Education Law Center released its annual Making the Grade report, which gave the state an overall F for school funding. The report evaluates states based on funding level, funding distribution, and funding effort, and North Carolina failed two of the three categories. The most damaging mark for North Carolina was its ranking in funding effort,

By Jordan Meadows Staff Writer Frank S. Greene Jr. stands as one of Silicon Valley's quiet architects, an engineer whose work on early semiconductor memory chips helped accelerate modern computing. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in St. Louis during an era of racial segregation, Greene showed an early talent for math and science. Encouraged by his parents to pursue education despite systemic barriers, he became one of the first

By: Jordan Meadows, Staff Writer Annie Wealthy Holland's life story is inseparable from the story of Black education in the early twentieth-century South. Born in 1871 in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, Holland entered the world on land adjacent to the Wealthy plantation, where her grandmother had been enslaved. She was named after Annie Wealthy, the plantation owner who had freed her grandfather. From an early age, Holland understood education

  By Jordan Meadows Staff Writer The roots of HBCU football trace back to December 27, 1892, when Biddle College, now Johnson C. Smith University, defeated Livingstone College in what is recognized as the first intercollegiate football game between two Black institutions. Played on the snowy lawn of Livingstone's campus in North Carolina, the game was organized with minimal resources: uniforms sewn by students, cleats added to street shoes, and