More than two decades ago, a group including the white sheriff of Limestone County, Ala., rustled and slaughtered more than 60 head of cattle owned by Michael Stovall, a black farmer. They then dumped the carcasses into graves dug up on the farmer’s land. That was the finding of a Department of Agriculture special investigation. But the culprits remained free, ...
“Holding the Thin Green Line,” a radio documentary by FIJ grantee Barbara Bernstein, tells the stories of communities fighting fossil fuel industry projects in the Pacific Northwest . The first hour follows the efforts of activists in Tacoma and Kalama, Washington, to stop construction of the world’s largest methanol refinery and delves into the saga of Puget Sound Energy’s effort ...
For years, Alaska Native women have urged officials to address a crisis of violence throughout their state: Reported rapes are twice the national average, and child sexual violence is six times the national average. Alaska’s western region has the state’s highest rate of felony sex offenses, and the overwhelming majority of victims are Alaska Native. Victoria McKenzie addresses the issue in ...
T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong’s award-winning investigation with ProPublica and the Marshall Project, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” has been made into a Netflix series, “Unbelievable.” The investigation detailed the ordeal of a young woman who was coerced by authorities into recanting a claim that she had been raped. FIJ provided Miller and Armstrong with a grant when they ...
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students across the United States. And numbers are on the rise. But you won’t hear details about these tragic deaths from Massachusetts colleges and universities. Most of them don’t release information if they track it at all. Jenifer McKim, a reporter with the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, used ...
FIJ grantees Abby Ellis and Kayla Ruble released the documentary, “Flint’s Deadly Water,” with Frontline. The project followed a two-year investigation, in which Ellis and Ruble uncovered the extent of a deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak during the Flint, Michigan, water crisis — and how officials failed to stop it. The disease’s outbreak in Flint was one of the largest in ...
“WAITING FOR TEARAH,” a film directed by FIJ grantee Juliana Schatz is an intimate portrait of a mother struggling to find mental health care for her child. Shot over two years, this vérité film tells the story of Shayna, a single parent of three girls on the brink of losing her home due to medical costs, while her eldest daughter, ...
For six months, FIJ grantee, Rachel M. Cohen investigated the D.C. charter school lobby, tracing the history of how the charter sector has evolved over the past two decades. Using public records requests, document leaks, countless interviews and hours of archival research, Cohen pieced together for Washington City Paper How Charter Schools Won D.C. Politics, a story of how federal intervention, ...
“Juiced,” a report by Will Carruthers and FIJ grantee Peter Byrne, looks at how California power giant PG&E oiled political machinery after the 2017 and 2018 California wildfires that killed more than 100 people and caused vast destruction in residential communities. PG&E was found responsible for the most lethal fire and is implicated in others. It is part of an ...
Journalist Suman Naishadham, writing in VICE, reports on the first federal prosecution of a female genital mutilation case in the U.S., and traces the surprisingly vexed history of the tradition here. The case has reignited a longstanding debate over what constitutes the practice and how best to handle it. Secrecy around the issue in America means there is little data ...