Scott Morgan

One could make much of the timing of Chef Rob Masone’s next big food venture, seeing that it just happens to intersect with a moment that’s brought us both a pandemic and a major conversation about the meaning and breadth of race and racism in the United States.

A lot of people see frontline healthcare workers as heroes in the coronavirus pandemic.

That might actually be kind of a problem.

Cheedy Jaja grew up in Sierra Leone. He came to the United States to study medicine and became a nurse practitioner.

So it’s not much of a stretch to see what drew him back to Sierra Leone when the Ebola crisis broke out in 2014. He felt a call to go home and help.

He wasn’t prepared for the things he saw.

Voters with disabilities have always faced a lot of obstacles, but they’ve also always had a choice – voting absentee.

Now, a combination of the coronavirus pandemic and the politicization of the U.S. Postal Service is forcing a different kind of choice onto disabled voters – do they risk going out among people to vote during a pandemic or risk having their votes not count?

The coronavirus sent everyone at Converse College in Spartanburg packing early in the spring. Graduating seniors barely had time to say their good-byes before the campus shut down and restructured.

As the college reopens to residents this week, it brings a few changes, and not just in the COVID-19 protocols. For the first time, male freshmen are moving in as well. Converse, one of the last all-female colleges in South Carolina, decided that the fall of 2021 would be when it would go coed. But, as it has for a lot of things, the coronavirus pandemic has moved a few things around.

Right now, around the country, communities are asking hard questions about the role of police – does policing need an overhaul? How can officers better serve communities? And how can departments ratchet down tensions that can lead to aggression by and against police officers?

Well before the flashpoint that was the George Floyd incident, scholars and social reformers were posing an answer to questions like these: female officers.

Admittedly, we don’t often profile residents of Arizona here at South Carolina Public Radio.

But we’ve never gotten a visitor quite like Jessica Cox.

The walk out to the dam at Lake Conestee is a short downhill/uphill, past the remains of an old mill that died decades ago. That mill is the reason this dam – 585 feet across, 28 feet tall, and up to 10 feet thick – exists in the first place. It was a power generation system for an Industrial Age business that, like thousands of other dams in the United States, still stands, far beyond its intended lifespan.

What worries Dave Hargett, a retired engineer and co-founder of the Conestee Foundation, is not just that this 128-year-old dam sitting six miles south of Downtown Greenville might break and send a lot of water rushing down the Reedy River. What bothers him most is what is piled up on the north side of the dam’s wall.

The weekend after George Floyd’s death, a thousand-or-so people took to the streets of Rock Hill. At the heart of their march was a call to develop a citizen’s review board – a mechanism that allows residents to weigh in on claims of police misconduct. By the end of the march it was announced, to booming applause, that the city would start to develop one.

A few days later, a couple hundred people bowed their heads at a prayer vigil in Chester. The city’s mayor, Wanda Stringfellow, helped pull the vigil together with Chester County Sheriff Max Dorsey. During the vigil, Stringfellow said she would personally shepherd a citizen’s review board to the City Council.

By June 22, the ordinance for such a board passed its first of two hearings with the council.

It might be tempting to end the story there.  

Attending a Historically Black College/University (HBCU) is not quite the same as attending college elsewhere. There’s a lot of history and culture that goes with the HBCU experience – and that can be surprisingly intimidating for young African-American intellectuals.

The only thing scarier is the prospect of not being on campus.

And that is what students at Clinton College in Rock Hill are facing, thanks to the coronavirus. Juwan Williams is one of them.