News & Commentary

For the past 50 years, the ACLU of South Carolina has worked to ensure access to the ballot. This year, in the face of one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime, we expanded this work to ensure that every vote counted.

The court order and the directive assured hundreds of voters that their votes would count.

Charleston County voters chose a platform that will address head-on the disproportionate burden our system places on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor people.

There is a stark difference between the image and reality of law enforcement in South Carolina. Seven months after numerous law enforcement agencies brutalized people protesting police brutality in Charleston, the agencies still refuse to hold themselves accountable.

Across the nation, nursing homes with predominantly Black and Latinx residents are twice as likely to suffer the impacts of COVID-19 as those with predominantly white populations. 

This year has shown us that in order to shift power and create true accountability, we must meaningfully invest in community organizing. The ACLU of SC is proud to be a small part of the movement for an equitable and just South Carolina.

COVID-19 has laid bare the longstanding inadequacies of South Carolina’s prisons and jails. Under this system, approximately 30,000 people are caged each day and night.

The Charleston City Council voted today to approve the City of Charleston’s FY21 budget. The approved FY21 budget gives the Charleston Police Department (CPD) 26 percent ($53,410,792) of all funds in the city budget, despite the fact that 86.2 percent of arrests last year were for nonviolent, largely low-level offenses like marijuana possession and open container of alcohol.

Charleston can, and should, create true public safety by reinvesting in communities from which the city has divested and perpetuated centuries of harm against. This work starts, but does not end, in Charleston.