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Southern Center for Human Rights

organization

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 5, 2026
Entity authorityQ7569759 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Southern Center for Human Rights is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to enforcing the civil and human rights of people in the criminal justice system in the South. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, it has won cases in several states in the southeastern United States, including Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina.

The Center’s legal work includes representing prisoners in challenges to unconstitutional conditions and practices in prisons and jails; challenging systemic failures in the legal representation of poor people in the criminal courts; and representing people facing death penalty who otherwise would have no representation. Alabama is the only state that does not provide legal representation to people on death row.

The Center's former director and president, Stephen Bright, was lauded in 2001 by Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice. In May 2004, the Center was highlighted in a New York Times op-ed piece which compared treatment of prisoners in Georgia to abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

References

Sources

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New Press: New York, 2010.

Bach, Amy.

Editorial summary

“Southern Center for Human Rights” enters the record as organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Southern, Center and Human can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2001, 2004, 2010—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Southern, Center and Human.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Southern Center for Human Rights” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Southern, Center and Human provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7569759. VIAF identifies the subject as 148112754. The Library of Congress control number is no2006026832. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2004 and 2010.

Critical limits

Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Southern Center for Human Rights”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Southern Center for Human Rights primary sources, Southern Center for Human Rights archive and Southern research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Southern Center for Human Rights”?
  2. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Southern Center for Human Rights” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.