Olivia Paschal
- Journalist and Writer, Freelance
- Assistant Editor, Virginia Quarterly Review
Arkansas, Charlottesville, North Carolina, Ozarks
As seen in:
Virginia Quarterly Review,
HuffPost,
Post Outlook,
The Guardian,
Yahoo Singapore,
The Atlantic,
Yahoo,
New York Review of Books,
The Nation,
RealClear Politics,
Truthout
and
Covers:
rural South, agriculture, Southern politics
writer | phd candidate @uva_history, capitalism, business, labor in 20th c America | archives ed @facingsouth | asst editor @vqr | from arkansas.
Articles by Olivia Paschal
Rally for Hallie | Olivia Paschal
Western Arkansas is poultry country. From the Missouri state border all the way down to Grannis and De Queen, long strips of metal barns line the county roads. The farms emit a sickly-sweet aroma with a sour bite-an odor that suffuses the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains. As I drove down the poultry corridor to see upstart Democratic Senate candidate Hallie Shoffner on the campaign trail, this very distinctive smell of chicken shit hung in the air.
Tontitown traffic stops led to ICE detentions months before 287(g) agreement
Editor’s Note: This investigation was originally published by Arkansas GRITA, a local nonprofit newsroom in Northwest Arkansas founded last November that reports on the impact of immigration enforcement in Arkansas communities. Arkansas GRITA kindly allowed us to republish their work. At least 20 people were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after routine traffic stops by Tontitown police before the department formally joined the federal 287(g) immigration enforcement program.
The Beast of Bentonville | Olivia Paschal
In retrospect, the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration was an inopportune time for Walmart to hold the grand opening of its new corporate campus.
The Beast of Bentonville | Olivia Paschal
In retrospect, the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration was an inopportune time for Walmart to hold the grand opening of its new corporate campus.
‘An Internal Colony’ | Olivia Paschal, Willa Glickman
Hurricane Helene devastated the southeastern United States when it hit in early October—killing about 230 people and causing over $50 billion in damages—particularly in North Carolina. “Those with financial resources may be able to rebuild,” writes Olivia Paschal in a November 3, 2024, essay for the NYR Online.
Who Owns the Mountains? | Olivia Paschal
When the Tug River flooded in the spring of 1977, it swept away thousands of homes in the rural Tug Fork Valley, across parts of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee. Years later, residents would recall that the emergency response was lackluster. In the pre-FEMA era, the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) were left to manage the federal disaster response and find homes for displaced people.
Organizing Faculty in Florida: An interview with Paul Ortiz
Dr. Paul Ortiz, a professor of labor history at Cornell’s ILR School and a former board member of the Institute for Southern Studies, joined the Southern Labor Studies Association’s Working History podcast to discuss the history of higher education labor organizing in Florida and Dr. Ortiz’s work in higher education labor organizing.
Lives on the Line: An Interview With Alice Driver
Lives on the Line: An Interview With Alice Driver Published September 9, 2024 Alice Driver’s book Life and Death of the American Worker comes out on September 3. Click here to purchase it on Bookshop.org. Reporter Alice Driver’s new book “The Life and Death of the American Worker” is an accounting of the lives and working conditions faced by poultry and meatpacking workers in Arkansas, where Tyson Foods is headquartered.
The Forebears of JD Vance and the New Right
This story was originally published by History News Network. The ascension of Ohio Senator JD Vance from, as he was dubbed by much of the American media, white working class-whisperer author of Hillbilly Elegy to Donald Trump’s 2024 nominee for vice president has made him a standard-bearer of a rising brand of illiberal, antidemocratic conservatism that has quickly built visible power on the American right. Few of Vance’s politics are truly new.
The Forebears of JD Vance and the New Right
The ascension of Ohio Senator JD Vance from, as he was dubbed by much of the American media, white working class-whisperer author of Hillbilly Elegy to Donald Trump’s 2024 nominee for vice president has made him a standard-bearer of a rising brand of illiberal, antidemocratic conservatism that has quickly built visible power on the American right. Few of Vance’s politics are truly new.
Lives on the line: An interview with Alice Driver
By Olivia Paschal / September 2, 2024 Reporter Alice Driver’s new book “The Life and Death of the American Worker” is an accounting of the lives and working conditions faced by poultry and meatpacking workers in Arkansas, where Tyson Foods is headquartered.
Before & after Freedom Summer
This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, the landmark campaign in Mississippi that saw more than 1,000 college students from around the country descend upon rural Mississippi to register rural Black Mississippians to vote, and which, in the face of extreme state and white supremacist suppression, seeded a broader movement for racial and economic justice.
A Southern Exposure/Facing South reading list for Gaza organizers
By Olivia Paschal / May 1, 2024 Across the country, students have set up Gaza solidarity encampments, drawing attention to a campaign of violence that has cost more than 34,000 lives in Palestine over the last six months. These encampments follow months of students across the country pushing for their universities and schools to divest from U.S. militarism and to support Palestinian students and pro-Palestinian speech on campus.
Let Her Cook
Off the Clock / Whole Woman’s Health was forced out of Texas, but its founder sees a future for abortion rights in modern-day “border states.” Ad Policy This article appears in the April 2024 issue, with the headline “Let Her Cook.” Wearing a black Feminist Buzzkills podcast T-shirt, green sweats, and blue Hokas, Amy Hagstrom Miller leads us out of her kitchen and into her car to buy groceries.
Five questions with Marc Miller
Marc Miller was on the staff of the Institute for Southern Studies and Southern Exposure for eight years, from 1977 to 1985. He started as a volunteer drawing unemployment insurance from the state of Massachusetts — where he attended graduate school — and didn’t intend to stick around for as long as he did.
Dead chicken pileup shows poultry growers' vulnerability to government and industry power
Poultry growers in Madison County are still dealing with fallout from the closure of Cooks Venture, a small poultry company that shut down abruptly in late November. Growers were left in the lurch, many with thousands of birds in their chicken houses. One grower, Leslie Harp, said she received a new shipment of birds just a few hours before the company shuttered.
'The Cost of Cheapness' filmmakers capture Walmart’s imprint on Arkansas and beyond
Editor’s note: Northwest Arkansas native Olivia Paschal teamed up with writer Bart Elmore and filmmaker Ethan Payne to produce this new documentary, which you can watch for free, embedded below. When I first met award-winning writer and historian Bart Elmore, he was about to head off to Bentonville.
Why We Did What We Did: Reflections from Sue Thrasher, Leah Wise, and Bob Hall
In March of this year, at Pages from the Movements for Justice: Southern Exposure at 50, a panel of some of the Institute’s early staffers—Sue Thrasher, Leah Wise, and Bob Hall—reflected on the founding of the Institute for Southern Studies, Southern Exposure, and the movements and networks for change that we have been embedded in, part of, and helped to create over the last fifty-plus years.
Harvard Report: US Meat Supply Could Start the Next Global Pandemic
A new report from Harvard Law School and New York University argues that the next global pandemic could originate from the U.S. meat supply. “Covid has infected more than 100 million Americans and killed over a million of them. But the next pandemic may be far worse and might happen sooner than we think,” Ann Linder, one of the report’s lead authors, said in a statement.
The South Is Used to Heat. It’s Not Used to This.
A few weeks ago, as the first wave of smoke from the Canadian wildfires rolled south, I was getting ready to drive from Charlottesville, Virginia, about 18 hours west to my hometown of Rogers, Arkansas, to visit family. I figured that by the time I hit the Virginia–North Carolina border, where I was planning to camp, I would have outrun the haze. But it followed me past the campsite and along I-40 in Tennessee, all the way to my corner of Arkansas, just 20 minutes away from Oklahoma.
‘Throwing The Heroes Away’: As Arkansas Tyson Plant Closes, Workers Strike over Treatment
Published in partnership with Facing South. Striking workers gathered in front of a Tyson Foods poultry processing plant in Van Buren, Arkansas, earlier this month, holding protest signs reading “Justice for Workers” and chanting in Spanish “si se puede” (“yes we can”) and “juntos venceremos” (“together we’ll win”).
An archive for a time of crisis
In 1970, as the civil rights and antiwar movements entered a new moment, several Southern organizers and activists asked what the times demanded of them. Their answer was a counter-institution, conceived as a hub for movement-oriented research and organizing.
How One Delaware City Ended Prison Gerrymandering
This article was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization based in Washington, D.C. The Howard R. Young Correctional Institution sits between a creek and Interstate 495 in Wilmington, Delaware. For the last ten years, the prison’s 1,281 residents were counted as constituents of Wilmington’s third city council district.
Shop Talk with Laura Kolbe
VQR columnist Laura Kolbe’s series of essays considers American art through poet and physician Kolbe’s own personal and experiential lens. The latest installment, “Safe as Houses,” starts with Louise Bourgeois’s Femme Maison paintings and moves through a series of works by other artists and writers who consider women’s bodies as shelters, bodies as homes, and bodies under siege. Read the full essay here. VQR: What is the animating idea behind your column for VQR?
Black Agenda Report
Manufactured crime panics are still a successful method of getting votes from white people. When politicians and corporate media speak of crime they are invariably talking about Black people as a group. The latest manufactured crime panic is following a very old and successful playbook. The dog whistle is very clearly heard by white people, who don’t need very much encouragement to indulge in their worst racist fantasies.
The Modern-Day Company Towns of Arkansas
On a sweltering June Sunday earlier this summer, under the shade of a pavilion in Springdale, Arkansas’s Luther George Park, Alice Gachuzo-Colin launched her campaign for city council. The first Black woman ever to run for office in Springdale, Gachuzo-Colin wants to move from what she calls “old Springdale”—long dominated by white bankers, farmers, and businessmen—to “new Springdale,” a place more representative of the town’s current demographics and culture. Read Full Article »
The Modern-Day Company Towns of Arkansas
This article appears in the August 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. On a sweltering June Sunday earlier this summer, under the shade of a pavilion in Springdale, Arkansas’s Luther George Park, Alice Gachuzo-Colin launched her campaign for city council.
How a Credit Union Is Building a New Vision of Financial Justice
IN THE 1960s, Louise Morphis stored her money in a neighbor’s garage in the small town of Bynum, N.C. The rural Southern town’s white-run banks refused to serve the Black community, so the neighbor, vice principal of the local Black public school, housed a credit union in his garage through the 1990s. “Some people go to the bank, some people have to go to the garage,” Morphis’ grandson, William J. “Bill” Bynum, told Sojourners.
The Amazon union vote isn’t the only big labor story in Alabama right now
Braxton Wright and 1,000 of his fellow unionized miners at Warrior Met Coal in Brookwood, Alabama, will soon have been on strike for one full year over a dispute with management about their contract. To make ends meet in the meantime, Wright has been working at Amazon’s warehouse in nearby Bessemer, where another labor battle is afoot. Braxton Wright, a miner with Warrior Met Coal, speaks during a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Feb.
Consider the chicken: What history can tell us about the future of alternative meat
The last time American protein consumption changed dramatically was the turn toward industrialized chicken in the last decades of the 20th century. Billed as a healthier and cheaper alternative to red meats like beef and pork, chicken went from an animal kept in relatively small flocks, usually for eggs, to one that was mass-produced and engineered for its meat, which became a new industrialized commodity.
Perspective | The Black press provides a model for how mainstream news can better cover racism
In the aftermath of the anti-racist uprisings of 2020 and the Trump presidency, many American newspapers are reckoning with how their coverage has made them complicit in racism and racial violence. Caught up in the unattainable and relatively recent ideal of journalistic objectivity, which did not take root until the 1930s, the traditional news media has struggled to cover the communities it now claims as its audience.
Black Agenda Report
As part of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum, we interview scholars about a recent article they’ve written for either an academic journal or popular publication. We ask these scholars to discuss their article, as well as some of the books that have most influenced them. This week’s featured scholar is Taija Mars McDougall. McDougall is a PhD candidate in Culture and Theory at the University of California, Irvine.
Year in Review
In 2021, I left a full-time journalism job for graduate school and freelancing. I also picked up and moved again, this time from Fayetteville, Arkansas to Charlottesville, Virginia, trading one mountain town for another. I don't have many insightful things to say about this transition yet—I'm really glad to be learning alongside people again, and to have time and space to think through big ideas and niche subfields. I'm also glad to have had a consistent stream of opportunities to freelance.
The Coin Standard | Olivia Paschal
In 1926 William Hope “Coin” Harvey began constructing a “pyramid” in the Arkansas Ozarks, with the intention of single-handedly preserving a record of the dying American civilization’s proudest creations in a concrete time capsule. Less than fifty years later, the remains of his monument—more of an obelisk than a pyramid—was eroding under the surface of a man-made lake.
Black Agenda Report
Incarcerated people are banned from reading books with themes of Black liberation or leftist content. Now the profit motive is the rationale for preventing individuals or charitable organizations from donating books. For profit companies make money on people forced to work for little or nothing. The prison industrial complex is alive and well. This article originally appeared in Protean.
At Least 269 Workers in US Meatpacking Industry Died in First Year of Pandemic
At least 59,000 workers at the nation’s five largest meatpackers were infected with COVID-19 and at least 269 died during the first year of the pandemic, a new investigation from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis has found. That’s almost three times the number of both infections and deaths known from previous estimates based on publicly available data collected by the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN).
House subcommittee finds more COVID in meatpacking plants than previously known
Screen Shot 2021-11-12 at 11.36.48 AM.png Rep. Jim Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina and the chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, reads his opening statement at a hearing on the meatpacking industry and COVID-19 on Oct. 27.
"Once everybody left, what were we left with?"
102 years ago this month, white mobs organized by white elites and planters in Phillips County, Arkansas swarmed into Elaine and other rural Black sharecropping communities in the Arkansas Delta.
Elaine Massacre descendants call for backing up repentance with resources
clarice_abdul-bey.jpg Clarice Abdul-Bey, the co-convener of the Arkansas Peace and Justice Memorial Movement, speaks during an Elaine Unity Fest panel titled "The Elaine Massacre: The Fight for Restorative Justice." (Screenshot via Descendants of the Elaine Massacre of 1919 on YouTube.) Last year, Lisa Hicks Gilbert was running a Facebook page and hosting Zoom events for those who, like her, descended from victims of the 1919 Elaine Massacre, when mobs of white people instigated by white...
The Forebears of JD Vance and the New Right
The ascension of Ohio Senator JD Vance from, as he was dubbed by much of the American media, white working class-whisperer author of Hillbilly Elegy to Donald Trump’s 2024 nominee for vice president has made him a standard-bearer of a rising brand of illiberal, antidemocratic conservatism that has quickly built visible power on the American right. Few of Vance’s politics are truly new.
august slipped away*
Hello from Charlottesville, where the humidity seems to finally (hopefully) be receding into crisp autumn weather. I started my PhD program in history at UVA about a month ago, and I'm knee-deep in reading and essays for grad seminars. It's such a gift to be in a university environment again; my life revolves around reading, writing, and going to as many talks, events, and free GIS trainings as I can fit in.
The Disastrous Opening of One Arkansas School District
When schools in Marion, Ark., opened, the district was prohibited from requiring masks. Here’s what their experience can teach the rest of the country. fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark August 30, 2021 Around the country, Americans have protested mask mandates for public schools. (MediaNews Group / Getty Images) Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week.
Tyson has a stranglehold over Arkansas's poultry industry
Economist Rebecca Boehm just released a report showing that the state’s industry is three times more consolidated than the Department of Justice’s antitrust threshold. This story was originally published at Facing South, the online magazine of the nonprofit Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, North Carolina.
Economist Rebecca Boehm on Tyson's stranglehold over Arkansas's poultry industry
A new report by economist Rebecca Boehm of the Union of Concerned Scientists titled "Tyson Spells Trouble," released in conjunction with an investigation in The Guardian, dives into the impact of Tyson's lack of serious competition for farmers and workers in the state. Also contributing to the report were organizer Magaly Licolli of the Arkansas workers' justice group Venceremos and Austin Frerick of Yale's Thurman Arnold Project, which studies competition and antitrust enforcement.
He had a BB gun. A cop had a semiautomatic rifle. Without warning, the officer fired five times.
Brian ChilsonLITTLE ROCK POLICE HEADQUARTERS Vanessa Cole remembers her older brother Roy Lee Richards Jr. as the storyteller of their tight-knit Central Arkansas family. When they got together for family dinners on the weekends, Roy entertained Nae — his nickname for Cole — her children, and his sons with old family yarns.
Arkansas Marshallese commemorate 75th anniversary of U.S. nuclear testing
COVID-19 was devastating for Arkansas' sizable Marshallese community, especially in the Northwest region of the state. The virus spread quickly through the area, where many Marshallese moved to work in poultry plants, which never closed during the pandemic. Pacific Islanders make up at most 3% of the region's population, but they accounted for 20% of the region's COVID-19 cases from March to June of 2020, according to the CDC.
INSTITUTE INDEX: States struggled to distribute federal pandemic unemployment assistance
Number of available jobs the U.S. lost between February 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the country in full force, to May 2021: 7.6 million Date on which President Donald Trump signed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act into law, expanding states' ability to provide unemployment insurance and the categories of people eligible for unemployment insurance: 3/27/2020 Amount of money drawn down by states to pay for federal pandemic unemployment insurance programs,...
How Alabama organizers blocked Gov. Ivey's prison lease plan
A coalition of Alabama organizations called Communities Not Prisons is celebrating the collapse of a plan proposed by Gov. Kay Ivey (R) to increase the state's prison capacity by working with private prison companies to build three new facilities in the state and leasing them for 30 years.
For Magaly Licolli, Organizing Poultry Workers Starts with Learning Together
She's been denounced by Tyson Foods as a "radical union organizer," but Magaly Licolli doesn't organize unions — she organizes workers. Licolli is a leader in the workers' center movement that since the 1970s has been organizing labor difficult to formally unionize.
For Magaly Licolli, organizing poultry workers starts with learning together
She's been denounced by Tyson Foods as a "radical union organizer," but Magaly Licolli doesn't organize unions — she organizes workers. Licolli is a leader in the workers' center movement that since the 1970s has been organizing labor difficult to formally unionize.
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