Tobacco Harvest, Braswell Plantation, Battleboro, N.C., 1944

In this-- my 17th photo-essay in this series-- we meet scores of tenant farmers harvesting tobacco on the Braswell Plantation in Battleboro, N.C., in August 1944. The 15 photographs speak to North Carolina's agricultural history, but also to the enduring legacy of Gov. Charles B. Aycock's brand of white supremacy.

Learning Instructions for Everyone … in prison and out (by Phillip Vance Smith II)

Phillip Vance Smith II, an inmate at the Nash Correctional Institution, has just published a remarkable book of poetry called "Life: Learning Instructions for Everyone … in prison and out." His poems are a primer in survival without hope, or perhaps in how to find hope, and how to make a life with meaning, in a hopeless world.