Southern United States

• From its evergreen appearance to its low-maintenance durability, synthetic turf is the ideal landscaping choice for any climate and property type.
• Southern Turf Co. stepped up to the challenge, completing the project in record time with the help of industry-leading SGW turf.
• To enhance the vineyard's appearance, Southern Turf Co. and their client choose Synthetic Grass Warehouse's Nature's Best artificial grass.
• Having seen the benefits of synthetic grass in his own home, Miller felt passionate about transforming the yards of others and created Southern Turf Co.

• The remote and rugged swaths of national forest and mountain wilderness make Tellico Plains and Blue Ridge two of the greatest wild-water gateway destinations in the Great American South.
• Fannin County's Blue Ridge Trout Festival is recognized as Georgia's Official Trout Festival.
• In just four years, the Tellico Trout Festival has become one of the largest annual downtown festivals in Southeast Tennessee.
• By bringing together communities, anglers, and outdoor lovers, the Tellico Trout Festival and Blue Ridge Trout Festival underscore the vital connection between recreation, conservation and local economies.

• Dearborn, Michigan, is a center of Arab American cultural, economic, and political life.
• It’s home to several of the country’s oldest and most influential mosques, the Arab American National Museum, dozens of now-iconic Arab bakeries and restaurants, and a vibrant and essential mix of Arab American service and cultural organizations.
• The city became the first Arab-majority city in the U.S. in 2023, with roughly 55% of the city’s 110,000 residents claiming Middle Eastern or North African ancestry on the 2023 census.

Ford and Dearborn are in many ways synonymous

• Dearborn owes much of its growth to automotive pioneer Henry Ford, who began building his famous River Rouge Complex in 1917.
• While most early 20th-century Arab immigrants to the United States were Christians, those who moved to Dearborn in the 1920s were mainly Muslims from southern Lebanon.
• Fleeing civil war in Yemen and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967, these new Arab immigrants breathed new life into Dearborn.
• By the 1980s, this mix of first- and second-generation Arab Americans had begun to spill into other neighborhoods in East Dearborn.

Overcoming discrimination

• Arab American activists responded by pushing for more city services in East Dearborn and running for office.
• Republican Suzanne Sareini was the first Arab American elected to the City Council in 1990.
• It took another 20 years, when Arabs became the plurality of the population, before other Arab Americans joined Sareini on the council.
• Following the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11, Dearborn became a target for anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia, government surveillance, and harassment.

New leadership

• Hammoud objected publicly to the congressional censure of Tlaib in 2023 following her remarks about the violence in the Gaza Strip.
• He also called for an unequivocal cease-fire in Gaza at a time when other Democratic leaders were silent.
• Dearborn often becomes a topic of global media interest during election years or at times of conflict in the Middle East.

Nothing to disclose. Amny Shuraydi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• The site of the speech on Jan. 8, 2024, was Charleston, South Carolina’s Mother Emanuel AME Church, where, on a summer evening in 2015, an avowed white supremacist murdered nine Black worshipers, including Rev.
• At Pinckney’s funeral, then-President Barack Obama sang a heart-felt version of the Christian hymn Amazing Grace.
• “The word of God was pierced by bullets in hate and rage, propelled by not just gunpowder but by a poison,” Biden said.
• What I have learned is that Biden’s Mother Emanuel speech should rank with some of the most important speeches in our history.

The original big lie

• Boldly rejecting the Declaration of Independence as effusive “enthusiasm,” Smith injected white supremacy into public discourse.
• Smith, who owned several plantations and at least 71 enslaved people, was among more than 1,800 U.S. legislators who enslaved Black people.
• If you disagreed, vigilante thugs would beat you up or chase you into exile.

‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’

• The Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford extended Southern racist ideology into the North.
• He addressed the consequences of slavery on America’s democracy and warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” “This government cannot endure,” he said, “permanently half slave and half free.
• It will become all one thing, or all the other.

• The Civil War was supposed to end slavery and the white supremacist ideology that underpinned it.
• The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, known as the Reconstruction amendments, made equality explicit in the Constitution, extending civil and political rights to newly freed African Americans.

Democracies in peril

• In his State of the Union address on Jan. 6, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sounded a new alarm.
• His “Four Freedoms” speech was an updated version of Lincoln’s and further defined freedom within a democracy.
• The immediate issue was whether the U.S. should help England and other European allies defend against the fascist regimes of German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
• Biden called out Trump for his “big lie” about the 2020 election that Trump has repeatedly claim was “rigged” against him.

Joseph Patrick Kelly volunteers for the Charleston County (SC) Democratic Party.