A few decades ago, some say a business like Sara Williford’s LGBTQ bookstore would have been impossible in Cobb County. Even today, experts say LGBTQ-owned businesses across the state struggle to find parity.

But The Lavender Bookshop is helping build community for LGBTQ readers one book club, crafts circle and improv night at a time. And customers are coming from all over the South, looking for characters and friends like them.

For the thousands of people in immigration detention centers in Georgia, access to legal representation can be hard to come by. Immigrants are not guaranteed a lawyer in immigration court because it is a civil, not a criminal issue. A private attorney can cost thousands of dollars, and few live near Georgia’s rural immigration detention centers.

Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center closed its office dedicated to providing free legal services to detained immigrants in the South. It was based in Lumpkin, Georgia, less than a mile from Stewart Detention Center, where nearly 2,000 immigrants, on average, are detained on any given day since the beginning of the second Trump administration. Now, no pro-bono immigration attorneys live in Lumpkin.

Data centers are a big and growing business in Georgia.

The warehouse-like facilities power our online lives, and state and some local communities have welcomed this development boom that has ramped up in recent years.

WABE’s series, “Server South,” explains what data centers are and why the industry has honed in on Georgia to plant roots.

When thousands of people fled New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago, they uprooted their lives and, for many, their businesses as well. As they settled in places like Atlanta, they brought their hometown culture with them.

The influx of evacuees reshaped Georgia’s demographics, schools, labor market and economy.

A few years after she lost everything in the storm and relocated to Atlanta, Keisha Marie Mackie had saved enough money to start her business, Everythang NOLA Cafe. The original location in Sylvan Hills served up New Orleans classics, like snowballs, crawfish and King Cakes, often to other evacuees who are now residents in Atlanta.