As many as 10,000 protesters took to the streets of downtown Raleigh to protest the repressive bills that made their way through the NC General Assembly this legislative session. Protesters wore red to call out against bills that gutted public education.
As many as 10,000 North Carolinians (and a few out-of-state visitors, including hundreds of media representatives) left the rally at Halifax Mall on Monday and poured into the streets of Raleigh. The N.C General Assembly had adjourned Friday morning, July 26, after passing some of the most reactionary, regressive, oppressive legislation in untold decades of the state.
No arrests were made at Moral Monday #13, as the N.C. General Assembly was no longer in session and entry to its buildings was strictly controlled. Former arrestees met earlier at a nearby church so that NAACP leaders and members of the legal-defense team representing the 926 arrestees could discuss next steps. A press conference brought news that the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) and the AFL-CIO of North Carolina were joining in on the upcoming legal challenges.
Afterwards, supporters marched from the church to Gov. Pat McCrory's office to deliver notification of these upcoming legal challenges, starting with demands that Gov. McCrory actually read the voter ID bill before he signs it -- something he has said publicly that he had not yet done.
Gov. McCrory signed the voter-suppression bill into law that evening.
No one here knows how to describe how different this North Carolina is from the state we lived in eight months ago. In less time than it takes to gestate a human fetus, our state has given birth to a place where guns are welcome in restaurants where alcohol is served, a place where voting is no longer a right but a privilege granted by a powerful few, a place where anyone (even someone with a firearm) can challenge your eligibility to vote,a place where women may have to travel to one clinic in the entire state that may still be permitted to provide a full range of reproductive medical services, a place where the water system your community built and maintained could now be controlled by a small group of Republican millionaires, a place where public education has been gutted, a place where your business is prohibited by law from contracting with union workers, a place where our state attorney general has been stripped of the power to work with the U.S. attorney general to address challenges to state laws.
The above paragraph would have to be the length of a George R.R. Martin novel to enumerate the ways in which our state has been ALEC-aformed by colonizing forces working with state-grown conservative, paleoconservative, and neoconservative collaborators.
And so we marched.
Last week was heartbreaking. Millions of us watched or listened to live-streamed proceedings as the N.C. House and the N.C. Senate, packed with a Republican and Tea Party supermajority, debated and voted on bills that defied logic, history, and the will of North Carolinians.
The Senate finished its final list of votes Thursday night (July 25) and adjourned; the House needed a little more time because it had submitted a two-page "voter ID" bill to the Senate but ended up having to vote on a 57-page voter-suppression bill that they had less than 12 hours to review before House Speaker Thom Tillis grudgingly allowed a 90-minute debate on the floor.
Despite challenges from Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate who presented arguments that used logic, emotional tales of voting during the Jim Crow era, information about constituent disapproval of the bill, prayer, and even a calculator (to determine the impact of decreased early-voting days in light of increased time to address a ballot that no longer allows straight-ticket voting options), the bill passed along party lines. Not one Republican voted against the bill.
N.C. House Democrats held hands and bowed their heads as the vote was tallied for HB589, a 57-page voter-suppression manual that will disqualify hundreds of thousands of voters and open other voters to challenge at the ballots by 10 party-appointed challengers and any other citizen of the county who chooses to single out any voter for challenge.
With the Friday passage of HB937 ("gun omnibus bill"), the "voter ID" bill changed from omnibus to ominous. HB937 expands the places where concealed-carry weapons (CCW) can be toted, including university and public-school campus grounds (locked inside a vehicle in public, municipal, state-owned parking spots), restaurants and eateries that serve alcohol, any venue where tickets are sold (including movie theaters, school gymnasiums, amphitheaters and concert sites, etc.), and many other locations.
One section of the bill includes a list of oddly specific venues where CCWs will be permitted: recreational facilities, funeral processions, and school gymnasiums.
What do these sites have in common? All are commonly used as polling places.
An earlier bill that didn't make it to the May crossover between House and Senate specified that CCWs would be permitted in churches, but that bill was met with such opposition that it was dropped. However, HB937 permits CCWs at funeral processions, which often take place in part at churches and on church grounds.
Combined with the "vigilante voter" provision of HB589, this means that armed challengers (parties are permitted to appoint 10 challengers per precinct, plus any citizen can challenge any voter within his/her county) can approach voters in line outside these balloting areas or even inside these balloting areas to challenge their eligibility.
Moral Monday #13 was dedicated to education. Speaker after speaker at the Halifax Mall rally came to the stage to address how the Republican/Tea Party supermajority has eviscerated public education, stripped the state of its duty to oversee standards of state-funded charter schools, and ceded authority to private schools via school vouchers provided by the state.
What happens next?
Both the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and NAACP of North Carolina are challenging the constitutionality of the new voter-suppression law. The two organizations are educating voters about the new law and helping individual voters obtain necessary documents to meet the criteria outlined in HB589 that will prove their eligibility to vote.
Other plans:
- A massive statewide voter registration campaign, featuring NAACP-NC trainings.
- Each of the 926 people arrested during Moral Monday and Witness Wednesday demonstrations has vowed to register 50 people to vote.
- Moral Mondays hits the road, with local communities hosting mass demonstrations each month, beginning with a Mountain Moral Monday in Asheville on Monday, August 5.
- The Forward Together Movement “Social Justice Services” the weekend of August 24-25, in which faith communities will dedicate their Saturday and Sunday services to addressing the moral crisis of public policy in North Carolina and building a more just and equitable society.
- Thirteen simultaneous protest and organizing rallies will be held in North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts on August 28, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.
- We'll be attending congressional forums held by members of U.S. Congress in their home districts across North Carolina, to hold representatives accountable and demand that they stand against regressive policies in the state, as well as reinstate qualifications under Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act nationally.
How can you help?
Your donations to NAACP-NC and Southern Coalition for Social Justice will go a long way toward helping people document their eligibility to vote. People who were born at home, for instance, may lack the necessary documentation to obtain a state-issued ID and need help with that documentation. Other people may lack the funds to meet the state-issued ID fee.
The N.C. General Assembly has packed up and gone home.
Gov. Pat McCrory is facing protests at his office and official residence each day as he signs each of these bills into law. (Read Scarce's excellent diary of his condescending offer of cookies to women protesting Gov. McCrory's signature yesterday of the "Motorcycle Vagina" bill restricting availability and access to reproductive health care.
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper is adjusting to news that he will be prohibited from collaborating with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder without intervention from Republican N.C. House and Senate leaders Thom Tillis and Phil Berger, should the feds decide to investigate claims of voter suppression.
And the Moral Monday movement marches on. Forward together, not one step back. Throughout the summer, throughout the fall, throughout upcoming municipal and school-board elections ... for as long as it takes to get our state back. We march.