Screenshot of civil rights activists from "Rev. Dr. William Barber: The 3rd Reconstruction"
video by Eric Byler & Annabel Park from their series "Story of America."
One of the most powerful speakers I've ever had the opportunity to hear over my more than five decades in the civil rights movement is the Rev. Dr. William Barber,
president of the North Carolina NAACP, and chief architect of the
Moral Mondays Movement. On Friday, September 25, I will have the opportunity to hear him once again at a
Daily Kos event in Asheville, North Carolina. It's free and open to the public. Hopefully many readers will join me there, and if you cannot, then pass the word on.
What is key in the grassroots organizing being spearheaded by Moral Mondays and other activist groups across the nation like #BlackLivesMatter, The Dream Defenders, United We Dream, Overpass Light Brigade, and Gathering for Justice, is that their movements are inextricably linked to past civil and political abuses, but are alive and well now. The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles has a list with links to many groups continuing the fight for change.
Too many people speak about the struggle for civil rights as if it is something only to be dragged out as part of Black/Women's/Latino History Month and relegated to a poster on the wall, a spot in a museum, or a memorial tribute when an elder passes on. But the movement is alive, growing, linked to a long history, and moving forward into the future. At a time when the drumbeat of dissonant, destructive, racist, and sexist voices are standard fare in the media and given legitimacy by bigots running for elective office, we must cast aside the burial cloak and embrace the immediacy of direct action—now!
Rev. Barber discusses this eloquently on video in The Third Reconstruction, which is also the title of his soon-to-be released book.
Join me below for the video, and more.
From the video:
This interview was filmed four months prior to the launch of the Moral Monday movement, on Jan 3, 2013 in Durham, North Carolina by Annabel Park and Eric Byler of Story of America. Rev. Dr. William Barber provides a seven-minute reframing of American history that is surprisingly, even shockingly timely in the context of America's present-day battle over voting rights. In his view, we are currently going through the third reconstruction. The first Reconstruction took place after the Civil War. Fusion politics—a governing coalition including Lincoln Republicans, freedmen and former slaves, and populists—made it possible for former slaves to become business, community, and political leaders. But fusion politics was snuffed out by a violent backlash, and replaced by Jim Crow laws that blocked African Americans from voting through poll taxes, impossible "tests," and terrorism.
In the 1960s, there was another attempt at reconstruction, better known as the Civil Rights Movement. The progress we made was met with another violent backlash, culminating in the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Dr. Barber identifies the possibility of a third reconstruction, one that could actually succeed, with the launch of Barack Obama's campaign for president in 2008. Once again, this attempt at fusion politics has been met with a hateful backlash. The backlash against integration, equality, and trans-racial governing coalitions has, in all three instances, included attacks on voting rights of African Americans and other minorities. Rev. Barber believes that change is inevitable because of demographic shifts in America and the effectiveness of fusion politics.
President John F. Kennedy led our nation during the tumultuous period of violence backlash against the Civil Rights movement, and historian Carl M. Brauer argued that this era was the Second Reconstruction, a second attempt to make good on the promise of America, for all Americans, in the South as well as the North.
We traveled to Durham and met with Rev. Dr. William Barber—President of the North Carolina NAACP—in early January, 2013 to ask him why he thinks America is so divided today. He offered this historical framework, in which the America that twice elected President Obama is embroiled in a Third Reconstruction, with a similar, but less violent, political backlash.
Rev. Barber's brief introduction of this concept is expanded in his book which will be released in early 2016. It's titled
The Third Reconstruction:
Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement:
A modern-day civil rights champion tells the stirring story of how he helped start a movement to bridge America’s racial divide.
Over the summer of 2013, Rev. William Barber led more than a hundred thousand people at rallies across North Carolina to protest cuts to voting rights and the social safety net, which the state’s conservative legislature had implemented. These protests, which came to be known as Moral Mondays, have blossomed into the largest social movement the South has seen since the civil rights era—and, since then, it has spread to states as diverse as Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Ohio. In The Third Reconstruction, Rev. Barber tells the story of how he helped lay the groundwork for the Moral Mondays movement and explores the unfulfilled promises of America’s multi-ethnic democracy. He draws on the lessons of history to offer a vision of a new Reconstruction, one in which a diverse coalition of citizens—black and white, religious and secular, Northern and Southern—fight side-by-side for racial and economic justice for all Americans. The Third Reconstruction is both a blueprint for activism at the state level and an inspiring call to action from the twenty-first century’s most effective grassroots organizer.
There is now a new web-zine of the same name,
The Third Reconstruction:
This Greater Diversity News project commemorates the historic struggles of Black Americans and their supporters to transform America into a non-racial, multi-ethnic, opportunity society that is characterized by political, social and economic justice. Nearly four-hundred (400) years since Blacks were brought to America they have endured slavery, Jim Crow and second class citizenship. This publication will take you from 1619 through 1865, the Era of Slavery; 1865 – 1954 the Era of the First Reconstruction; and 1954-2013 the Civil Rights Movement (Second Reconstruction) and finally, from 2013 forward (the Era of the Third Reconstruction).
Within the pages of this comprehensive publication you will find historical data that will help you understand the present predicament of Black American communities. You will find stories about current initiatives that are taking place to address the lingering inequalities and injustices that exist today. You will read commentaries that interpret various aspects of each significant era of Black history in America and the enduring struggle of Black Americans to recognition as human beings.
Well worth a read is
this piece from March 2015's
The Nation, which covers an in-depth panel discussion. The entire panel can be seen
online.
Eric Foner's classic history, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, has been updated.
Newly Reissued with a New Introduction: From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America. Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed.
Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans.
This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period—an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.
Foner wrote "
Why Reconstruction Matters" for the
New York Times in March 2015.
He concluded:
While violated with impunity, however, the 14th and 15th Amendments remained on the books. Decades later they would provide the legal basis for the civil rights revolution, sometimes called the Second Reconstruction.
Citizenship, rights, democracy — as long as these remain contested, so will the necessity of an accurate understanding of Reconstruction. More than most historical subjects, how we think about this era truly matters, for it forces us to think about what kind of society we wish America to be.
Many students these days are assigned to write papers on "the civil rights movement" or on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. I've seen a slew of internet queries asking "When did the civil rights movement begin?" and "When did it end?" Most will probably turn to Wikipedia for answers, which has two major pages:
African-American Civil Rights Movement (1865–95), and
African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–68). In the latter there is this note:
Many popular representations of the movement are centered on the leadership and philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., who won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the movement; however, some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to one person, organization, or strategy.
There's also a link to historian Timothy Tyson's piece, "
Robert F. Williams, 'Black Power,' and the Roots of the African American Freedom Struggle," which sheds light on a rarely discussed early leader.
This observation about popular representation was echoed in the discussion around this piece in The Nation:
Williams: We are talking about the hagiography of black leaders. And that is a general question of representation, whether it is in film or whether it is about Barack Obama right now. Obama was elected in part because he became a cipher onto which people projected all of these images—that he was Malcolm X, that he was MLK. He was all things to all people—a big floating signifier. In much the same way, I think Martin Luther King has been resurrected as this color-blind conservative god to some. And I keep wondering how he would have been represented if he had survived. If he were 80 or 90 years old, if he had pressed his agenda, would he be heroic?
Wilkerson: When you speak of the representation of a Martin Luther King or a Rosa Parks—this idea that they have to be perfect, and that they have to be presented as perfect, is also a form of dehumanization.
Foner: I wish they would just retire his speech at the Lincoln Memorial for a while. One speech, with one or two sentences out of it, is all you hear. The guy who was calling for economic justice, the guy who was calling for an end to the war and an end to the whole military-industrial concept in this country—you never hear about that on Martin Luther King Day. The civil-rights movement, which was very disruptive and very unpopular with very many people as it was happening, has been turned into this onward-and-upward journey. I think King would be appalled to see how he is actually represented nowadays on Martin Luther King Day.
That very disruption, taking place today, is being held up against a sanitized set of icons who are not alive to refute their sanctification. The emphasis on civil rights as movements from the past reinforces a meme that we are post-movement and post-color. Cutting the connective cord in the timeline with a clear end date says, "It's over. You won . . . now, moving right along . . . let's just undo all the gains you did make."
What has not been destroyed is the fusion element of today's struggle, contrary to what the meme creators would have you believe. What we are fighting for today isn't simply "black versus white." Nor are our battles simply a "left-right" issue.
Rev. William Barber
In
Rev. Barber's 2014 speech to Netroots Nation in Detroit he said:
Labor rights are not a left or right issue. Women's rights are not left or right issues. Education is not a left or right issue. Helping people when they are unemployed is not left or right. Those issues are the moral center of who we are and it's high time that we recover the moral dialogue in this nation.
Not only that, we progressives need a movement where our relationships with our coalition partners are transformative, not transactional.
You know we sometimes like those movements where everybody signs that I'm with the movement but they are really with those... their issue. But what we've got to have is a movement—and we've learned this in North Carolina—that understands the connectivity between the issues, where each partner embraces your issue, but you also embrace the other issues because you understand the intersectionality.
We must find common ground, or as Barber puts it, "a higher ground," and join together to make change happen.
Chris Savage, aka Eclectablog, reported on Rev. Barber's speech at Netroots Nation:
For me, one of the highlights of last week’s Netroots Nation conference was the powerful, riveting speech by Rev. William Barber, the charismatic leader of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement. He spoke about “a moral movement for a moral crisis as the only way to higher ground” and what he calls the “moral fusion movement”. There have been several times in the history of the USA when our country faced a catastrophic moral crisis — slavery and the civil rights era, for example — and a movement rose up to meet and defeat it. Today, Rev. Barber told us, we face a similar crisis and a new movement must rise up to meet it.
He also told us about the “snake line”. “My son is an environmental physicist,” Rev. Barber said, “and he told me, ‘Daddy, if you ever get lost in mountainous territory … don’t walk out through the valley but climb up the mountain to higher ground. Reptiles,” he said, “are cold-blooded. They can’t survive up there. In America, we’ve got to get our policies above the snake line! We’ve got to get to higher ground.”
“There are some snakes out here!” Barber boomed. “There are some low-down policies out here! There’s some poison out here! Going backwards on voting rights, that’s below the snake line! Going backwards on civil rights, that’s below the snake line! Hurting people just because they have a different sexuality, that’s below the snake line! Stomping on poor people just because you’ve got power, that’s below the snake line! Denying health care to the sick and keeping children from opportunity, that’s below the snake line!”
There are people of good will on the left who are "uncomfortable" with the fact that Rev. Barber is a minister, and uses biblical references in his speeches, coming from a long line of pastoral activist traditions in the black community like Sojourner Truth, Malcolm X, and Dr. Martin Luther King. Let's hope that anyone who believes in civil, political, and human rights would be open to embracing those people who are of a like mind, no matter the inspiration.
"The revolution will be slogged, not blogged," is something I've often stated. Let us not forget those people from all walks of life who are currently walking their way across the south from Selma to the nation's capital on America's Journey for Justice, which you can also follow on twitter at #JusticeSummer.
They are already in Virginia, and will wind up in D.C. for events on September 15 and 16.
See America's Journey for Justice D.C. Rally and Advocacy Day for more information.
Don't allow the traditional media to hoodwink you into thinking the civil rights movement ended. It hasn't. We are simply in the next phase.
Join us.