I will never forget traveling from New York to march with more than 80,000 other like-minded folks at the Moral Mondays March in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2014.
Given the ongoing debate among Democrats over our future direction as a political party, we would do well to pay close attention to what has been happening in North Carolina. It has brought together a broad cross-section of citizens to push for forward movement against entrenched right-wing, undemocratic governance.
The recent defeat of North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and the victory of Democrat Roy Cooper can be directly attributed to the strength of the fusion coalition that has been spearheaded and painstakingly built since 2005 by the Rev. Dr. William Barber Jr. He is president of the North Carolina NAACP and a visionary leader of the Moral Mondays Forward Together Movement.
Public Policy Polling reported in “Why Pat McCrory Lost and What It Means in Trump's America” that “...the seeds of McCrory's defeat really were planted by the Moral Monday movement in the summer of 2013, just months after McCrory took office.” Greg Dworkin assembled their tweets in a Storify format, titled “Public Policy Polling on observations about the NC Governor's race and Moral Monday.”
This movement is not a black movement (though it is being led by the NAACP and a black man). It’s not a white movement, a straight or a gay movement, or a Democratic or Republican movement. Rather, it is a shining example of what people can do when they are able to put divisions aside to work for the common good. This is a civil rights movement—which contrary to those who relegate the movement to history, is alive and well in North Carolina, a state which was a key center of civil rights activity in the past.
When the example is right in front of us, it’s easy to wonder why there is not more attention being paid to what is working. Perhaps I can answer my own query—it gets scant attention from the national media because it is working. While they focus on all things Trump, the struggle for justice not only continues: it is growing.
Yet when I talk with students and friends who consider themselves to be leftists or left-of-center liberals, rarely do they know much—if anything—about either the Rev. Barber or Moral Mondays. This needs to change, and those of us who are committed to defeating both Donald Trump and entrenched right-wing politicians in legislatures across the nation need to learn from, emulate, and disseminate this news and information. Here on Daily Kos quite a bit has been written about Moral Mondays and the Rev. Barber. We also have a community group: Moral Movement Forward Together. Daily Kos has a big platform as far as Democratic blogs go, but it will take a sustained effort on multiple platforms and face to face, precinct to precinct, door to door, and on the ground work to counteract purposeful suppression of news about successful long-term coalition organizing—and to bring about change.
For those of you are who already aware of the movement, please take the time to share with those in your networks who may not. Don’t assume they know, too. Pass it on to friends, family, and co-workers. If you are a member of your local Democratic Party group, put Moral Mondays on the agenda for discussion. You can do the same in the groups you belong to which are organizing around issues—from climate change and the environment to women’s rights.
At the heart of the movement is fusion politics, which has a history dating back to the 1890s in North Carolina. Rev. Barber speaks about this in his video below. It currently has only 26,537 views, though it has been posted here frequently.
I haven’t found a transcript of this video, though it has captions (some of which aren’t accurate). The ideas and history are laid out in Barber’s book The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement Is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear, and the Unitarian Universalist Church has a teaching guide. Rev. Barber spoke powerfully about fusion politics and reconstruction at Netroots Nation 2014, which TrueBlueMajority transcribed. Go back, listen and read.
Drawing from that history, Moral Mondays is forging coalitions to address issues that affect and unite diverse constituencies in the state and in the U.S. as a whole.
Phil Ebersole, a retired newspaper reporter in Rochester, New York, wrote about the early history of Moral Mondays:
In 2005, soon after being elected president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, he joined with Al McSurely, an experienced white civil rights activist, to organize a meeting of a broad cross-section of reformers in the state—advocates of education funding, living wage, health care, affordable housing, environmental justice, immigrant justice, criminal justice reform and many others.
He had each group draw up its goals on a big sheet of butcher paper and then, on another sheet, list the obstacles to achieving those goals. The goals were diverse, but the obstacles were the same—North Carolina’s state government and the corporate interests that controlled it.
This was the birth of a new movement called HKonJ, which stands for Historic Thousands on Jones Street, the location of the state legislature in Raleigh. Each year they bring together a People’s Assembly, which hears testimony of victims of injustice and speakers about how injustice can be remedied, and then closes with a sermon and prayer. Then they march on the legislature to make their voices heard. Because they represent such a large cross-section of North Carolinians, it is hard to dismiss what they say out of prejudice against a particular group.
Reading the entire piece would be worth your while. Ebersole related something key to our Democratic Party future:
He has been invited to speak by white people in parts of North Carolina where it was once considered dangerous for a black person to go. People in an Appalachian community where there are no black people were so impressed with Barber’s vision that they formed a chapter of the NAACP.
Post-election, those arguing about engaging and involving more white people should take some time to examine how Moral Mondays makes that happen without muting issues like racism, sexism, and homophobia.
While the national news play endless clips about Trump tweets, workers are fighting back and organizing in the streets, and Moral Mondays is a part of that fight.
Some of you learned about Rev. Barber for the first time at the Democratic National Convention in Philly.
You can read the transcript of his speech in Leslie Salzillo’s post.
He closed with this
We must shock this nation with the power of love. We must shock this nation with the power of mercy. We must shock this nation and fight for justice for all. We can’t give up on the heart of our democracy, not now, not ever!
And so, and so I stop by here tonight to ask,
- Is there a heart in this house?
- Is there a heart in America?
- Is there somebody that has a heart for the poor, and a heart for the vulnerable?
- Then Stand up. Vote together. Organize together. Fight for the heart of this nation. And while you’re are fighting, sing that old hymn. “Revive us again. Fill each heart with Thy love. May each soul be rekindled with fire from above.” Hallelujah! Find the glory.
I don’t care if you are an atheist. I don’t care of you are not a Christian—I’m not one either. The core message Rev. Barber brings is one of love for humanity and the need to organize and fight back. We are facing very hard times. Some of us will die as a result of the gerrymandered, Koch-funded power of the right wing in this nation. That cannot stop us.
Daily Kos Connect Unite Act (CUA) held a conference in Asheville, North Carolina last year (thank you to navajo and our Asheville hosts). Rev. Barber was a featured speaker there.
Most of you have never seen or listened to the panel discussions held there. One that I moderated currently has 153 views. Why should you take time out to listen? Because if you want to have the discussion about organizing white folks and getting more of them to become active in the Democratic Party, it might be a good idea to listen to and learn from two white veteran civil rights organizers who have done—and are still doing—that work.
This interview panel features NAACP attorney Al McSurely and Bob Zellner, both lifetime activists for civil rights issues in the South.
Here’s a little about McSurely:
Al McSurely has dedicated half a century to fighting for civil rights and a more just society. After joining the civil rights movement in 1961, working with N.Va. CORE and SNCC in D.C., Al and Margaret Herring were recruited to move to E. Kentucky to help carry out the Black Power strategy of winning poor and working white people to the anti-racism, anti-war, and anti-poverty Movement of SNCC. In 1967, Al and Margaret were arrested for sedition in Pike County, Kentucky for trying to repair the breaches of racism. In 1968, they narrowly escaped death when assassins threw 8 sticks of dynamite at their mountain cabin’s bedroom window, and in 1969, they were arrested again for Contempt of Congress after they refused to turn over the names of hundreds of southern Movement organizers.
To stay out of jail, Al apprenticed himself to his attorneys, Morton Stavis, William Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy, some of the most creative and brilliant civil rights lawyers in history. After 17 years of working without a license alongside Kinoy, Kunstler and Stavis and their new Center for Constitutional Rights, Al and Margaret won a jury award in McSurely v. [Sen. John] McClellan in 1984. With his share of settlement proceeds at the age of 48, Al entered law school at N.C. Central. He passed the bar on the first day of Spring in 1988. Over the past 23 years he has helped hundreds of workers challenge and win their employment discrimination cases. In addition to his private civil rights practice, Al has served as the Chair of the N.C. NAACP’s Legal Redress Committee and currently serves as Communications Chair of the State Conference as well as the Legal Redress Chair of the Chapel Hill-Carborro NAACP.
Some background on Zellner:
While a young activist at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, Zellner was initially introduced to the Southern Conference Educational Fund through its longtime leader Anne Braden. As the son of an Alabama Klansman, he was attracted to political activism through studying civil rights, meeting Dr. King, and becoming aware of the entrenched racism in his community and in the South. He was expelled as a white from SNCC in 1967 following leader Stokely Carmichael’s movement of the organization in the direction of Black Nationalism.
Zellner then moved to New Orleans among other SCEF members to head up the Deep South Education and Research Associates. His first campaign through SCEF was the GROW project, Grass Roots Organizing Work, in rural towns such as Laurel, Mississippi. GROW organized poor whites in the rural Deep South, many of whom were well accustomed to the Ku Klux Klan in their communities. In Zellner’s experience, “the last thing that changes with white southerners is their rhetoric,” so he judged white southerners by their deeds rather than words.
Like other activists imbued in Marxism, Zellner used a materialist approach when organizing reforming Klansmen, focusing on concrete advantages of black-white unity rather than appealing to Christian brotherhood. His organizing work paid off, with “working class rallies with as many as two thousand black and white people out in a cow pasture—old Mississippi rednecks with the whip antennas and [George] Wallace stickers on their trucks, standing next to black folks, all of them talking about how the power structure was holding them down.”61 This enticed OL leaders, among others in the NCM, to recruit Zellner for organizing Deep South trade unionists and reforming Klansmen.
Regrettably, there is no transcript of this panel as of yet. I hope people will take the time to listen to what Al and Bob had to say.
As mentioned above, the Rev. Barber spoke at that same gathering, where he issued a challenge—to Daily Kos bloggers.
We need to not only step-up our own in-house coverage: we need to get other bloggers and journalists to do the same.
Barber went on from Asheville to team up with other progressive religious leaders on a Moral Revival Tour which continues under the auspices of Repairers of the Breach.
Repairers of the Breach, Inc. is a nonpartisan and ecumenical organization that seeks to build a progressive agenda rooted in a moral framework to counter the ultra-conservative constructs that try to dominate the public square. Repairers will help frame public policies which are not constrained or confined by the narrow tenets of neo-conservatism. Repairers will bring together clergy and lay people from different faith traditions, with people without a spiritual practice but who share the moral principles at the heart of the great moral teachings. Repairers will expand a “school of prophets” who can broadly spread the vision of a nation that is just and loving.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in. — Isaiah 58:12
Our communities are torn apart by hateful violence and words, often in the name of opportunistic and hypocritical interpretations of the world's oldest holy books and teachings. To repair the breaches caused by centuries old systems of racial and gender inequality, we need thousands of clergy and lay leaders who will dedicate their lives to rebuilding, raising up and repairing our moral infrastructure. They shall be called, "The Repairers of the Breach: The Restorers of Our Communities".
A few days after the presidential election results came in and Donald Trump was declared the winner, Barber preached a powerful sermon to a packed house:
November 13th, 2016 - As many post-election Americans feel distraught and confused after the election of Donald Trump, Moral Monday Architect Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II provides deep historical insights that help make sense of the moment, while also delivering a powerful - moving forward - charge as he addresses standing room only and thousands online from the Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.
His address was covered, but almost exclusively by North Carolina newspapers.
One article was titled, “Denouncing Trump as 'Vulgarity Unbounded,' Rev. Barber Says Election Must Fuel Work for Justice:”
The election of Donald Trump—whom he calls "vulgarity unbounded"—must be a charge to redouble efforts to work towards "truth, love, and justice," said the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. The Moral Monday Movement architect made the remarks Sunday evening in a special post-election service entitled "Revival and Resiliency After Rejection." Speaking to hundreds gathered at the Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., Barber said that the nation "must be honest about the depth of racism and the psychic sickness of our country," and said "it is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than profound anxiety and revulsion."
"This moment in America is ultimately not about Trump and [Hillary] Clinton. But it really is about the rejection of some things much deeper," he said.Trump's win, he argues, "shows that we have rejected in some ways moral statesmanship for buffoonery and gamesmanship." For some, it also "reveals a rejection of answers to real issues" and a rejection of "some very serious principles." The president-elect, he said, "articulated fears rooted in racism and classism. He offered no answers but merely said, 'You are right to be afraid, very afraid.'"
"To elect a president whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact—to say nothing of simple decency"—shows "that we are rejecting something much deeper, which is why Trump is vulgarity unbounded."
His "election strikes fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and above all the many varieties of 'other' whom he has so deeply insulted. The African American 'other.' The Hispanic 'other.' The female 'other.' The Jewish 'other.' And the Muslim 'other.'"
In January, a "man of integrity" will leave the White House, he said, "and then we will witness the inauguration of a con."
When I have written about Rev. Barber and Moral Mondays here in the past, there has been push-back from some people in comments about their personal discomfort with religion and preachers. Too often I have read some of the same people citing the speeches, sermons, writings, and organizing of past religious leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., while failing to get involved with movements happening here and now.
My simple answer is: if you are serious about organizing and changing the political landscape of the United States, one of the key principles of organizing is to reach people with a language they can understand. Framing issues in a moral context does that. According to Gallup, 89 percent of Americans still believe in a God of some kind. Writing them all off is a no-win strategy.
We need to challenge those who claim religion yet embrace immoral values, as Rev. Barber did recently by challenging right-wing conservative Franklin Graham.
As we face the challenge of 2018 and beyond and as we work to build a strong party from the ground up which continues to be an inclusive big tent, let’s apply what works.
We have a lot of work to do to defeat what confronts us.
Spread the word. Take action. Let’s move forward together.