The Poor People’s Campaign said it will host marches in Raleigh, 31 other state capitals, and Washington, D.C. on March 2 to demand reversal of political and policy choices that ignore or harm people who live in poverty or survive on low incomes.
It’s part of an effort to encourage low-income voters to go to the polls this year to help elect politicians who have their interests in mind. “We are the antidote to voter apathy,” said the Rev. Rob Stephens of Raleigh. “We are the antidote to gerrymandering.”
The Raleigh march will be held on the last day of early voting for the primary. The Super Tuesday primary is March 5. A door-to-door voter mobilization effort has already started in Raleigh, Charlotte, Asheville, Hickory, and other cities, Stephens said.
At the same time North Carolina was ranked the top state for business, Oxfam ranked the state the worst for workers, based on compensation, worker protections, and the right to organize. Oxfam ranked North Carolina below every other state, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.
Most states have raised their minimum wage above $7.25 an hour. North Carolina has not.
Almost 230 years ago, a Johnston County jury convicted an enslaved Black woman named Jenny of poisoning the family that owned her. She was burned to death 10 days later.
Fifty years ago, members of the Ku Klux Klan rode through Black neighborhoods in Benson brandishing weapons in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The violent, racist hate group held marches in Johnston County in the 1990s, and were active at least into the 2000s.
And on Monday, a judge in Johnston County will hear arguments connecting that history with the use of the death penalty not only there, but across the entirety of North Carolina — if the state Supreme Court allows the hearing to happen.
“After 45 years of tinkering [following the end of a 10-year national moratorium on capital punishment,] the machinery of North Carolina’s death penalty is still infused with discriminatory policies and practices that are really a legacy of racial terrorism in North Carolina’s and Johnston County’s past,” Henderson Hill, senior counsel for the ACLU, said on a Zoom call Wednesday. “The hearing in Hasson Bacote’s case will present evidence that demonstrates that that legacy remains strong and has had a lasting impact on criminal justice policies, even today.”
Bacote received a death sentence in 2009 after 10 white and two Black jurors found him guilty of committing a murder when he was 20 years old. But next week’s hearing isn’t just about Bacote. It could have profound implications for those on North Carolina’s death row.
In last year’s student body elections, 14.43 percent of students cast a vote. This spring, that number was nearly halved.
Out of the 31,778 eligible voters in this spring’s UNC student body general elections, 2,293 students voted, for an overall turnout of 7.22 percent. The number of individuals who voted in the race for student body president was slightly lower, with 2,224 votes cast.
The election for Graduate and Professional Student Government president had a turnout of 3.64 percent — Katie Heath won with 240 votes out of 11,277 eligible voters.
“Turnout was extremely bad,” Sophie van Duin, acting chair of the UNC Board of Elections, said. “It was pretty disheartening to see it dropped by such a significant margin. We’ve been trying to figure out what might have caused this, because on the publicity side we really put in more work than ever.”
Van Duin said the UNC BOE hung flyers, stationed members at tables in the Pit for early voting, and posted on their social media page frequently in order to advertise the Feb. 14 election.
Thanks for your interest in North Carolina politics, wishing you a good week.