Photo: FLOC
North Carolina’s ‘Moral Mondays’ Draw Thousands to Oppose Its Right-Wing Legislature
The summer of 2013 in North Carolina was one of mild temperatures, record rains and a political movement that took the state, and the nation, by storm.
While the world watched, each Monday since April 29th saw growing numbers of North Carolinians flocking to Halifax Mall in the center of the state capitol buildings in Raleigh. They gathered to protest the massive sweep of regressive legislation quickly passing through the North Carolina General Assembly at a rate some deem pre-meditated.
Over 900 people have been have been arrested, peacefully refusing to leave the General Assembly building to protest the extreme and cruel changes in our state.
We are a movement. This is not a moment,” Reverend William Barber told the Moral Monday rally on June 3. That has been apparent in the multi-racial composition of the crowds — blacks, whites, Latinos, and Native Americans — in a South where this has been the exception not the rule.
These Mondays have been deemed “Moral Mondays” by Reverend Barber, an evangelical preacher who is president of the state’s chapter of the NAACP and the man who sparked the movement.
“We recognized that many of the same political forces that are against, say, gender rights, are often also against education equality, environmental justice, and policies that help the poor,” Rev. Barber told an interviewer.
“And so we said that we needed in North Carolina—and we said this is when Democrats were in office—to have a new form of fusion politics if we were going to really address the South.”
The super majority of Tea Party/GOP legislators has made broad-stroke cuts in food assistance, early childhood learning, and public education, and limited Medicaid expansion and healthcare, cuts that have affected the poorest and most vulnerable in the state.
The super-majority has also given significant tax cuts given to corporations, while raising taxes on middle- and working-class families. Mandatory voter ID and other voter restrictions have been signed into law, which will most affect women, minorities and students.
At the final and largest rally held in Raleigh, July 29, at the end of the legislative session, approximately 10,000 people took to the streets to march.
On the following Monday, August 5, the rally movement took to the road, and 10,000 citizens gathered to protest and rally in Asheville, the largest city in western North Carolina. Moral Monday demonstrations in other North Carolina cities have followed..
Though Governor Pat McCrory was quick to call the Moral Monday protesters “outsiders,” a mere 3 percent of arrestees have come from out of state, McCrory’s tactics hearken back to the Civil Rights era, when Alabama governor George Wallace called civil rights works “outside agitators.”
A database of Moral Monday arrestees, their photographs, personal data like the county they live in and even in some cases, their salaries have been posted on the website of Civitas, an organization founded by a wealthy North Carolinian who also generously contributed to the campaigns of many in the NC GOP.
The Civitas postings echo the White Citizens Councils of the ‘50s and 60’s, which opposed equal rights and an end to racial segregation. In some cities, they published the names of NAACP supporters and signers of anti-segregation petitions at a time when Ku Klux Klan violence was notorious.
Reverend Barber has been insistent at each rally that the Moral Mondays are peaceful protest, and indeed, the air is somber and respectful, the chants and songs as likely to be a a hymn as a protest song. Religious leaders from across all faiths and denominations stand shoulder to shoulder with Reverend Barber.
In his words, this is the right side to be on.
“The worst kind of abuse is the abuse of power,” says Rev. Barber, “But if the Biblical story is about anything, it’s that Goliath only has a day. The Pharaoh only has a limited time.”
“The non-violent and the people of deep faith always transform history,” he says. “And we’ll do it again, right here in North Carolina.”
