A new social movement explodes in the United States of America’s historic South, which once was the home of capitalistic slavery.
Moral Monday is a protest movement, which every first Monday in the month protests injustice and class inequality in North Carolina. Beginning in April 2013, the protests grew until in February 2014, the gathering brought together 100,000 people.
The first Moral Monday was on April 29, 2013. Justice-loving people from across the state gathered at the capitol to express their concern that the governor and legislature were working together, enacting an extreme and immoral agenda which was a declaration of war on the people of North Carolina—women, minorities, children, and the elderly. No one was exempt. On that day seventeen people peacefully took their protest to the People’s House—the General Assembly—to petition their legislators to reconsider and instead to work for the common good of all North Carolina residents. Since then on subsequent Mondays, nearly 1,000 North Carolina residents have been arrested while exercising their constitutional right to petition their government.
Moral Mondays have been successful. Moral Mondays have turned a moment of concern, fear, and uncertainty into the Forward Together, Not One Step Back Movement for change that has drawn tens of thousands of North Carolinians in this righteous struggle to voice their dissatisfaction with the actions of the legislators who have cut unemployment benefits for 170,000 people without work, deprived a half a million people of health care, decimated public schools, endangered the environment, and threatened voting rights.
Tens of thousands of people are now committed to continuing work with the NC NAACP, building and maintaining local coalitions, registering new voters, building local People’s Assemblies of HKonJ (Historic Thousands on Jones Street, where the NC legislature sits) and mobilizing for the massive HKonJ of 100,000 people on February 8, 2014. They are committed to making their voices heard.
Issues of the entire population have been put forward by HKonJ, including their demand No.12: “Protect the rights of immigrants from Latin America and other nations.” Rev. Barber always speaks about unity between black, white, and Latinos in his speeches. The Moral Monday leadership generally includes Latino speakers, such as Valdemar Velazquez of FLOC (Farm Labor Organizing Committee), at its big events.
Moral Monday actions continue around the state, uniting North Carolinians across gender, religious, and—above all—racial lines, a major breakthrough in the South, where the powers-that-be have historically divided the 99 percent by setting Black and white against each other and both against immigrants. Today is different. Today is something new. “We are destroying the myth of the old white Southern strategy—that you can hurt some people without hurting everybody. We’re all interconnected. This old divide and conquer is not going to work anymore,” said Rev. Barber.
As the Occupy Wall Street movement expressed it, it’s not just one thing: it’s everything. The Moral Monday movement takes it a step further. They assert a commonality of causes and a commonality of class. They are taking the battle right where it needs to go, directly before the corporate-government, not begging, but demanding: We must have a government that operates in our interest. “A new North Carolina, a new South, a new future.”
