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DC: Bishop William J. Barber II Speaks At Howard University
While deeply rooted in the language of faith, Barber has extended the reach of his “fusion coalition” movement to include other faiths as well as secular, agnostic, and atheist activists.
The Reverend William Barber II has emerged as a leading voice in the struggle for rights for African Americans, the poor, and other marginalized people in the United States, especially in the South. In his former role as president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, Barber led the “Moral Mondays” movement that enlisted a broad coalition of people engaged in human rights struggles.
Barber employed peaceful direct action to confront the state’s Republican legislative leadership and other political powers—initially over voting rights and voter suppression, but ultimately focusing on broader issues of justice for the poor and working class. And while deeply rooted in the language of faith—Barber is a minister with Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in his hometown of Goldsboro, North Carolina—he has extended the reach of his “fusion coalition” movement to include other faiths as well as secular, agnostic, and atheist activists.
Barber now heads Repairers of the Breach, a multifaith, nonpartisan nonprofit group also based in North Carolina, and cochairs along with the Reverend Liz Theoharis a new Poor People’s Campaign—a “re-engagement” of the movement of the same name that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. took up in 1967.
In late December, Barber spoke by phone with The Progressive about his involvements and how faith-based activists and organizations are responding to President Donald Trump.
Q: How would you describe the political forces that Trump has unleashed in his campaign and in the year since he took office?
William Barber: I don’t so much see him as having unleashed them. Well before Trump, we have needed a revival of our deepest religious and constitutional values in this country as it relates to the issues of love, justice, the common good, the general welfare, the establishment of justice.
You could see that in the way in which [House Speaker Paul] Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell, [Ryan’s predecessor John] Boehner, and Congress refused to fix the Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court gutted it [in 2013]. You could see that in the twenty-some states prior to Trump that passed voter suppression laws, which is contrary to any ethos of justice. You can see that when politicians who get free health care simply because they’ve been elected to be governors, Senators, or members of the House of Representatives are fighting to take health care from individuals—and at the same time claiming to be people of faith.
If Jesus did anything, he provided health care and never, as I like to say, charged a deductible or a copay.
Well before Trump, we needed a revival of our deepest religious and constitutional values related to love, justice, the common good, the general welfare, the establishment of justice.
Q: So you see what is happening as the continuation of an old problem?
Barber: It’s as old as slave-master religion. It’s as old as what Kevin Kruse, in his book One Nation Under God, talks about in the formation of religious organizations that came about to challenge the New Deal. So, long before Trump, these factors were in place.
Many of us knew that even if Hillary Clinton got elected or if President Obama could have done another term, we still needed a moral movement, a poor people’s campaign, a national call for a moral revival. Because thirty-seven million people would still be without health care. We’d have over sixty million people without a living wage. We would still have the Voting Rights Act being broken and not restored. We would still not have immigration reform. We would still have the challenges of our ecological devastation. We would still have a war economy and militarism. These things would have still been a part of our social reality.
If you look at the [2016] campaign, there were about two dozen presidential debates, both in the primary and in the general election, and not one hour of any of those debates, Democrat or Republican, talked about the poor. That’s a moral crisis. Not one hour talked about restoration of the Voting Rights Act. We didn’t spend one hour really dealing with how to move from the Affordable Care Act to universal health care. That is a moral crisis. We didn’t spend one hour talking about just immigration reform. In a nation of immigrants, that is a moral crisis.
Q: What effect has Trump had on this dynamic?
Barber: Trump has exacerbated a need to be in the public square. Trump is a symptom. He is what Professor [Nell Irvin] Painter out of Princeton refers to as “the call and response” of the American project. It has always happened.
It happened in the days after the end of slavery—you had Reconstruction, then you had a response, deconstruction. It happened during the 1900s with the election of Woodrow Wilson, who was a white supremacist, who played Birth of a Nation in the Oval Office, who stopped the desegregation of the federal government and kicked black civil rights leaders out of his office.
Then, in World War II, you had black people serving in that war, and there was a reaction to black soldiers coming back. You had the civil rights movement, and then there was a reaction—the white Southern strategy.
This is a fifty-year-old strategy designed to pit black and white people against each other. It began in the South, and then moved across the Midwest and the North, to use coded language to talk about race—language like “tax cuts,” “states’ rights,” and “entitlement reform.” It was a way to say to poor, working-class whites, “Your problems are all of these brown and black folk getting all of this free stuff, when really if they were more moral they would not have these issues.” And the goal was to cause people to vote against their own self-interest.
This is a fifty-year-old strategy designed to pit black and white people against each other. It began in the South, and then moved across the Midwest and the North, to use coded language to talk about race—language like “tax cuts,” “states’ rights,” and “entitlement reform.”
Q: How are people of faith seeking to stand up to those policies? What are you planning, going forward?
Barber: First of all, we’re doing deep down organizing. We’ve traveled to over twenty states in the last four months with my cochair, the Reverend Liz Theoharis. I lead Repairers of the Breach and she leads the Kairos Center, and our two organizations are sponsoring the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
Everywhere we have gone, we’re having a tremendous response—clergy and activists and poor people are coming together from Alabama to Alaska, from California to the Carolinas, from Tennessee to Texas. We have met people on Skid Row in Los Angeles and welfare-rights workers in Detroit, Michigan. We’ve met with poor blacks and whites in North Carolina.
Everywhere we go, we’re training a steering committee, we’re bringing clergy and impacted people into the same room. We’ve had mass meetings in cities where we plan for five hundred people and over a thousand show up. We’re organizing a thousand people in a minimum of twenty-five states who will engage in direct action, civil disobedience, public education, and voter registration at their state capitals, for a forty-day period from Mother’s Day to June 23. We’re having a tremendous response to that.
We’re also organizing twenty-five hundred people who will do the same in Washington, D.C., during this forty-day period. This Poor People’s Campaign is not a commemoration of what happened fifty years ago, but a re-engagement and a reinterpretation of it for the times we live in now.
You need a long-term commitment to direct action and civil disobedience, public education, power building, and voter registration and voter participation. It has to come from the bottom up, not from the top down, which is why we’re organizing from the states up.
Q: The Poor People’s Campaign is officially nonpartisan. How does that play out in practice?
Barber: We’re going to be challenging Democrats and Republicans. In this recent tax-reform fight, yes, the Republicans have passed an extreme plan, but on the other side, Democrats have not done enough to talk about how this will hurt the poor. They keep talking about the middle class, not the poor and the working poor, and there are over one hundred million poor and working poor in this country. Over fourteen million poor children, over forty million just poor people.
We have to change that discourse. As long as we have a politics that feels like it doesn’t have to mention the name or the condition of one hundred million people, then we’re never going to have a true moral implementation and transformation of our political order.
Some people don’t know that 11 percent of the people who got arrested during the Moral Monday arrests were Republicans. Many were from far western counties in North Carolina that were often seen as strongholds for the extreme right. We had been there organizing in those counties, bringing people together across those lines, showing them the intersections between racism and classism and how all people get impacted by those things.
Q: You spent many years leading the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina. What did you learn from that experience?
Barber: You have to lift up our deepest moral values. You have to lift up our deepest Constitutional values, and say to the people who got elected, “You put your hand on the Bible, swore yourself to uphold the Constitution and you’re not upholding either the Bible or the Constitution.”
We also learned you have to have a legal strategy, because what you battle in the street you have to find a way to challenge in the courts. You have to have a voter participation and voter registration strategy, because ultimately we want to see people fully engaged. Extremism operates on the principle of voter suppression and limited vote. They want the public not to be engaged. They know that their numbers are limited and their supporters are about 25 percent of the electorate. So they want to have racist redistricting, they want to have voter suppression, and they want to have low voter turnout.
If we challenge the redistricting, challenge the voter suppression, and increase the voter turnout and voter participation and voter education, we can win against extremism.
Sometimes I think the media has paid too much attention to so-called white evangelicalism and given it too much of a pass and allowed its members to claim being Christian and claim a Christian perspective without fundamentally challenging them.
Q: Does this faith-based engagement have the effect of reviving religion as an institution for social justice in our country?
Barber: I don’t see it so much as reviving religious institutions. Sometimes I think the media has paid too much attention to so-called white evangelicalism and given it too much of a pass and allowed its members to claim being Christian and claim a Christian perspective without fundamentally challenging them. If there’s anything, I hope that by doing this we’re reviving coming out in the public square.
A great hope in our nation is that, in the midst of this, we have always had moral dissenters and moral forces that rise up. My greatest prayer is not to be seen as somebody who revived religion, but to simply be written down in history as among those who responded to the call of the moment, who did not back down, did not stand down, did not bow down, and took our place alongside all of those male and female, gay and straight, black and brown, white and red, and stood up.
Erik Gunn is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer.