Rev. Frederick Battle is all too familiar with civil disobedience and what spurs people to fight power with peaceful assembly. The mild-mannered minister was arrested 51 years ago in Greensboro, N.C., at a sit-in at Woolworth's department store.
At the time, he was a Chapel Hill school board member. But that didn't stop area restaurants, movie theaters, and other businesses from refusing him and other African Americans admission and service. Battle and a few others took part in a small sit-in at Woolworth's one day, and the protest quickly gained significant support from students and a few faculty members at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, with increasing numbers of protests eliciting arrests throughout that day and the days to come.
According to a 2001 oral-history interview about the historic sit-ins that Battle took part in, "[W]e emptied the university. All the students went to jail. And for a week, A&T couldn't hold no classes, because they had no students. All the students was in jail. So they filled the jails, they had rest homes – they filled any kind of vacant building they had."
The actions that he and and the A&T State University students took in the early 1960s were pivotal in the civil-rights movement and the history of our state and our nation. Within two years of those 1962 arrests, Battle recalls, Woolworth's began serving African American patrons. Movie theaters began to allow African American patrons into the theaters but still forced them to sit in the balconies for quite some time.
Now Battle finds himself in a surreal Woolworth's redux. Although a Monday hearing at the Wake County District Court allowed him inside the General Assembly and Legislative Office buildings themselves for an afternoon meeting, he is still (under terms of his release from county jail) prohibited from taking part in any protests or civil-disobedience actions inside the buildings. In fact, except for scheduled meetings for which he must be escorted to and from the meetings rooms by legislative staff, Battle is not permitted inside the buildings at all until his criminal trespass and related charges have been fully adjudicated in court.
Those upcoming hearings on his actual arrest on charges of refusal to disperse when requested, criminal trespass after refusal to disperse, and "violating General Assembly rules" (which prohibit making "disruptive" noise and holding signs inside the buildings) will determine whether Battle will ever be allowed inside the buildings again. These are much the same charges under which Battle was arrested in 1962.
In the meantime, former Moral Monday arrestees are permitted on the grounds of the Halifax Mall, a patch of ground in between the General Assembly, Legislative Office Building, and several other state offices. And that's where Rev. Battle was for the 10th wave of Moral Mondays in North Carolina.
We in the Tar Heel State have embraced the historic success of civil disobedience to close the floodgates on a fierce river of repression. A newly elected Republican/Tea Party supermajority in the legislature and gubernatorial control by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and his Americans for Prosperity/American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) leader-turned-state-budget-director Art Pope have made North Carolina a battleground state for civil rights once again.
"What scares me about today," said Rev. Battle on July 8, "is that I see similarities that we are going back to those days, back to the '60s."
I am attending a large protest Tuesday morning at the N.C. General Assembly that addresses the Trojan horsing of HB 695 sprung upon us last week without any opportunity for input by citizens or Senate Democrats. I'm also attempting to encourage N.C. Speaker of the House Thom Tillis to keep his promise to meet with a small group of us North Carolina citizens to discuss a select list of bills. We'd scheduled this meeting in February; it has been postponed myriad times, with the result that Rep. Tillis has never addressed specific concerns about mathematical errors in budget documents attached to key bills, as well as fabricated complaints of voter fraud by an organization that spurred creation and support for a voter ID bill -- complaints that had to be retracted after the organization publicly admitted that the voter-fraud charges they made were false, but that have never been stricken from the public record nor annotated accordingly.
Again, my apologies for not tending to this diary. I hope you understand.
Record numbers of North Carolinians packed Halifax Mall on July 8, the 10th wave of Moral Monday protests organized by the NAACP-North Carolina. Early figures on the number of arrestees cite 64 arrests, though that number may increase as arrestees are processed and formally charged throughout the night while undergoing processing and facing magistrates at the Wake County Detention Center in Raleigh.
What's certain, however, is that this week's Moral Monday protest on Halifax Mall was the largest protest so far. Crowd estimates range from 5,000 to 6,500. Organizers were forced to move the speaker stage several hundred feet to the north to accommodate the larger throng of outraged North Carolinians seeking input on their governance and a redress of grievances over the slew of sweepingly restrictive bills.
At least several hundred, and perhaps thousands, of first-time protesters were galvanized into action this week after HB 695, which had previously been a two-page bill wholly focused on banning Sharia law in the state (a whole other crazy topic for a whole other crazy diary) was suddenly and without prior notice transformed into a seven-page bill restricting the operations of abortion clinics.
You may have heard about the debacle last week, when N.C. Senate Republicans secretly added a slew of anti-abortion restrictions and presented them with literally a few hours' notice to HB 695. News about the surprise switch-up spread fast last Tuesday night. Opposition to the Trojan-horse bill galvanized quickly, with many hundreds of women and men from all over the state gathering at the N.C. General Assembly the very next morning (Wednesday, July 3) to demonstrate outrage over the bill and the sneaky way new language was added without proper notification or debate.
Although there were many calls for a Tar Heel Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator who successfully filibustered a similar bill in the Lone Star State, North Carolina's legislature does not have a filibuster rule or even a quorum requirement. Spectators who crowded the Senate Chamber gallery were forbidden to speak, exclaim, or even make hand gestures to indicate disapproval or solidarity. Democrat after Democrat rose in the senate to speak out against the bill and the process by which the changes were made, but their efforts were futile.
The bill passed by a 29-16 vote. Even while women in the gallery and hallway were still being threatened with arrest for shouting, "Shame! Shame! Shame!" as the vote was called (one woman was arrested), Sen. Andrew Brock (R-District 34, see his voting record here) stood for a "point of personal privilege" to pay homage to North Carolina watermelons and announced that each legislator should have received a gift of two watermelons to his or her office in honor of July 4, the top sales day for watermelons in the state.
Outrage over the newly titled "Faith, Family, and Freedom Protection Act" and the outrageous irony of substituting reactionary religious pseudo-law for the original text of a bill aimed at opposing reactionary religious pseudo-law generated record attendance at this week's Moral Monday.
Progress North Carolina, an organization that has been helping voters plug into efforts to support helpful bills and oppose those that are regressive, offered us this perspective on the current legislative session:
How to create generations of misery:
TEACH inaccurate health information.
BAN access to birth control.
FORCE women to have children.
CUT OFF pre-natal services.
LET their children go hungry once born.
TRAP women in abusive relationships.
CONDEMN them for being single mothers.
KEEP college and job training out of reach.
DENY unemployment if the get laid off.
KICK at-risk kids off the Pre-K waiting list.
DESTROY our public schools so no one can lift themselves out of poverty.
START the cycle all over again.
Sound like a state you know?
As someone who has been in the lead of grassroots efforts to oppose HB 937 (a nutty bill that will repeal the requirement to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon while also allowing people to carry firearms in restaurants that serve alcohol as well as on college campuses and even elementary, middle, and high schools), I'd like to add this to Progress NC's list as a way to create misery:
ALLOW angry people to arm themselves willy-nilly without any regulation whatsoever.
ENCOURAGE paranoia amongst angry, armed people who are ticked off at liberals, non-Christians, LGBT community members, immigrants, racial minorities, the poor, anyone who works in education, unions, women, kids, the disabled, fellow motorists, the elderly, and grocery-store cashiers.
PERMIT guns in places that serve (and over-serve) alcohol, as well as on college/university campuses and in elementary, middle, and high schools.
REFUSE to accept liability when people armed to the teeth and served alcohol hurt or kill others.
ABANDON any business or organization that gets sued out of existence because of ill-considered firearms legislation.
I want to stress that the 10 waves of Moral Monday and Witness Wednesday protests have been entirely peaceful. Although there have been a very few scattered complaints about plastic zip-tie handcuffs being zipped too tightly, almost every arrestee has reported unfailing civility, respect, and gentle treatment at the hands of the law-enforcement and detention personnel involved in the arrests and overall crowd control.
We work very hard to impress upon each person taking part in civil disobedience that we are engaging in peaceful compliance and not in passive resistance (in which those being arrested might slump to the floor, thus requiring law-enforcement officers to carry them in order to detain them). We are fighting for everyone in our state -- including law-enforcement and detention personnel, who are paid precious little for their work and are just as affected by the oppressive legislation as anyone else in North Carolina. We are not protesting them but the legislators who are ignoring public efforts to engage in our own governance, as permitted under the N.C. Constitution.
Without fail, each week's procession of civil-disobedience volunteers files past police officers with thanks for their service and the respect they show to protesters individually and en masse.
Please, please, join us in Raleigh. Three more Moral Monday actions are planned, and additional actions will take place if the current legislative session continues through the summer.
If you cannot make it to Raleigh, you can still help. Visit the NAACP-NC website and make a donation to the legal-defense fund. This will help those of us who are arrested individually and also fund our overall defense, which is grounded in the rights and responsibilities outlined in the state constitution:
Sec. 12. Right of assembly and petition.
The people have a right to assemble together to consult for their common good, to instruct their representatives, and to apply to the General Assembly for redress of grievances; but secret political societies are dangerous to the liberties of a free people and shall not be tolerated.
Certainly the actions of the Republican supermajority this past week have underscored concerns that secret political societies are being not only tolerated but encouraged at the General Assembly, and that "the people" are not being heard nor permitted to assemble, instruct our representatives, or apply for redress of grievances.
Join us. And watch for secretive legislative shenanigans in your own state. By working together to raise awareness, we can all move "Forward together! Not one step back!"