The Rev. William Barber is an institution in North Carolina. A longtime civil rights activist and current president of the state chapter of the NAACP with an incredible body of work, he has worked hard over the last decade to intentionally build a progressive, interracial coalition of individuals and organizations determined to make North Carolina a more just and equitable state. He became well-known throughout the country for his leadership of the “Moral Mondays” movement—where each Monday, groups of clergy and activists would gather to protest conservative laws and policies at the capitol building in Raleigh. They would get arrested each week for civil disobedience. And, yet, they’d return the following week, more determined than ever.
With Moral Mondays, Barber channeled the pent-up frustration of North Carolinians who were shocked by how quickly their state had been transformed into a laboratory for conservative policies. [...]
Barber says his emphasis on morality is inspired by his predecessors in the civil rights movement. “They first had to win the moral high ground, and they had to capture the attention and consciousness of the nation,” he explains.
The Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina inspired similar protests in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, South Carolina, and Alabama. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to hear the Rev. Barber speak, you are able to easily understand why he has been able to convince so many people across race, ethnicity, religion, and gender to support and work on behalf of progressive causes like marriage equality, Planned Parenthood, racial justice, ending mass incarceration, and affordable health care. He is fiery and passionate, and his analysis on the political and structural ways that conservatives use race and class to divide people is nothing short of brilliant.
Perhaps this is why Republicans desperately seek to silence him. After being arrested again on May 30 during a health care sit-in at the North Carolina Legislative Building, he was officially banned from the site, along with 31 other people.
Just days after his appearance on the front page of The New York Times as one of the country’s leading liberal religious leaders, the Rev. William Barber was back on other front pages, this time because of an outrageous and likely unconstitutional ban from the North Carolina Legislative Building. [...]
As a condition for his release, Barber was banned from the building along with 31 other protesters. Banned from the building – their building, the people’s building. Wake County magistrate Jeffrey L. Godwin set the condition as he charged protesters with second-degree trespass.
Republicans have long shown that they will sink to any number of depths to justify their retrograde ways of thinking. And with Trump in office, they’ve become emboldened and even more depraved. But this is truly shameful. Republicans do not get to decide who is allowed in a building that is literally by, and for, the people. In a country where black people constructed numerous buildings (including the one in Washington where Donald Trump now resides) for free, a nation that has yet to fully come to terms with its racial history, no one should be telling black folk that they are banned from anywhere—least of all buildings where they are peacefully protesting the horrific conditions that keep marginalized people oppressed.
This controversy is embarrassing to North Carolina, and it reflects poorly on the judgment of the legislature’s police, and in addition on the General Assembly’s GOP leadership. [...]
But they’ll lose in court (other judges have ruled against bans on protesters) and they’ll lose in the public’s eye. The ban won’t stand, except perhaps as a petty, petulant, childish, humiliating example of bullying by people who ought to know better.
Of course, Republicans in North Carolina don’t care at all about being embarrassed. If they did, they wouldn’t be trying to pass such disgusting and vile legislation to try to regulate where people can go to the bathroom, or ultrasound laws to intimidate women who seek access to safe, legal abortions. They are happy to be a laughingstock to the part of the nation that has the good sense to see them for what they are: childish, ridiculous, and dangerous bullies. According to the constitution of the state of North Carolina, the people have the right to assemble and talk to their legislators. Let’s hope a court upholds the Rev. Barber’s right to do so.
Then let’s implore our friends and family in North Carolina to vote these clowns right out of office.