Photo: Tim Barnwell
Legislative News by Nelda Holder –
They’re back—and on Valentine’s Day, no less. Such a whimsical occasion for the North Carolina General Assembly to open for business again.
But in this session, the 50 members of the Senate and 120 members of the House will include some retiring members in their last session; some members whose sights are now set on higher ground; and a number who hope to hold onto their seats in the coming election this fall.
Interestingly, they’ll have just over two weeks for business before someone else comes back to town. The “Rev. Barber Army”—a mass march on Saturday, March 2, called the “Poor People’s and Low Wage Workers’ State House Assembly and Moral March”—will be hitting the capital city and bringing back memories of Raleigh’s years of hosting the Moral Monday marches on Jones Street.
The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, currently a professor and founding director of the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, was at the forefront of the pesky (to some legislators) Poor People’s Campaign that began in North Carolina in 2007. That developed into the well-known “Moral Monday” civil-rights protest marches through a coalition known as “Historic Thousands on Jones Street People’s Assembly.
In 2017 he took his Poor People’s Campaign national, calling for a moral revival throughout the country through Repairers of the Breach—an organization he and co-chair Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis founded to address the needs of the 15 million poor and low-wage voters in more than 30 states.
“Forward Together, Not One Step Back”
Barber’s current organization will take that familiar battle cry back to the doors of political power in Raleigh, and add it to a number of other state capitals across the country to protest “Poverty and low wages, lack of healthcare, underfunded public education, voter suppression, and environmental collapse,” according to…
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