Barber returns to NCGA with recycled complaints
Rev. Barber, who led the "Moral Monday" movement brought his "Poor People's Campaign" to Raleigh on April 24
Former head of the NC NAACP Rev. (now apparently Bishop) Barber brought his Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) to Raleigh on the 10th anniversary of his “Moral Monday” protest series that took up residence at the legislature after Republicans won control in 2010.
Moral Monday went on for the better part of two years (2013 and 2014) and included hundreds of theatrically staged arrests for the purpose of garnering media attention.
Barber made many more appearances at the General Assembly in the years that followed and his activities eventually got him banned from the legislature. He was also arrested, along with his daughter and wife.
In 2019, he was convicted of second-degree trespassing that occurred in 2017 and received a suspended one-day sentence, unsupervised probation, a $200 fine, and 24 hours of community service. He appealed the ruling and lost. Additionally, the then-Democrat-controlled state supreme court refused to take up his case and granted state attorneys’ request to dismiss the appeal motion from Barber's attorney.
Barber has had PPC out on the road in other states, most recently, in Tennessee, but also a 25-state tour in the run-up to the 2020 elections.
In its early years, PPC had been rumored to have partnered with the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), characterized by some as the largest supporter of the anti-semitic BDS movement in the country.
A ten-year anniversary
The April 24 PPC event was held at 5:30 p.m. in front of the Capitol building, a block up from the General Assembly.
The description for the event laid out the same recycled topics from the days of Moral Monday:
“If you believe in living wages, ending poverty, fully funding public education, universal health care, environmental justice, voting rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, criminal justice reform, gun control, then save April 24 on your calendar and RSVP!”
The staged protest took place in front of the Capitol building in Raleigh and not at the legislature.
There were very few tweets, photos, or videos of this planned event on Twitter. It was hard to tell from the photos how many attended but based on the space they were occupying, it looks like at least three hundred or so.
A live stream was posted by the PPC's Twitter account. The stream's video is almost three hours long and the first half hour involves a lot of bands and singing. Several individuals wearing religious vestments spoke and then a video montage of past Moral Monday protests was played on a big screen.
Around the 41:20 mark, Barber starts making his way to the microphone and once he's up there, he yells "It's time again!!!"
"Intersectional Moral Fusion Organizing"
He scolded the crowd several times for talking while he was talking.
Barber talked about the "extremism that infects this state house and state houses around the country" which he called "political coup d'état's" that was "going around the constitution and federal laws.
He then - unironically - said they were "still here" because the "forces that profit from racial division and class division and decoration, they do not rest."
For the next few minutes, Barber essentially accused "opponents" of being racists with "new tricks."
Barber also called on the "over four million low-wealth people" in North Carolina to "organize" and "move forward together."
He also targeted voting - saying they needed to get at least 19% of the 1.2 M poor people who didn't vote that they "could determine the outcome of every election" in North Carolina.
Targeting “low-wealth” voters is the strategy Barber has said Democrats need to take if they want to win. In other words, Democrats need to use poor people to propel themselves into elected offices.
Three speakers from the Union of Southern Service Workers who Barber called "testifiers" followed his remarks. Then there was more singing and chanting before Barber resumed speaking. When he did, he attempted to make a big deal out of police in the area by having the crowd repeat after him that they were "a non-violent gathering." Following that he talked about "their struggle" and using "weapons of Our Truth."
More speakers talked about healthcare before another video montage, which seemed to be a "greatest hits" reel of past Moral Monday arrests.
The continued focus on healthcare was interesting - and, frankly, moot- given that the Medicaid Expansion has been signed into law.
Other speakers followed the montage, talking about everything from the "war economy" to "underfunded public education" as well as the courts and elections.
Interestingly, I was unable to spot any LGBT or transgender speakers although I might have missed it. There were some people holding signs that read “LGBT rights are human rights.”
More to the Story
The group finally headed to the legislature to tell lawmakers "why we're still here." However, uncoincidentally, the timing of the rally and the walk to the legislature lined up with the building being closed.
Barber took up a bullhorn and called up all the "babies and young children" to the front where the gates to the building had already been raised. He used the bullhorn to name the sign-carrying children who came to the gate.
"This is what fear looks like," Barber told the children pointing to the fence.
"But despite this fence, this building is your building,” he said. “That's right. It's our building."
He added, pointing to the closed fence, "This is what wrong looks like."
Despite timing the rally and arrival at the legislature at the time the building was closed, Barber also said he was "ashamed of this state" that the kids would come out here and the building was locked up.
Near the end of more rhetoric about wages and "death," what looked like a barstool had to be brought out for Barber to sit down while pontificating through the bullhorn.
At the conclusion of the rally, Barber had attendees essentially litter on the legislature building grounds by dumping their signs under the gate while chanting "Forward together. Not one step back."
There was no indication from Barber or the speakers that another PPC event was being scheduled. Yet.
A Little Bit More To The Story
The PPC is hardly poor.
When the PPC was launched, it named a co-partner in a statement:
“Rev. Barber will focus attention on The New Poor People’s Campaign co-led by the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary, where Rev. Barber is a distinguished professor of public theology.”
The Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) wasn’t just where Barber allegedly taught “public theology,” the co-partnership was also about funding the PPC.
As I documented in 2017, following the Kairos money wasn’t easy and UTS is a financial juggernaut.