[In honor of the
upcoming birthday of an old friend, on which more this weekend, a series on histories
and stories from the Tarheel State! Add your Carolinian responses and stories
in comments, y’all!]
On two
complementary contexts for an inspiring protest movement.
Just over two
years ago,
in April 2013, a number of North Carolina religious and political leaders,
including NAACP chairperson and reverend William
Barber, began organizing weekly civil disobedience activities known as Moral
Mondays. Outraged at a number of extreme laws passed by the state’s
newly-elected GOP majority in the state legislature and signed by Governor Pat
McCrory, including restrctions on voting rights, cuts to numerous social and educational
programs, and the repeal of the state’s ground-breaking Racial Justice
Act, these progressive activists organized sit-ins at the legislature,
marches and protests, and other civil actions in Raleigh that subsequently
spread, both across the state and then to other neighboring states and beyond. Originally
intended to end that same summer, the Moral Monday protests have instead
continued and expanded, and are still going strong as we near the summer of
2015.
The obvious and
important context for Moral Mondays is the Civil Rights Movement, for which these
protests seem like a clear 21st century parallel: not only because
they have been led by African American leaders and have frequently focused on
issues of or closely related to race, but also and even more importantly
because of their reliance on strategies of civil disobedience, passive
resistance, and other hallmarks of the Civil Rights movement. I call those
latter Civil Rights parallels more important because much of the time, contemporary
social and cultural movements such as #BlackLivesMatter
have been critiqued by their opponents as being more divisive or violent than
the Civil Rights Movement’s protests. While of course many of those critics are
hypocrites who would have opposed the Civil Rights Movement just as strenuously,
and for whom no contemporary arguments would change their perspective, many
others might benefit from a greater awareness of just how fully current
movements echo that prior one—with Moral Mondays being a prime example.
There’s a
second, just as significant historical context for Moral Mondays, however. In this April piece for
the great We’re History
site, I argued that we need to include in our collective
memories a much fuller sense of the progressive side within American Christianity,
the ways in which our most conservative or exclusionary religious views have
been consistently counter-balanced by liberal, inclusive, activist forms of religious
community. In an era when Christian activism is most frequently associated with
discriminatory efforts like the “Religious Freedom” laws to which I was
responding in that piece, it’s more important than ever to note that there are likewise
ongoing expressions of progressive religion, movements that wed spirituality
and faith to social justice and reform. From their very name on to every aspect
of their history, purpose, and leadership, North Carolina’s Moral Mondays
represent such a progressive spiritual movement—just one more reason why we
should include these activist efforts in any and all conversations about
contemporary American politics.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Carolinian histories or stories you’d share?
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