[On April
28th, 1967, Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted
into the U.S. army and was stripped of his heavyweight title. So this week,
I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for moments and acts of civil
disobedience, leading up to Friday’s post on Ali’s activism.]
On two
complementary contexts for an inspiring, influential protest movement.
Almost exactly
four 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 and growing as we near the
summer of 2017 (my friend
Steve lives in North Carolina and has recently attended some on behalf of
the animal rights community).
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 2015 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 directly 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 protest and politics.
Next civil
disobedience post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other contexts for civil disobedience you’d highlight?
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