What’s Next for the Moral Monday Movement?

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http://www.thenation.com/article/178459/whats-next-moral-monday-movement


Marchers at Raleigh's first Moral Mondays march of 2014, February 8 (United Workers/Flickr)

Raleigh, N.C.—On February 1, 1960, four black students at North Carolina A&T kicked off the decade’s civil rights movement by trying to eat at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Greensboro. Two months later, young activists founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University in Raleigh, which would transform the South through sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration drives.

So it was fitting that when North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement held a massive “Moral March” in Raleigh on February 8, it began at Shaw University, exactly fifty-four years after North Carolina’s trail-blazing role in the civil rights movement. Tens of thousands of activists from thirty-two states—representing all different backgrounds, races and causes—marched from Shaw to the State Capitol, protesting the right-wing policies of the government (sample sign: Welcome to North Carolina. Turn Your Watch Back 50 Years!) and rallying for economic fairness, equal justice, labor rights, voting rights, universal healthcare and public education.

The North Carolina NAACP estimated that upward of 80,000 people attended; the police said they’d granted a permit for up to 30,000. Either way, it was the largest civil rights rally in the South since the legendary Selma-to-Montgomery march in support of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

The weekly Moral Monday protests at the North Carolina Statehouse transformed state politics in 2013, capturing the hearts and minds of progressive activists across the nation. “This Moral March inaugurates a fresh year of grassroots empowerment, voter education, litigation and nonviolent direct action,” said the Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP and leader of the Moral Monday movement, in his keynote speech. If the February 8 rally was any indication, the movement will be bigger and broader in 2014. “If you thought we fought hard in 2013,” Barber wrote in January, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”