How the Moral Mondays ‘Fusion Coalition’ Is Taking North Carolina Back

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http://www.thenation.com/article/180491/how-moral-mondays-fusion-coalition-taking-north-carolina-back



Housed in a brick church on a residential corner in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Beloved Community Center is a living monument to the city’s role in civil and human rights struggles, from the early 1960s to the present. Pay it a visit and the people who run the place will point out their younger selves in the decades-old photos of rallies and voter-registration drives that cover the walls. They’ll recount a standoff between local black students and the police in 1969 that left a 20-year-old dead. They’ll tell you how they organized a citywide truth and reconciliation commission after members of the Klan gunned down five people in the Greensboro massacre of 1979. They’ll talk about why, nearly a decade ago, they supported black and Latino workers in the state who tried to unionize a pork-processing plant despite management’s effort to intimidate them with immigration raids. And they’ll look at you quizzically if you ask, as I did when I visited in May, why they joined the Moral Monday movement, which has upended North Carolina’s politics and dominated headlines for the past year.

“There wasn’t a joining,” says Joyce Johnson, a co-founder of the center. “There was a flow.”

Given the news coverage, it’s easy to think that the Moral Monday protests and Forward Together—the movement behind the Monday mobilizations—came out of nowhere. It’s easy to believe that more than 900 people were arrested while engaging in civil disobedience last spring and summer because the laws passed by North Carolina’s conservative legislature and signed by Republican Governor Pat McCrory were just too draconian for a state accustomed to a more moderate leadership. It’s easy to read the accounts of teachers outraged by attacks on tenure, or swing voters upset by McCrory’s refusal to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and think that the mobilization is under way because politics—aided by model legislation crafted by ALEC and funding from the Koch brothers—just got too ugly in the Tar Heel State.

Yet such assessments have it only half-right. Yes, in the last midterm election, Republicans won control of the State Legislature for the first time since the late nineteenth century. And yes, they proceeded to redraw district lines in a cynical effort to maintain the GOP’s lock on the Statehouse. Emboldened by their win, they’ve passed a voter-suppression law that threatens to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people. They’ve passed what the spokesperson for a state Planned Parenthood affiliate describes as “an anti-abortion wish list” that restricts coverage for city and county employees and requires that clinics meet the standards of outpatient surgical centers—a change expected to force most clinics to close. The Legislature also gutted the state’s education budget and ended the earned-income tax credit. Those moves infuriated North Carolinians, and the protests have continued into the current summer legislative session, with sixty people arrested as of late June. But it’s also true that years of steady effort among the state’s organizers and advocates made it possible for this particular moment to become a movement.