“Moral Mondays” is a movement born out of a struggle of people dealing with an inflexible, ultra-conservative, overwhelmingly Republican Legislature and Governor in North Carolina.
In the Tar Heel State, the organization combined activism, peaceful civil disobedience and intense grassroots communications and lobbying to start turning attitudes of people in that state away from a highly conservative agenda.
Now, with the support of over 50 Indiana grassroots organizations, including organized labor, Concerned Clergy, and Indiana’s State Conference of NAACP Branches, the Moral Mondays movement has come to Indiana.
Last weekend, hundreds attended workshops and rallies at Crispus Attucks High School and participated in a Saturday afternoon march to the State House.
The spiritual and intellectual heart of Moral Mondays is the Rev. Dr. William Barber II. Born to an Indianapolis woman who was an Attucks grad, Barber has family connections to a former Pastor of historic Second Christian Church (the predecessor to Light of the World Christian Church).
In town to help teach, organize and fire up Hoosiers for the Moral Mondays effort, the Recorder sat down in an Attucks High School classroom with the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, head of North Carolina’s NAACP, as he talked about his movement and what people in Indiana and other states face today from energized ultra conservatives.
How did Moral Mondays start? “We in the NAACP (in North Carolina) asked why are all the advocacy groups fighting separately on the issues?” Barber asked. “Why don’t we find a way to come together?”
Barber continued, “We all looked at which power group had the most influence for or against issues we were concerned about. We found it was the General Assembly and the Governor. Then we went down the voting list and found the same people that were voting against environmentalists, were voting against public education, voting against labor rights. And the question was if they were mean enough to be together, why weren’t we smart enough to be together?”
Barber answered, “Enough pain will make people protest. And your Governor Pence and this extremist legislature have created a lot of pain.”
Barber ran down the facts, “In this state, over 850,000 are still uninsured, over 30 percent of working people are low income, 22 percent of your jobs are low wage jobs and when you aggregate that by race it gets worse.”
Barber equated what happened in North Carolina to a moral imperative and said people are starting to get the message, “All over the country people are starting to understand we need a movement that’s not about left or right, liberal versus conservative, but a deeper moral movement.”
Barber invoked a key sentence from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech,” saying “People are learning that we’re in a place like when Dr. King said ‘there’s Governors whose lips are dripping with the words interposition and nullification.’”
Many in the African-American and progressive communities have felt that the White House and Congress were the key targets for political involvement. But Rev. Barber strongly disagrees. He says state government, what happens downtown in Indianapolis is the key.
He put it in simple terms in the interview, “ALEC (the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council), the Tea Party and the Koch Brothers decided to come to states and takeover state capitols, because they know if they did they could control tax policy, educational policy and voting.”
Rev. Barber was blunt and explicit in imploring the community not to ignore state and local elections, “We cannot simply say we elect a president. You know what the Tea Party folks have learned? We’ll give you the president. We’ll takeover the states, we’ll control the voting rules, determine who goes into Congress. All the president will be able to do is pass executive orders.”
And Rev. William Barber reminded about what the true nature of democracy is, “We’ve got to learn that democracy is hard, hard work. And you can never simply sit on the sidelines. As a person of faith you’ve got to do a lot more than simply pray. You must work. You must put some legs on your prayer. That’s what this moral movement is saying.”
For more information about the Indiana Moral Mondays movement, go to IndianaMoralMondays.org.
