IN THE SUMMER OF 2013, as Moral Mondays became a national news story, I stood on the edges of this protest-turned-revival-meeting and watched the most diverse congregation of people I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, electrified week after week by the Reverend Barber’s sermons. Rooted in the black prophetic preaching tradition, his sermons were crafted for the public square—unashamedly confessional, yet at the same time radically inclusive. Like all good Southern revival sermons, each one ended with an altar call. Only here, in the context of a moral crisis at our statehouse, the invitation to come forward was a call to nonviolent direct action. Hundreds responded, week after week, joyfully submitting to an evening in jail. The Tuesday morning I walked out of the Wake County Detention Center, I was greeted by dozens of supporters, warm hugs, and a delicious baked ziti. Someone handed me a button that said, “I WENT TO JAIL WITH REV. BARBER.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d been arrested by the Reverend Barber’s preaching. As a Southern Baptist kid growing up in North Carolina two decades earlier, I had been a young Republican who wanted to join the Moral Majority. I went to work in the US Senate and paged for Strom Thurmond. Rooming with a congressman’s son on Capitol Hill, I thought I was on my way to a career in conservative politics. But something wasn’t quite right. I couldn’t reconcile the realities of DC politics with the words of Jesus I’d memorized in church. I came home thinking there must be a better way.
A few months later, I attended an event in North Carolina hosted by the governor’s office. The keynote speaker for the evening was the chair of the Human Relations Commission, William J. Barber II. I didn’t know he was a preacher when he stepped to the podium. But by the time he sat down, a ballroom full of people were on their feet, clapping and shouting like a Pentecostal camp meeting. I was among them. Unsure what had happened to us, I knew I had to hear more from this man.
When I invited the Reverend Barber to come preach at my home church in Stokes County, he graciously accepted. But he did not come alone. He told me he wouldn’t come to my hometown by himself because he knew its history. I was from Klan country and didn’t even know it.
As a native son of North Carolina, I count it one of the great gifts of my life that I was befriended and, in the very best sense of the word, pastored by the Reverend Barber. For him, fusion politics is no mere political theater. It has been the substance of his faith for the twenty years I’ve known him. It’s what drew me to him that night in a hotel ballroom and it’s what most impresses me about his life and vision still.
As media outlets from the New York Times to Fox News sent reporters to cover the Moral Mondays story, the Reverend Barber and I talked about problems with how this story was being told. The trouble wasn’t the individual reporters themselves. Many of them were good journalists who worked hard to tell the story they could see. But the limited left-right framework of the twenty-four-hour news cycle made it difficult for them to name what was happening, where it had come from, and what it might offer beyond North Carolina. Whether they considered themselves Republican, Democrat, or independent, the people who showed up at Moral Mondays got it. They went home and told their friends, and the movement continued to grow more diverse. It became clear that a new justice movement was rising up from the soil of grassroots organizing here in North Carolina. If a Third Reconstruction could take root here, we knew it could happen anywhere.
But the greatest danger to a Third Reconstruction was that people might not recognize it. Because they did not know the long history of coalition building here in North Carolina, many reporters saw Moral Mondays as a spontaneous response to particular legislation. When that act of protest did not immediately effect the change they thought it aimed to bring about, it was easy to dismiss. Reporters pointed ahead to the midterm elections of 2014, saying over and again that they would be a referendum on North Carolina’s legislature. But we had put our bodies on the line to say that the redistricting and voter suppression in Raleigh were an attack on the democratic process itself. In 2008, the largest turnout in North Carolina’s history of poor and African American voters had prompted this extremist backlash. Whether we were winning or losing depended on how you told the story. In the context of the long struggle for justice in this country, we knew this was a story of hope.
On his fiftieth birthday, at the end of the long summer of 2013, I sat down with the Reverend Barber and recorded the interviews that provided the basic outline of this book. In the course of that day, we were interrupted only once, by a reporter who tracked him down at my office. It would prove to be a rare respite. As I worked to write this story, we scheduled follow-up interviews in which I checked facts, probed the Reverend Barber’s memory, and sought clarity about his vision. We often met when he was on his way to or from the airport, sharing the movement with others even as he studied what was happening in their places. Our conversations mixed with calls from people on the ground in Ferguson, aides at the White House, lawyers reporting on challenges in the courts, reporters asking for a quote. And those were just the people who had his cell phone number. A few times we tried to continue a conversation while walking down the street in Durham. Without explanation, people would stop us to ask if they could have their picture taken with the Reverend Barber. A homeless man stopped us to give a detailed report of police brutality. To each of them Reverend Barber extended the same honest but generous hand he’d extended to me twenty years earlier. I took notes on everything. His life, I decided, was his message.
When I attended seminary, I recall learning about the authorship of biblical books. Although some of the New Testament letters were written in Paul’s name, historians have pointed out that many of the issues they address did not arise until Paul himself had been dead for decades. The same with the prophet Isaiah. The most reliable scholarship suggests he was alive only during the period when the first third of the book that bears his name was recorded. Second and third Isaiah were most likely written in his voice by those who took up his mantle and carried on the work Isaiah had started.
The Reverend Barber keeps saying this is how we’ve written this book, and I suppose he’s right. Except that he’s very much alive and carrying the message forward. I’m honored to be a conduit for his words.
The process of telling this story has taught me something about fusion politics that may help other readers understand where they fit in America’s Third Reconstruction. We can neither hear nor tell stories without asking ourselves along the way where we find ourselves in the story. As I’ve reflected on America’s history since the First Reconstruction, I’ve had to confess that I know the fear which has created a backlash against the black-led freedom movement time and again. It was suggested in a thousand conversations I overheard growing up—and clearly stated in more than one. I cannot pretend that the resistance to what I’ve written here is somewhere else. I carry it within me.
But that is not all that is in me. Jesus said love can drive out fear, and I have found great hope in the way white folks have joined the black-led freedom struggle, from the abolition movement up to the present. Writing this story, I’ve been drawn to the voices of Angelina Grimke and Levi Coffin, Anne Braden and William Stringfellow. I’ve become more and more interested in the white people who said little, but were present—people like Stanley Levison, from whom Martin Luther King Jr. refused to dissociate himself, even when asked to do so by the president himself (the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, had convinced President Kennedy that Levison was a Communist, manipulating King and the civil rights movement). These stories are little known, but they help people like me to see that we have a role to play in fusion politics and the Third Reconstruction.
Our job is not to take the lead, but to pledge our allegiance to the other America—the country that has not yet been but that one day shall be.
Fear is at the root of the violent backlash that the Third Reconstruction faces. I have read through the death threats the Reverend Barber receives, and I have watched the fears of white men I grew up with raging out of control. But fear is not only violent. Fear is also paralyzing, convincing so many of us that there is little we can do to change a world we know to be horribly broken. Fear whispers, “Well, that’s just the way it is.” Or, “These things are beyond me. I’ll just do what I can to love the people where I am.”
Maybe what we fear the most is that the Reverend Barber is right: that the heavy lifting to establish a multiethnic democracy isn’t behind us in our Civil War or civil rights movement, but rather is very present in the Moral Movement of today. Maybe America isn’t possible without a Third Reconstruction. Maybe we were born for such a time as this.
I’m willing to believe that America is possible—that fusion politics is not a pipe dream—because of a black preacher who was willing to embrace me, even when he knew I was from Klan country. That embrace was one step in a twenty-year journey. But fusion politics, as it turns out, is about one step after another into a relationship with the people who are supposed to be our enemies.
I can trust a man who embraces his enemy, then trusts him to tell his story.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove