CHAPTER 1
DURING THE CIVIL WAR, when the Southern states were determined to survive as a sovereign nation committed to keeping its slaves, General William T. Sherman led sixty thousand Union troops across the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and up through the South on a long march that would finally end in central North Carolina. The last of General Joseph E. Johnston’s Southern forces surrendered to Sherman at Bennett Place on April 26, 1865. While America’s collective memory of Sherman’s march is largely shaped by Gone With the Wind’s story of white people’s loss, African American communities throughout the South remember how, wherever Sherman’s troops established an encampment, that place became an island of freedom within the South. If you could get to one of those places, you didn’t have to cross the Ohio River to gain your freedom. You were already free, right there at home.
Plymouth, North Carolina, was one such island, just twenty miles from a community that still bears the name Free Union. Because black people there had gained not only their freedom but also access to property and capital, the typical white power structure was not as rigid in and around Free Union. My father grew up there with an understanding that Native Americans, black folks, and white folks could share life together, even in the South. Though Jim Crow laws—laws in the South that, taken together, reinstated de jure racial segregation after Reconstruction—were on the books in North Carolina, “miscegenation” was evident in the faces of people my father knew growing up. I have uncles and cousins with eyes as blue as those of any white person you will ever meet. To survive in the 1940s and ’50s, some of them went north and passed as white in places where no one knew their family history.
After receiving degrees in North Carolina and Georgia, my father went north to Indianapolis, where he studied at Butler University. He was a brilliant man, and he was encouraged by many of his teachers to continue in academic work. By the early 1960s he was a black man with two master’s degrees, teaching in a Midwestern city with integrated schools. He met my mother there, and they married. Indianapolis was a place of opportunity for my father and our entire family.
But before I was old enough to start kindergarten, my parents received a call from E.V. Wilkins in North Carolina. An educator who had advocated for black children under segregation, Wilkins was also an activist who saw that change was coming to places like Plymouth. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in North Carolina had won some important victories for desegregation in the courts. But they needed educated black people on the ground to test the school systems’ willingness to hire black teachers and enroll black students. Wilkins asked my father if he would come home and teach science in the public school. He agreed to do this. My mother took a job in the school office, and after a year in a segregated first-grade class, as a second-grader I was sent to integrate the all-white public school.
Nearly fifty years later, my mother still works for the Washington County Schools. The great-grandchildren of some people who called her nigger when we first came now call her Mama Barber. But my parents didn’t have that kind of affirmation when they made the decision to come back and work for justice in eastern North Carolina. They came because they respected people like E.V. Wilkins, who were already deeply engaged in the work. And they came because they were called by God.
Because we came home to Roper, North Carolina, I grew up not only in my parents’ home but also at my grandmamma’s. My father’s mother was, in so many ways, the spiritual anchor of our family. She had a way of watching over her children and grandchildren—of paying attention to the whole community—and seeing what was really going on. An elder in the traditional sense of our African and Native American ancestors, she kept the wisdom of those who had gone before her and passed it down to us, the next generation. I’ve had the privilege of being able to study at some of this country’s best theological schools, and I have learned a great deal from professors of theology in those places. But everything I know that I know in a practical way—the faith that I hold most deeply—I learned from my grandmamma.
When we were growing up, Grandmamma and her nieces always cooked for the whole family (and for anyone else who happened to stop by). When I was at her house, I often sat with them in the kitchen. They would hum songs from church as she rolled out biscuits and stirred pots on her old gas stove. They also had a ritual whenever the food was done. Grandmamma would take a bottle of the anointing oil that she rubbed on people’s heads when she prayed for them and slip it into the front of her apron. She and the other ladies would take some money, a rag, and some of the food they’d cooked and they would say, “We’ll be back shortly. We’ve got to go and hope somebody.”
As a young black boy learning proper English in school, I thought my uneducated grandmamma was misspeaking—that she mistook the word “hope” for “help.” I even may have tried to correct her error in word choice a time or two. But looking back, I see that Grandmamma articulated more theology in that single phrase than some preachers manage to get into an entire sermon. As a person of faith struggling to survive in a society that so often despised her and the people she loved most, my grandmamma knew that any prayers worth their salt had to be accompanied by food for the hungry. She and other mothers of the church practiced “visitation” as a spiritual discipline, every bit as important as Sunday worship or Holy Communion. She knew in her bones that faith and works, belief and practice, were inseparable. And she knew in her careful choice of words that love in action was not simply about helping people. It was a practice of hope that both enabled others to keep going and helped her to keep her eyes on the prize and hold on.
Though she had no formal training in theology, my grandmamma knew what the great German theologian Jürgen Moltmann said so clearly: “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.”1 We become, as Dr. Cornel West says so well, not optimists who deny reality but prisoners of hope who work to change reality. I didn’t know as a boy sitting at Grandmamma’s kitchen table how important the faith she was showing me would be. But I took it all in just the same.
In time, I would come to see that the faith my grandmamma embodied was my father’s primary motivation in life as well. William J. Barber, for whom I was named, was a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) minister as long as I knew him. He was a powerful preacher who stood tall in the pulpit, proclaiming God’s dream of freedom for captives to people who struggled daily against poverty, cultural trauma, and second-class citizenship. If he had gone to an urban center with more concentrated black wealth, he easily could have become a big-church preacher and lived the middle-class, professional lifestyle of his classmates from seminary. But coming home to Roper, North Carolina, was a vow of poverty for my father. He was not committed to professional advancement. He was devoted, instead, to the freedom of all people—especially those who have been overlooked by the powerful in society.
Though he was a fully credentialed preacher, my father was not employed as a pastor. He taught science at the local high school and did odd jobs in the community, providing for our family while, at the same time, building a broad network of connections in Washington County and throughout eastern North Carolina. Though no one used this language in rural North Carolina at the time, he was essentially a bivocational community organizer.
When we first came home to North Carolina, my parents began attending meetings at Elizabeth City State University, a historically black college. There they discussed with Mr. Wilkins, other leaders in the African American community, and some progressive whites the best strategy for a peaceful integration of Washington County’s public schools. People were always coming by our house in the evenings to talk about issues. One man had a son who’d been wrongfully incarcerated on trumped-up charges. Another wanted to discuss labor rights at the local warehouse and how workers might organize for better wages and working conditions. Some neighbors were concerned about child care for working parents or establishing worker-owned co-ops to build economic power so they wouldn’t be abused by the sharecropping system that had extended slavery’s power dynamic into the twentieth century. My father could talk to all of them. He had the sort of quick, versatile mind that allowed him to sit down and work the New York Times crossword puzzle in twenty minutes, but he rode around in an old, beat-up pickup truck, looking like all the other farmhands in the area. Everyone who knew him called him Doc.
My father used to carry me to meetings when I was a little boy. Every once in a while someone would ask, “Why is this kid here?” And my father would always say, “Leave him alone. He’s learning.” I grew up in community meetings. Conversations that started when someone stopped by the house inevitably led to a community meeting where others with a similar concern would gather to discuss what could be done. These meetings happened in living rooms, in church basements, in Masonic lodges, and in barbershops. They were often small groups—ten or fifteen people getting together to talk. But my father took each individual seriously. No matter what the injustice, it mattered because people mattered. Every single one of them was created in the image of God. Like his mother, my grandmamma, my father was going to “hope” them any way he knew how.
But keeping faith alive in the 1960s Black Belt of North Carolina wasn’t always easy. One of my earliest memories of childhood is of sitting on the floor of our living room in Roper. There is a little white TV set with tinfoil on the antenna, and my mother is sitting in front of that TV, bent over crying. For a long time, I didn’t know what to make of that memory. But then I realized it must have been the spring of 1968. She was hearing for the first time about the death of Martin Luther King. In so many ways, her grief at the loss of the single African American freedom preacher who had risen to national prominence symbolizes for me the constant struggle that she and my father endured throughout their lives.
As Americans in the twenty-first century, it is easy for us to celebrate the MLK holiday or visit his national monument on the Mall in Washington, DC, without ever feeling the agony of the thousands of African Americans like my parents who struggled tirelessly for decades against the same forces that gunned down Dr. King. We can be inspired by King’s dream without having to live through the nightmare of friends losing their land because they tried to register to vote or family members losing their jobs because they attended a union meeting. In my mind’s eye I still see my mother bent over weeping. And I know that she was not only mourning the loss of Dr. King. She was mourning all the losses that she and my father had endured in the hope that, someday, justice would prevail and people who lived with their backs against the wall would indeed be free at last. When you’ve devoted your entire life to those people—when, in fact, you are those people—then the freedom movement is not a matter of history or social theory. It is a matter of life and death.
For my family, it was also always a matter of faith. I cannot remember a time when I did not know God both to be real and to be about bringing justice in this world. I’ve never experienced the epistemological crisis that is central to so many faith journeys in Western history, when individuals must learn to answer for themselves the question “How can I know that God is real?” But as a teenager I had to face a different kind of faith crisis. To so many of my fellow Americans, the God I knew was a stranger, the faith I was raised in, an anomaly. Before I could join the struggle that my parents had given their lives to, I had to wrestle with a church that seemed to hypocritically turn its back on them and the people they served.
I witnessed this hypocrisy firsthand as I observed my father’s ministry. As a preacher without a congregation, my father often traveled, holding revivals in little country churches across eastern North Carolina. For him, this was always a twofold vocation. He was sharing the Gospel message that gave him hope, believing that it was good news for others as well. But at the same time he was also building connections as an organizer. As a sociologist, he thought about how the social institution of the church provided a network through which people could share information, organize around issues of common concern, and mobilize for collective action. As a people person, he knew that congregations answer a call to action not only because they believe it to be right but also because they know the pastor who is making the call. An organizer is always building relationships of trust. My father did this as a traveling evangelist.
But he knew well that not everyone in the Christian churches of eastern North Carolina believed, as he did, that God and justice always go hand in hand. As a historian my father wrote the book on the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in eastern North Carolina.2 He traced how the Restorationist Movement, born of an integrated revival in early-nineteenth-century Kentucky, had evolved into the radical Christian notion that black and white could live, work, and worship together, even in the South. In North Carolina history, he observed how descendants of that revival—Christian church missionaries—were active participants in the post-Reconstruction Fusion Party, which united poor whites and freed slaves across North Carolina to stand together against the tyranny of white-supremacist Democrats in the late nineteenth century. Their challenge to white power was met by a racist propaganda campaign that resulted in America’s only documented coup d’état, in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. The grief I witnessed in my parents’ experience of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968 was a reflection of the grief their forebears had borne seventy years earlier, when most of the black wealth in Wilmington was destroyed by white mobs who murdered dozens of African Americans, burned down the only African American daily newspaper in the country, and pillaged Wilmington’s black-owned businesses district.3
My parents’ was a grief that mourned the power death holds in this world, working through individuals and systems to crush human beings and their God-given potential. But it was more than that, I came to learn as I watched my father’s relationship with the church. My father knew his history, so he was never surprised. He knew that fellow Christians had been deeply involved in justice work from Reconstruction on up until his time. But he also knew that Christians had been on the other side as well. Those same Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) churches of eastern North Carolina that had been so radically committed to a new world at their inception were often silent in the face of injustice. During the civil rights movement, when my father called these congregations to stand up for what was right, they often ignored him or said, “We can’t move too quickly. All progress takes time.”
Most popular understandings of the civil rights movement assume that black churches supported Dr. King because he was a minister, because mass meetings happened in church buildings, and because the moral language of the church was used in public appeals. But the fact is that there was no single “black church,” just as there is no single white church—or no single America, for that matter. In his book Prophesy Deliverance!, the public intellectual and Union Theological Seminary professor Cornel West outlines five types of African American social engagement in response to modern racism. These different modes of existence, he acknowledges, were developed as people sought to survive in an economy built upon race-based slavery and white supremacy. Because of both a fear of reprisal for any challenge to the status quo and an internalized sense that “white was right,” the “assimilationist” posture became a mode of survival for many black Christians who wanted life for their children to be a little bit easier than life had been for them.4 For these churches, “justice,” was often a scary word. It invited the trouble they were intent on avoiding.
I did not have this framework for understanding the church as a boy, but I observed how often my father’s ministry was marginalized by people who called themselves Christians. He was turned out of churches and ignored at denominational meetings and invitations to preach were canceled when someone said he was known to stir up trouble. To me, it seemed like the height of hypocrisy to chastise a fellow believer for taking the faith too seriously. As I said, I never doubted God, but I had serious reservations about the church. So the last thing I wanted to do was to become a preacher.
I thought I’d be a lawyer. My first year at North Carolina Central University, the nation’s oldest public university for African Americans, I became the freshman class president. I majored in political science and began to explore notions of public justice as they are understood in sociological, economic, and political terms. My senior year, I got involved in organizing students. We marched to Raleigh to demand more funding for historically black colleges. After the fact, someone told me that it was the largest protest of university trustees on record in our state. Without knowing it, I was becoming an organizer. But I was also practicing the faith my grandmamma and my father had lived and preached.
When I was about to graduate, I got a call from Boston University. They offered me a scholarship to come and do graduate studies in theology. By this time, I knew Dr. King had gone to Boston University to do his doctoral studies before going to Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Rosa Parks and became a leader in the first intentionally nonviolent struggle for African American freedom. Learning about this man whose death had caused my mother such grief helped me to understand how faith and politics can go hand in hand, not only for individuals but for a social movement. I still didn’t want to be a preacher, but I thought I might follow in Dr. King’s footsteps as a human rights advocate and public intellectual.
So, I went home and told my grandmamma about the invitation to do graduate studies at Boston University. She immediately did something that always made me nervous. She got up, went to her bedroom, closed the door, and started to pray. You could hear her humming from outside the closed door. When she came out, she said, “Boy, you don’t need to go to Boston.”
I said to myself, “I love Grandmamma, but I’m not about to turn down a scholarship to graduate school.” But a few weeks later, I realized I just couldn’t go. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Something down deep inside of me was preventing me from going. I went to the president of my school and told him I was going to have to turn down Boston University.
I don’t know what Grandmamma saw when she went into that room to pray, but I do know that three years later both she and my father were dead. I consider those two—my father and my grandmamma—to be the best friends I’ve ever had. And if I’d gone to Boston, I would have missed the last three years of their lives. I also got married in those years. My wife, Rebecca, had made it clear that she wasn’t interested in a long-distance relationship. So I don’t know if she would have waited on me.
I take seriously the Scripture that says, “In an abundance of counselors there is safety.”5 If it hadn’t been for Grandmamma, who knew how to pray, I might have made a decision that wouldn’t necessarily have been wrong, but would have changed my direction. I think about Paul in the New Testament and how he wanted to go to Spain but, as he wrote, “the Spirit prevented him.” And it seems to me now that the Spirit must have kept me here in North Carolina. Somehow, Grandmamma knew that I couldn’t just follow Dr. King’s path. I had to find my own way.
Finding my way meant coming to terms with the faith my family had shown me—a prophetic Christianity that would connect me to a great river of resisters, stretching back to Ella Baker and Medgar Evers, to Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, to John the Baptist and Mary of Bethany, to Queen Esther and the Hebrew prophet Micah, who asked in the eighth century BCE, “What doth the Lord require?” Dr. King had found his own place in this stream, as had my mother and father. My vocation, I was learning, was to live an answer to this fundamental biblical question with my own life.
He has showed you, O man, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?6
What never changes from age to age with God? What is always God’s primary focus for His people? What transcends our labels, our political alliances, and our situational ethics? What is greater than the political majority at any given moment?
Do justice echoed in every ripple of the great river of resistance. Treat people right, treat communities right, treat the least of these right. Love mercy, I heard my faith tradition say. Love helping people. Love building a government that cares for all. Love the least, the left out, the lost. Enjoy lifting those who have been abandoned. Get excited about rescuing those who have failed. And this: Walk humbly before your God. Never think as a nation that your bombs, missiles, and weaponry make you greater than God. Never become a nation that’s unable to repent when you have mistreated the vulnerable. Never become so arrogant in your wealth that you refuse to lift the poor. Never become so vain that you pray for God to bless America and forget that God is not your exclusive property.
Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly before your God.
Micah said it nearly three thousand years ago. And God’s servants have been saying it ever since. Coming to terms with the church that seemed to turn its back on my father, I heard a call to take up Micah’s message and reclaim moral language in the public square for the common good. The great river of resistance taught me that this is what God has always been about. And with God, some things never change.
Of course, this was the 1980s—the heyday for the Moral Majority and the ascendance of the Religious Right in America’s public life. Neoconservatives were using biblical language to justify arms deals in Central America, a War on Drugs in America’s cities, and the sellout of government to private corporate interests. It was the worst of times for a human rights advocate to discover himself to be a religious conservative—for that’s what I was, just not in the usual sense of the term. But there I was. I could not deny that my deepest and truest beliefs were those fundamental truths God had declared through Micah years ago.
I was not a politician. I wasn’t a lobbyist. I wasn’t going to be able to give my life to a nonprofit that works for progressive ideals. Those people and organizations do important work, but I had to find my own way. God was calling me as a theological conservative to reclaim language that had been hijacked by those who liberally resist and ignore so much of God’s character.
Of course, these theological conservatives’ rationale was not new. During slavery many so-called conservative Christians claimed deep adherence to Scripture in their support of slavery and racism. They pulled out a few texts to build a whole system of injustice, while ignoring the multiplicity of texts that condemned human oppression. Though claiming to be biblicists, they overlooked as much of the Bible as they could, pretending that a half reading of a few selected texts justified slavery over and against the heart of God’s long work to free creation from bondage.
During the civil rights movement there were many who found ways to dismiss the biblical call for justice and righteousness. Many of them were so liberal in their dispelling of God’s demands that they criticized Dr. King, saying that he was not “acting like a preacher.” He had to remind them that if you read and accept the whole counsel of the triune God, then you must challenge the threefold evils of racism, classism, and militarism in our society. Like my father, Dr. King simply insisted that with God, some things never change. The more I paid attention to our tradition, the more urgently I heard the call to conserve its heart of liberation from the liberal dismissal of moral truth for the sake of individual gain.
I came to see that in our shifting times, as so many were trying to promote the benign and anemic Christianity that reduces the image of God to a mere sanctifier of our nation, I was called to preach. It seemed as if I heard God’s voice saying, “Come out of the exile of false religion. Come out of the exile of the religion of idolatry and self-worship, which can only sustain oppression. Come out of the exile of religion that serves itself and avoids real people, the vulnerable people whom God adores. Come out of the religion that has liberally removed itself from the unchanging values of God and dared to call itself conservative.”
Maybe I had resisted the call because I knew from watching my parents what it would cost. But they had baptized me in the river of resistance, saturating my mind with freedom songs that would not go away. Grandmamma was praying for me long before she went into her bedroom that day and closed the door. She was praying with every song she hummed, in every plate of food she carried out to hope somebody. Though she had crossed over to the other side of the river, I knew she was praying still.
I didn’t know just how soon I’d be crying out to God for myself.