CHAPTER 4
A DOZEN YEARS as pastor at Greenleaf established the power of coalitions as my personal testimony. When the Spirit moved and brought us together as a community, we saw how God can change the world that is into the world that ought to be. This evidence of things hoped for buoyed the spirits of people who had long suffered without any genuine expectation for change. I watched how they walked with a new spring in their step, coming in and out of the Vision of Faith Community Center each day. Every preacher wants to hear their people shout when they preach the good news in a sermon. But it’s a truly gratifying experience to see good news come to life in the neighborhood where you live and work. Like a doctor making rounds, I rode the streets within a two-mile radius of Greenleaf and watched a sick community becoming well.
One morning in early 2005, I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. For years I had always woken my wife up when I got up because I had to get my walker out and it would clank and bang. But as I was standing in the bathroom this particular morning, I realized I didn’t have my walker. I thought I must be dreaming, so I went back to our bedroom and said to Rebecca, “Hey, wake up. Pinch me.”
She opened her eyes and asked, “When did you get up?” For the first time in twelve years, I had walked to the bathroom and back without waking her up. We both laughed out loud. I knew we had become part of a community that was moving from sickness to health. But I had hardly noticed my own body getting well. It felt like one of those gospel stories where Jesus touched the lame and suddenly they could walk again. The day before, I’d been bent over that old walker. Now, I was moving around on my own two legs.
I went down the street that morning and bought a wooden cane. I’ve been carrying that same cane ever since. It’s a raggedy old cane now, and people are always trying to give me new ones. But I say, “This cane is my testimony. The Lord said, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’ ” So I carry it as a sign of what I learned from a community of people who came together in Goldsboro, North Carolina.
Words of the prophet Isaiah help me name the reality to which my old cane bears witness. Through the prophet, God asks Israel:
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then shall your light break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up speedily.1
I’ve heard health and wealth preachers talk about the faith that’s needed to be well in this world, but I decided after that morning in 2005 that Isaiah made clear what I must do for my own healing: I must help others to heal. Greenleaf’s ministry had invited me into the up-close and personal work of unlocking handcuffs and untying yokes. It was the sort of work that made poverty personal because it gave justice issues a name and a face. We had, in fact, fed hungry people at our tables, listening to the stories of why they couldn’t feed themselves. We had invited the homeless poor into homes, seeing firsthand how beloved children of God had been systemically excluded from the education, employment, and government services that folks on the other side of town enjoyed. Isaiah was right: they were our own flesh and blood. The poor looked like us and talked like us; when they were cut, they bled like us.
We had done some good work through Rebuilding Broken Places to set the oppressed free, but I had to be honest with myself. We had not, in the words of Isaiah, “broken every yoke.” No matter how many people we helped in our little neighborhood in one Southern town, we knew things weren’t going to change for them and for so many others in this world unless we challenged the power structure and changed the way our society works. Understanding my healing in the context of Isaiah’s prophecy, I knew we had to do something more.
I remembered a commitment I had made years earlier, before my own hospitalization, when Rebecca and I traveled to Johns Hopkins for our young daughter to receive brain surgery. She had been diagnosed with serious hydrocephalus and we were doing everything in our power to reduce the swelling in her brain. As we were rushing in for the last appointment before her surgery, I noticed another little boy lying alone on a gurney in the hallway. Something inside me said, “So you’re not concerned for this child, too?” I walked over and prayed for that boy before he went into surgery. Later that night, as Rebecca and I sat in the chapel, praying about our daughter’s surgery, I felt like I had a small sense of what God must feel, watching a world where some of his children suffer and die from poverty and hunger while others play video games, knowing they will always have more than enough. I promised the Lord that night that I would dedicate my life to fighting for his vulnerable children.
Fifteen years later, my baby was a brilliant young woman, thriving because of good health care, a good education, and a family and community that loved her. But just as I had felt moved to pray for that other little boy at Johns Hopkins, I knew I had to stand up for God’s children who weren’t thriving because the yoke of oppression still weighed them down. If God had given me the strength to walk, then I was determined to hit the streets, spreading the good news of fusion coalitions to raise a cry of moral dissent and transform the systems of this world into a society of justice and peace.
Some friends of mine had encouraged me to run for state chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The oldest antiracist organization in America, the NAACP was founded as a fusion movement in 1909, when Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, a highly educated African American, came together with white allies to say that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line. America could never achieve its promise of “liberty and justice for all” until it dealt with the legacy of slavery. Rooted in this racial analysis, the NAACP was and always had been a justice organization. Through the long days of Jim Crow, it built organizational power to challenge lynching and win the franchise for African Americans in the South. North Carolina’s greatest organizer, Ms. Ella Baker, was a field secretary for the national NAACP office through the 1930s and ’40s, establishing chapters throughout the South. In so many ways, there could have never been the fruit of a civil rights movement without the tilling and planting those NAACP chapters did at the grassroots level in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and the Black Belt of North Carolina.
But I noted that, though it had this legacy of grassroots fusion coalition justice work, the NAACP in the twenty-first century had become a top-heavy social club for civil rights elites. Due to its long tenure, it was organizationally established, claiming more members than any other antiracist justice group in the country. But if the NAACP was to lead a twenty-first-century justice movement, it would have to reclaim its legacy and expand capacity through fusionist organizing.
In the summer of 2005, that same year I got off my walker and started to walk again, I ran for president of the North Carolina NAACP, campaigning to move us from “banquets to battle.” We were not, I said, the National Association for Colored People. Our organization did not exist to hold fancy banquets where black folks could eat, drink, and be merry, remembering what the movement had done fifty years ago. No, the NAACP existed in 2005 to carry out the same work we’d been founded to do a century earlier—the work so many of our elders had sacrificed life and limb to carry forward. We were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Our mission, I said, was to move forward, not backward.
The prophet Amos helped me name the situation we found ourselves in, both as an organization and as a nation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A farmer in Israel in the eighth century before Christ, Amos was not a “court prophet.” He wasn’t an insider with the political elites of his day, but rather, in our modern language, a grassroots scholar and activist who had seen what bad social policy in Jerusalem could do to folks back home. When Amos spoke to his nation, his message was clear: “Woe unto you who are at ease in Zion.” The great danger of achievement, Amos taught us, is that it leads to social amnesia.
In the course of my campaign, I made clear that black people did indeed have much to celebrate in 2005. We had survived the Middle Passage and endured 250 years of slavery to see that great Jubilee when, by the executive order of President Lincoln, all slaves were declared free. And though that freedom was curtailed and the promise of forty acres and a mule denied, we kept our eyes on the prize and defeated Jim Crow, dispelling the fear of lynch mobs and White Citizen Councils. When Jim Crow decided to go back to law school and become Mr. James Crow, Esquire, we fought him in the courts and in boardrooms, advocating for affirmative action and anti-discrimination policies. Yes, we could remember back in the day when we ate cucumber and tomato sandwiches because we couldn’t afford any meat. But I told the members of the NAACP that we must, in the words of the young folk, keep it real. Most of us had more than enough for ourselves in 2005.
Our greatest temptation was to forget where we’d come from. Amos warned that, when we are at ease in Zion, we face two dangers. The first is to accommodate ourselves to an “acceptable” amount of injustice, conceding that things will, after all, never be perfect in this broken world. The second temptation is to not stand up against those forces that inevitably rise up to say, “We must go back to Egypt, where we lived as slaves.”
I pointed out to the good people of the NAACP that although many of us were doing fine, the poor people we’d met in the neighborhood surrounding our church in Goldsboro had a different story to tell about the state of justice in America. Though some of us had crossed over to the American Dream, the gap between the median income of African Americans and the median income of whites had not changed at all since 1968. If a room full of black folks knew they were doing better than they had been doing fifty years before, then simple math made clear that, somewhere, there was another room full of black folks doing worse. I told them how the city schools in Goldsboro had essentially resegregated fifty-one years after Brown v. Board of Education. Although this was rooted in a history of racial injustice, I also pointed out that this injustice wasn’t just about black people. Twelve percent of children in North Carolina had no health insurance.2 That wasn’t just black kids. Red and yellow, black and white, poor children were suffering from what Dr. King called the greatest injustice in the modern world—a lack of the basic care we all need to be well. Meanwhile, the single greatest institution shaping black life in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century was the prison industrial complex. More black men were in prison in 2005 than had been in slavery in 1850. Most of them would be coming home at some point, but the collateral consequences of their convictions meant that they could not go to college, find housing, gain employment, or vote.
Amos warned Israel in his day that when we are at ease in Zion, we too easily ignore the cries of hurting people, participating in what I’ve come to call “attention violence” by failing to respond to real people’s real needs. But I told the delegates to the North Carolina NAACP convention that we who believe in freedom cannot rest. We know, as Amos knew, that our well-being is connected to the well-being of those who suffer. And we know that those who want to “take back America” don’t have a point in history to take us back to where we experienced greater freedom. Even the strides forward that have been made cannot be preserved without vigilance. A justice movement can never circle camp and make celebrating past victories its primary function. No, the future of the NAACP must be as a militantly pro-justice, antiracist, antipoverty fusion coalition. If we were to have a future, I said, then it must be as a leader in helping America realize the promise of justice that had not yet been fulfilled.
Some were put off by this call to action. At the convention where the election was to be held, my wife sat down next to someone who was campaigning for one of the other candidates. He began to tell her about how I was trying to take over the NAACP and use the organization for personal gain. She listened politely, then smiled and said, “Well, if he were that bad, I can promise you I would have never married him.”
Not everyone was immediately excited by a call to change, but Amos’s message struck a chord with many and we won the election that summer. My task, then, was to pull together a team that could reflect this vision for what the NAACP should be. If we were going to go into battle as leaders of a new fusion coalition, we needed a leadership team to reflect our vision. We needed our veterans—black folks who’d sacrificed for generations to see the progress we could now enjoy. But we also needed faces that didn’t look like us—young people and white folks who understood what it means to work with others as laborers for justice.
I asked Al McSurely, a white civil rights attorney who had worked with the Southern Conference Education Fund in the 1960s, to serve as legal redress chair for the NAACP. Al had fusion politics in his DNA. While organizing during the most intense years of the civil rights movement, he had seen his house blown up with dynamite in the North Carolina mountains and faced sedition charges in the state of Kentucky. Al defended himself all the way to the Supreme Court and became a constitutional lawyer in order to understand how our society’s foundational laws protect the people’s right to moral dissent. Al was a white man, but he was just the sort of white man we needed to help lead the NAACP into battle.
Although my first task as president was to travel the state, presenting our vision to NAACP chapters and reengaging the membership, from the beginning Al and I were talking about how we needed something more—a coalition that extended beyond the base of the NAACP to include others who were concerned about justice and the good of the whole. The advancement of colored people had to be central because so much of American injustice was rooted in our history of slavery. But the NAACP’s own history showed us that black folk can never move forward by ourselves. We had to find a way to stand with others, acknowledging their connections with us and our issues. Dr. King had understood this. Civil rights could not be separated from worker’s rights, so his Southern Christian Leadership Conference had worked with many unions and with the AFL-CIO. King’s turn against the war in Vietnam and toward the Poor People’s Campaign in the last year of his life was an acknowledgement of America’s deep need to recognize how military spending abroad was connected to lack of funding for the War on Poverty at home. King was gunned down just as he was beginning to articulate our need for a fusion coalition to work for the reconstruction of America.
I wrestled with these hard realities as I worked out a rhythm of traveling the state while my wife was at home during the week, then returning to Goldsboro to be with the church and our kids on the weekend, when Rebecca worked back-to-back shifts at the hospital. The state presidency of the NAACP is a volunteer position, but I wasn’t just volunteering my own time. Our whole community was involved. For over twelve years, I’d practiced doing nothing alone. Members of my church volunteered to drive me everywhere I went for the NAACP. We’d visit twenty-five people in a fellowship hall down east, then drive one hundred miles to an NAACP chapter meeting at a Masonic Lodge in the Piedmont. All the time I was looking for connections, showing up to support any group in the state that was standing for justice. In a year of almost nonstop travel, I learned something important about North Carolina: there wasn’t a huge crowd standing together in any one place, but if you added up all the different groups who were standing for their justice issue, the potential base for a coalition was large—bigger, I thought, than anything North Carolina had seen before.
Sometime during my travels in 2006, I started reading the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel was a dreamer who wrote about what he saw, speaking to the issues of his day even as he invited people to think about their shared future. In the last chapter of his book, Ezekiel concludes his prophecy with a grand vision of that great day when all of Israel’s divided tribes would come together in Jerusalem. From east and west, north and south, he saw them streaming in to become a great congregation. And then, in the final verse, Ezekiel declared that when we all get together, the great city of Zion will itself be renamed. “And the name of the city henceforth shall be, The LORD is there.”3
Thinking about the people I’d met across the state, I started to sketch a list of fourteen justice tribes in North Carolina. We had folks who cared about education, folks who cared about living wages, and others who were passionate about the 1.2 million North Carolinians who didn’t have access to health care. We also had groups petitioning for redress for black and poor women who’d been forcibly sterilized in state institutions, organizations advocating for public financing in elections, and historically black colleges and universities petitioning for better state funding. I included on my list groups concerned about discrimination in hiring, others concerned about affordable housing, and people opposed to the death penalty and other glaring injustices in our criminal justice system. Finally, I noted the movements for environmental justice, immigrant justice, civil rights enforcement, and an end to America’s so-called “war on terror.” Any one of these “tribes” had several highly committed people who’d been working on their issue for years. Some of them had been able to mobilize thousands of people for a particular event, especially when their issue was a hot news item. But Ezekiel’s bold vision got me thinking about what could happen if we all came together for a People’s Assembly in our state capital, to show the members of the General Assembly who their constituents are. What if the people most concerned about these fourteen different issues could form a twenty-first-century fusion coalition? Might such an assembly even give us new language and vision for the place where we gathered?
In December of 2006, we called a meeting of potential partners for this new coalition. Representatives of sixteen organizations showed up. We started with a blank sheet of butcher paper and asked each group to write the issue they were most concerned about. Then, on another sheet, we asked them to list the forces standing in the way of what their organization wanted. We learned something important at that first retreat: though our issues varied, we all recognized the same forces opposing us. What’s more, we saw something that we hadn’t had a space to talk about before: There were more of us than there were of them.
Just a couple of weeks later, I preached at a church in Raleigh. I talked about our recent retreat and read from Ezekiel’s text, saying how his vision was inspiring a new movement in North Carolina. When I was finished, an older woman in that congregation stood up and said, “Did you hear how the Scripture ended? It says, ‘The Lord is there.’ It doesn’t say he’s going to be there. It says he’s already there.” She stood up in that church and told the people that the Lord was already on Jones Street, where the North Carolina General Assembly meets, and we needed to join God there.
Our new coalition partners decided to call a major teach-in and a march for citizens on the second Saturday in February 2007, declaring it North Carolina’s first People’s Assembly. Professor Jarvis Hall of North Carolina Central University led the committee, laying out a forum for citizenship education. We asked not only what the key issues were but also what our agenda should be. What action steps would be transformative for North Carolina? We came up with a fourteen-point agenda that outlined eighty-one action steps (complicated, for sure—but our coalition partners had been working on these issues for years). Then we chose a symbol for the movement that was based on our state constitution, because we knew our movement had to be deeply rooted in North Carolina’s most basic constitutional values and in our deepest moral values. We decided we would start the teach-in with “Did you know?” questions, making people aware of poor people’s reality. Then we would outline the action steps under each agenda item, showing how we could achieve what we knew was good and right.
The night before that first People’s Assembly, I spoke at a rally out in Henderson, about an hour’s drive north of Raleigh. It was cold that night, and I was worried. People had warned us that we were crazy to try to rally people in the middle of the winter. Would folks really come out and march in the cold? I’ll never forget showing up that next morning in Raleigh and seeing a few thousand people standing outside the Progress Energy Center (now the Duke Energy Center), where we were gathering for the teach-in. When we got inside the two-thousand-seat performance hall, it was a packed house, all the way to the back row of the balcony. After coalition partners presented each item, Stella Adams stood up and called for a vote, and the fourteen-point agenda was adopted unanimously. Then we marched through downtown Raleigh to Jones Street and stood in front of the State Legislative Building to publicly present our agenda. Like Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg at the beginning of the Reformation, we posted our fourteen points outside the State Legislative Building on a fourteen-foot-high placard. Black and white, young and old, the coalition we had only imagined fifty days earlier was standing before us on the Fayetteville Mall. It was an astounding sight.
Al McSurely had come up with a name: Historic Thousands on Jones Street (HKonJ). He said our movement was historic because such a diverse coalition had never gathered to stand together before a statehouse. It was focused on Jones Street because we knew we couldn’t change America without changing states. And we were thousands because people needed to see with their own eyes the diversifying electorate of our state and of America. Publicizing HKonJ had been more or less an act faith for us—not knowing who all would show up. But here we were—it was Historic Thousands on Jones Street. It was almost as if the people were out in front of us, showing us something we could hardly find language to describe. I’ll never forget the scene of all those people coming forward to sign their names to the fourteen-point agenda. A woman came to me with tears in her eyes and said, “I want to thank you for calling us together. I didn’t know. I just didn’t know.”
Indeed, we had not known the extent of others’ pain and suffering until we came together to listen. We did not know how much we had in common until we told our stories of struggle to one another. What’s more, we didn’t know our own power until we gathered as one coalition with a moral agenda. We could not have known as we stood on the Fayetteville Mall that cold Saturday morning what our movement would become. But six and a half years later, after Moral Mondays had become a national news story, reporters asked me to explain how thousands of people had spontaneously decided to protest, risking arrest and escalating our resistance every week for thirteen weeks. Where had this movement come from?
I didn’t pretend I could explain how a movement had been born. But when people asked where it came from, I told them about that first HKonJ. We had first gathered on Jones Street when Democrats were in power. We had said from the beginning that our agenda wasn’t Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. We weren’t advocating for left or right, but for all that is good and right. We had studied our history. We knew that fusion politics were central to our state’s history. In 1868, before the Fusion Party won seats in an election, a black preacher named J. W. Hood and a white preacher named Samuel Stanford Ashley had worked together to rewrite our state constitution. Echoing Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, they wrote that all people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” But in view of North Carolina’s history of race-based slavery, they made a significant addition to Mr. Jefferson’s list. “Among them,” they insisted, “are life, liberty, the enjoyment of the fruits of their own labor, and the pursuit of happiness” (emphasis mine). When men whose labor had been stolen through chattel slavery had a say in writing a new constitution, they declared that a just compensation for labor is an inalienable right. They went on to say that “beneficent provision for the poor, the unfortunate … is among the first duties” of our state. And they affirmed, as a matter of democratic principle, that all power of our state’s government is derived from the people.4
These lofty notions were not proposals for the future of North Carolina. They were constitutional guarantees that had been on the books for nearly 150 years. It didn’t matter what the polls said or what campaign promises a politician made. Anyone who took the oath of office swore to uphold this constitution. From the very beginning, the HKonJ People’s Assembly insisted that we were going to hold our elected officials to their oath and stand for North Carolina’s deepest constitutional values.
Because our agenda was comprehensive, covering fourteen issue areas where we could move forward together with specific action steps, many asked us in the weeks following our assembly on Jones Street, “Which issues are your priority for this session? What do you want to achieve first?”
We explained that, for us, every issue was equally important. In a fusion coalition, our most directly affected members would always speak to the issue closest to their own hearts. But they would never speak alone. When workers spoke up for the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining, the civil rights community would be there with them. And when civil rights leaders petitioned for the expansion of voting rights for people of color, white workers would stand with them. Again, we knew our history. The power of the abolitionist movement through the nineteenth century, the fusionist movement in the post-Reconstruction era, and the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century was always the same: a diverse coalition of people with shared moral concern, refusing to be divided by fear or intimidation. In the 1960s, the white power structure of the South had resisted fusionist power in direct ways, allowing the terrorism of the Klan and employing explicit language of hate and fear. When George Wallace lost the Alabama gubernatorial race to John Patterson in 1958, he famously promised to “never be out-niggered again.” Wallace became an icon of overt racism, declaring after being elected governor four years later, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”
But by the late 1960s, mainstream America had sided with the civil rights movement on the issue of desegregation, making clear its distaste for the language of hatred and fear. Those who wanted to maintain power shifted gears, adopting for the Republican Party what Richard Nixon’s advisor Kevin Phillips dubbed “the Southern Strategy.” The goal, as always, was to divide and conquer. But the language was not as overt as the segregationists’. Rather than talking about segregation and “our Southern way of life,” politicians called for “law and order.” They began to attack “entitlement programs,” playing on the fears of poor whites who had themselves benefited from Social Security and the GI Bill. As long as the movement’s coalition could be divided by other means, racist language wasn’t needed. The Southern Strategy protected white power while appearing to be color-blind.
But after forty years of wandering in the wilderness, isolated in our issue-based tribes, our HKonJ coalition found others to stand with them on Jones Street. Like a cloud by day and a fire by night, our common agenda, rooted in North Carolina’s deepest moral and constitutional values, promised to lead us forward. We did not know how long we would have to struggle or how many obstacles we would have to overcome. But we made three commitments to one another after that first HKonJ: (1) we would stay together until we saw our People’s Agenda become the agenda of North Carolina’s government; (2) we would go home and gather People’s Assemblies in our cities and towns, building up this fusion coalition; and (3) we would come back next year on the second Saturday in February.
We had held up our vision and sent out a battle cry; now we had an army. But our troops were more like the ad hoc militias of the American Revolution than the well-trained battalions of modern militaries. A boot camp would have benefited most of us, but in the event, our lessons in nonviolent struggle would come on the field of battle.