CHAPTER 5
ALMOST NO ONE outside North Carolina noticed our first HKonJ. But that was not a negative. In movement building, this is an important point to remember. Though we knew we were witnessing something historic—though our deepest moral convictions told us this was right—we had very little external affirmation, even after a mobilization that showed us what a new moral movement looked like. They say “seeing is believing,” but the truth is that those in power will ignore what they do not want to see as long as we let them. We who believe in freedom and justice must remember the summary of nonviolent struggle often attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”
While they are ignoring you, you have time to build power.
This is what our twenty-first-century fusion coalition did in 2007. Our agenda was comprehensive, covering the full scope of our partner’s issues, yet we knew from fusion history that we could not advance the people’s agenda unless we built power by expanding voting rights. In 1866, when North Carolina’s first fusion movement was just beginning, the Reverend J. W. Hood, a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, stood before the North Carolina Constitutional Convention and said, “Let us have faith, and patience, and moderation, yet assert always that we want three things,—first, the right to give evidence in the courts; second, the right to be represented in the jury-box; and third, the right to put votes in the ballot box. These rights we want, these rights we contend for, and these rights, under God, we must ultimately have.”1
Hood was right, both morally and historically. Without power in the courts and in the legislature, a pro-justice fusion coalition could never defeat white supremacy. But if voting rights were expanded to include African Americans, then they could join their forces with other antiracist, pro-justice coalitions in America. The expansion of voting rights was a bedrock of fusion politics from the very beginning.
More blacks were elected to public office during the period from 1868 to 1880 than at any other time in American history. During this first fusion movement, blacks and whites joined together to reconstruct the nation in ways that would make it possible to move toward the noble goals of justice and equality. Some of the most progressive economic, educational, and labor laws in our nation’s history were passed during this era.
Almost a century before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, sixteen African Americans were elected to seats in the US Congress; more than six hundred black men took the oath of office in Southern state legislatures between 1865 and 1880. Although they never held office in proportion to their numbers, African Americans wielded significant power in every statehouse. In North Carolina more African Americans served in the state legislature than are there today. Though Southern white terrorism and Northern white indifference destroyed Reconstruction, the redefinition of American citizenship is unimaginable without the framework of rights won by these black and white pioneers of fusion politics. They attacked the divisive rhetoric of white solidarity and pointed to the common interests of most black and white Southerners.
During Reconstruction, these fusion coalitions took power. In the decade following America’s Civil War, more than a quarter of white voters in the South cast their ballots for black-majority coalitions. In the 1890s, a Fusion Party made up of Republicans and Populists in North Carolina swept the state legislature, and won both the two US Senate seats and the governorship. These fusion coalitions of blacks and whites in the South passed some of the most progressive educational and labor laws in our nation’s history, guaranteeing publicly funded education not only for all children, but for “all persons.” (Former slaves had been denied access to education and even basic literacy for generations.) Those whose labor had been stolen codified the “just fruit of their own labor” as a God-given right of all people. They did all of this by bringing people together around a deeply moral, antiracist, pro-justice people’s agenda. But they did not stop there. As the Reverend Hood saw so clearly here in North Carolina, the accomplishments of fusion coalitions depend upon the expansion of voting rights—rights that “under God, we must ultimately have.”
In our public memory of the civil rights movement, to be understood as a Second Reconstruction, we often forget that this same insight about the fundamental need for voting rights was at the heart of the movement from the beginning. Sloppy and romantic renderings of our struggle suggest that Rosa Parks sat down on that bus because she was tired and Martin Luther King stood up to defend her. Inspired by their witness of direct action, we say, students integrated lunch counters and buses in the early sixties. Only then, in this telling, did the white liberal establishment deign to grant black people civil rights in 1964 and voting rights in 1965.
Fact is, the civil rights movement of the sixties itself was the result of fusion coalitions that saw the fundamental need to expand voting rights from the very beginning. Rosa Parks didn’t sit down because she was tired. She sat down in an intentional, strategic act of civil disobedience because she had attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School, in Monteagle, Tennessee, where local community leaders spent two weeks together planning strategies for integration. In that context of fusion organizing—black and white together—she said she woke up for the first time in her life to the smell of bacon that a white person was cooking for her. Coming together in that way gave her the vision and nonviolence gave her and Dr. King the tools to demonstrate their capacity for struggle.
But Dr. King was clear from 1957—the year after they desegregated Montgomery’s buses—that the single most important goal for an antiracist, pro-justice, fusion coalition in America was the expansion of voting rights. At the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, the March on Washington that preceded the one we remember by six and a half years, King concluded the day with a speech entitled “Give Us the Ballot.” When Eisenhower was president and Lyndon Johnson was still leading the Democrats in the Senate, Dr. King said, “Our most urgent request to the president of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote.” With the ballot, King foresaw, black people would have political power that they could use to partner with others in coalitions to challenge the powers of injustice.
Though King’s articulation of an agenda that pushed beyond reform to reconstruction would not be fully developed for nearly a decade, he saw from the beginning of his fusion building efforts what the Reverend Hood had attested to almost a century before him: America cannot move forward from our history of racial division without the expansion of voting rights.
When our HKonJ coalition came together in 2007, Dr. Timothy Tyson, professor of history at Duke University, often reminded us how the established powers had conspired to give “black power” a bad name. But black power joined with the economic and electoral power of fusion partners, Dr. Tyson said, was the only thing that had ever moved this country forward. If we wanted to move forward together with our People’s Agenda, history taught us that we had to expand voting rights.
The Supreme Court of the United States, as it happened, had confirmed on record what William Faulkner expressed so succinctly in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Writing for the Court in its 1986 decision in Thornburg v. Gingles, Justice William Brennan noted that “North Carolina had officially discriminated against its black citizens with respect to their exercise of the voting franchise from approximately 1900 to 1970 by employing at different times a poll tax, a literacy test, a prohibition against bullet (single-shot) voting, and designated seat plans for multimember districts.”2 In the twentieth century we had documented cases of intentional voter suppression for the first seven decades. Though those barriers had been removed, their effects continued. Justice Brennan went on to say that black voter registrations remained low—just over 50 percent of those eligible to vote in 1982.
After generations of officially prohibiting blacks from voting, the white power structure of North Carolina had found quieter, more subtle ways to suppress the electoral power of black and poor people. Once again, Jim Crow had cleaned up his language, put on a suit, and continued to rule as James Crow, Esquire. But we knew we had history on our side. We knew we had the Voting Rights Act and legal precedents such as the Thornburg decision on our side. We knew we had on our side the God who brought down Goliath with David’s single stone. So we set out in 2007 to expand voting rights.
By the end of the legislative session, we had a crucial win. Both houses approved a bill that both expanded early voting and made same-day registration possible. In our research, we had learned that the primary reason poor people did not vote was because they didn’t have a day off from work on Election Day. Though North Carolina’s constitution guaranteed free elections, folks struggling to make ends meet on hourly pay simply could not afford to miss a day—or even an hour—and risk losing their fragile employment. They certainly didn’t have time to travel to their county board of elections months prior to November, make sure their paperwork was in order, and then get off work again on a weekday to vote at their local precinct. Due to the highly mobile nature of low-wage work, many working poor people told us that they were often hours away from their precinct on Election Day, building someone else’s home or cleaning a school miles away from their own children.
Expanding voting rights in the twenty-first century, we learned, meant overcoming middle-class assumptions about when and where “free” elections can happen. If a poor person could show up anywhere she happened to be working on Election Day and both register and vote on that same day, more poor people would be free to vote. What’s more, if poor people could register and vote on the weekend prior to Election Day, voting rights would be further expanded, allowing folks to spend a precious day off voting for candidates who represent their interests in local, state, and federal government. Politicians weren’t addressing poor people’s concerns because they knew in a very real sense that they were not going to have to answer to poor people on Election Day. The legislation we helped to push through in 2007 challenged that assumption. It opened the door for the first significant expansion of voting rights in North Carolina in half a century.
But movement work doesn’t just happen in a statehouse. Once we had the governor’s signature on this important piece of legislation, we had to turn our attention to educating and mobilizing people to get out and vote. Coalition partners proved invaluable in this work. We got the word out through our established networks, launching a grassroots education effort that “went viral,” as they say, because of the reach of multiple overlapping organizations that represented millions of North Carolinians. Through the NAACP, we launched a “Souls to the Polls” campaign, organizing black churches to provide free transportation to early-voting sites after worship services. Some ministers expressed concern because they had been misinformed. They thought their churches might risk their nonprofit status if they engaged in “political activity”—they had been sent misleading information. But we provided them with documentation to show that nonpartisan support of their members’ constitutional right to vote was not only legal—it was a moral mandate, deeply rooted in our faith traditions. Democracy as a form of government might only be a few centuries old. But the value of every child of God for the good of the whole is a principle as old as the Torah.
In keeping with the Gandhian formula, most political pundits and party strategists in the country simply ignored us. Occasionally we would see mean-spirited cartoons, most of them poking fun at me personally. If we had been in this for external rewards, it would have been an exercise in daily frustration. The pay was nonexistent, the accolades absent, the mockery mean, and the encouragements few and far between. But we knew that what we were doing was right. And we had each other. Nothing could have been more rewarding than traveling my own home state, week after week, speaking into dark and desperate situations and watching people come to life. Ezekiel had given me the initial inspiration for HKonJ. As our coalition built real political power from the ground up through 2007 and 2008, I felt like I was witnessing Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, where the Spirit blew and broken pieces started joining back together again. I’d grown up singing the spiritual about “dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.” Now I felt like I was watching them resurrected in real time.
The presidential election of 2008 raised the curtain on our coalition’s appearance on the public stage. Because we were a coalition and not a single organization, the analysts and commentators didn’t know at first how to make sense of what they saw. They only knew that something had happened in North Carolina that no one had expected—something that hadn’t been seen since Ronald Reagan’s New Beginning in 1980. All fifteen of North Carolina’s Electoral College votes went to a Democrat. What’s more, he was a black man. The margin was slim—about a third of a percent, or just over 100,000 votes. But when they ran the numbers on new voters, it became clear that the expansion of voting rights in 2007 had added at least 185,000 new voters to the 2008 electorate, most of whom had voted for change. The people had spoken clearly in the only language that those in power could hear. Almost overnight, we moved to a new stage of battle. Our days of quiet organizing and capacity building were over. We were under attack.
At our NAACP office, death threats started coming in. Mean-spirited ideologues were no longer content to poke fun at me as “Reverend Bar-B-Q.” They felt threatened by our coalition’s power and fell back on the fears that had been passed down to them by their parents and grandparents. If a black man was president, America must be out of control. We were accused of being part of a Marxist conspiracy and told that, in various parts of the state, they knew how to deal with men like me and President Obama. Pictures of nooses came across our fax machine with some regularity. They were a vivid image of the fear that our power inspired.
This was the twenty-first century, of course, but this response felt familiar. Fusion politics was as threatening to the white power structure in 2008 as it had been in 1868—the year the KKK was founded, the same year when J. W. Hood and Samuel Stanford Ashley had worked so hard to write a new vision for North Carolina into our constitution. In response to nineteenth-century fusion organizing, the Klan murdered the first black town councilman in Graham, North Carolina, hanging his body in the town square. They killed a white Republican in Caswell County. Terrorism alone has never been the primary means of maintaining power within American democracy, but the threat of it has often sufficed to sustain a politics of fear within the masses. When North Carolina’s Fusion Party government was overthrown in 1898, gun-wielding Red Shirts—white-supremacist paramilitaries—drove elected officials out of office and burned down most of black-owned Wilmington, North Carolina. The Democratic Party stood in as the official authority to take back control for the moneyed elites.
Although many things had changed in the intervening century, the dynamics of power remained very much the same. We knew that the most dangerous extremists were not sitting in their home offices, sending nasty faxes (though we had to take those threats seriously). The people most frightened by our fusion coalition were the elites who had inherited the spoils of white power and had run North Carolina by proxy for generations. Thus, our most powerful enemies were neither the fear-driven terrorists nor their puppet kings, but the quiet kingmakers. They were flying to private meetings with their peers in other states, developing a strategy to fight back against a movement they had falsely hoped they could ignore. What they had on their side, they knew, was money. As shrewd businessmen, they plotted to invest it well on two fronts: a legal battle in the courts and a grassroots struggle for control of the statehouse.
Their most important legal battle turned out to be the case Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission.3 Although purporting to be a case about free speech, the fundamental issue—the one that mattered most to wealthy power brokers threatened by poor people’s votes—was whether corporations would be allowed unlimited investment in political campaigns. Winning by a 5–4 decision, Citizens United and others determined to “take back America” were given free rein to pour mystery money into the 2010 midterm elections. The timing couldn’t have been better for extremists in North Carolina, for they had already decided that the battle to be won was right here at home, in our state legislature races.
At the center of this effort to subvert our fusion coalition’s power was Art Pope, the ultraconservative head of a regional five-and-dime retail chain. A younger Pope had learned state politics as a legislator and pro bono counsel to various conservative campaigns. But after inheriting his father’s business, Pope came to see that his real power was in strategic investment of his family’s considerable financial resources. A protégé of the men who had developed the Southern Strategy a generation earlier, Pope was skilled in the mechanics of defending institutionalized racism without using the language of race. A gentle, religious man, he spoke quietly about small government, fiscal responsibility, and the inefficiencies of government programs. To a public that hardly knew him, he was an honest businessman willing to offer his financial skills in public service. But off the record, in secret meetings with power brokers across the state, Pope was plotting a takeover of North Carolina’s government.
Through an array of foundations and organizations set up to influence public opinion, Art Pope contributed about a tenth of the $30 million invested in local campaigns for seats in the state House of Representatives across North Carolina in 2010. His investment paid off: extremists determined to “take back” control of the legislature won a majority of seats by using the politics of fear to rally Republican voters. Of course, none of these campaigns was overtly racist. No one used the N-word (not in public, at least). But after this new Republican majority had elected its speaker, Representative Thom Tillis, someone posted a video of him on YouTube in which he is seen explaining to a room of white people how “we have to find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance.”4 He went on to explain how he wanted a woman with cerebral palsy who “deserves” government assistance to “look down on those people” who, unlike her, choose to be in the condition they’re in and therefore deserve nothing. It was a textbook example of racism without overt racists. Kevin Phillips, creator of the Southern Strategy, would have been proud.
But we had to face facts: this man was the officially recognized leader of our legislature, backed by an extremist majority. Though our HKonJ fusion coalition had demonstrated incredible power, coming together across old dividing lines and expanding voting rights, we had also suffered a serious blow. With less than $20,000 of our organization’s own money (and lots of volunteer hours), we’d built some basic organizational infrastructure for issue-based organizations to join hands and work together. In response, extremists had invested tens of millions of dollars—much of the money from outside North Carolina—in a campaign to discredit our efforts, demonize the poor, and stir up old fears that have divided the South for decades. In real and measurable ways, we were losing ground.
But as sobering as the political realists’ assessment was, we knew we were in a profoundly moral struggle. Extremists had not focused their energies and investments on North Carolina because we were weak. They were throwing all they had at us because we were strong. No, we didn’t have money on our side. And because we lacked money, we didn’t have the organizational capacity, the access to the influential, or the ear of the media that they did. What we had on our side was truth. We had love and justice and the faith that, if we could just hold on for a little while longer, goodness would win out in the end. Maybe the Pope machine was a Goliath. Still, with a few smooth stones and God on our side, we knew we could stand our ground.
Because I’d spent my whole adult life preaching the message of Jesus, I also knew something he showed us at the very beginning of his public ministry: that resistance is our confirmation. In Luke’s gospel, when Jesus steps onto the public stage in his hometown of Nazareth, he chooses for his first sermon the text that had become so central to our work at Greenleaf Christian Church, the passage from the prophet Isaiah that begins, “The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” Calling the oppressed and divided people of the Galilee together, Jesus electrified the crowd with this message of liberation and hope. People came to life when they saw, through Jesus’s ministry, that a world of justice and peace is possible. But that is not the end of the story in Luke, chapter 4. Luke is painfully honest in his telling. He concludes the story of Jesus’s first sermon by saying, “And they rose up and put him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw him down headlong. But passing through the midst of them he went away.”5
This is, of course, a central theme of the gospel story which ends not with Jesus taking Jerusalem through a popular uprising but with Jesus being executed as an enemy of the state. Yet, two thousand years later, the history of Israel and Rome are measured in time marked before and after the One they crucified. Faith-rooted moral battles are not won with the world’s weapons and they do not always advance on schedules that make sense to us. But of this we can always be sure: when we stand for what is good and right, evil will employ every power at its disposal to take us out. A heavy backlash against our movement for justice may hurt. It may well make us weep and moan. But it must not deter us. In fact, it should encourage us. Because resistance is our confirmation that we are on the right track.
Frederick Douglass taught us back in the nineteenth century that power concedes nothing without a demand. Because power blinds broken human beings to injustice, the most powerful among us will always ignore and laugh at the cries of those who suffer. But when the balance of power tips far enough to threaten those who think they are in control—when the people come together in a demonstration of our political force—then those in power fight back. Their resistance is our confirmation that we are gaining ground. When they stop laughing and start fighting, you can be sure they are worried that you are winning.
If we had accepted the liberal consensus that suggests that faith is either divisive or inherently regressive, we would have never had the resources to stand our ground after the initial backlash of 2008. But those years of struggle solidified in our coalition the need for a faith-rooted, moral movement that welcomes people of all faiths, as well as those who struggle with faith. A diverse coalition of liberals and conservatives, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, the documented and the undocumented, black, white, and brown sisters and brothers were learning that we could trust one another. What’s more, we could trust a Higher Power to have our back when things got rough. This faith even gave us hope to pray that our enemies might become our friends.
While we held on to faith and stood our ground, there was work to be done. Resistance did more than confirm our purpose; it challenged us to go deeper with one another and with our analysis of the situation at hand. As with every partnership, we had to move past the honeymoon and deal with the real stuff we each brought to the table. The “enemy,” as it turned out, wasn’t always out there. Sometimes, the enemy was us. To move forward together, we would have to deal with unquestioned assumptions and internalized fears. Thankfully, the opposition gave us plenty of reason to keep coming together.