CHAPTER 7
THOUGH WE HAD SEEN important wins in the Smithfield struggle—in John McNeil’s case, in the passing of the Racial Justice Act, the Wake County struggle, and the court’s defense of public education—we knew the extremists were holding their ground in their most important victory. After taking the General Assembly in 2010, they had acted immediately to redraw voting districts. It was simple power politics, which Democrats had engaged in as much as Republicans in the past. Only this time, we were learning, ultraconservative extremists had leveraged obscene amounts of money to buy a degree of control that they imagined no one could challenge. We would have to sue and wait for years to get the whole story, but eventually the truth came to light. North Carolina, it turned out, was ground zero for a coordinated buyout of American democracy by so-called dark money.
The Citizens United decision, we knew, had opened the door for new kinds of money to pour into America’s elections. But the decision also made it much more difficult to follow the money and see just where the moneyed elites were focusing their energies. We had our suspicions, of course. But facts matter in any public debate. Those who confront power without hard facts will always be accused of touting conspiracy theories.
Those who pay attention to human nature, however, need not be naïve about our tendency to conspire. The prophet Jeremiah said four thousand years ago, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?”1 Power plus secrecy guarantees conspiracy in human affairs. The authors of North Carolina’s constitution understood this. In order to preserve an open, democratic process in our state, they guaranteed every citizen the right to “assemble together to consult for their common good, to instruct their representatives, and to apply to the General Assembly for redress of grievances.” This is the right of every North Carolinian, regardless of race, creed, or class. But because this right had been trampled during the nineteenth century in the secret, closed-door meetings of white power elites, the wise authors of our constitution had followed this democratic guarantee immediately with a strict prohibition: “but secret political societies are dangerous to the liberties of a free people and shall not be tolerated.”2
“Secret political societies,” we learned, were precisely the enemy we were up against. Immediately following their heavily financed victory in 2010, extremists controlling the General Assembly used their previously dormant State Government Leadership Foundation (SGLF) to hire an outside consultant, Tom Hofeller, to oversee the gerrymandering of North Carolina’s voting districts. Because the IRS does not require the SGLF to disclose information about its donors, it provided the perfect shroud behind which Art Pope and his allies could fortify themselves against all future challenges. Their strategy was simple: identify those who would vote against them, isolate those votes in a minority of “packed” districts, and thus guarantee “democratic” power through a majority of sympathetic districts. Henceforth and forevermore, they thought, the popular vote wouldn’t matter. A majority of North Carolinians could vote against them but they would still maintain power by winning a majority of the districts.
The General Assembly leadership, whose campaigns Pope had funded, assigned him as “special counsel” to the redistricting team, thereby protecting him from subpoena through attorney-client privilege. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see the level of conspiring behind this plan. The same man who had bought the legislature was paying the consultant who was working side by side with him, all under carefully arranged conditions designed to keep the public from connecting the dots. One layer after another, the extremists tried to cover up what they knew they could only do in secret.3
If any of them had been listening when they made their obligatory public appearances at church, they might have heard these words of Jesus: “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.”4 As our coalition filed lawsuits and fought in court to expose this conspiracy against the people of North Carolina, we held on to the promise that a lie cannot live forever. But we knew that this was not the narrative folks were reading in their newspapers or watching on the evening news. When the extremists came out from behind the curtains of their secret societies, they smiled, shook hands and kissed babies. To most people, it looked like they were good, honest businessmen using their skills to help North Carolina recover from the Great Recession.
Once again, we knew our job was to change the public narrative. If all folks heard in the public conversation was spin about how the economy was rebounding and unemployment rates were going down, they were damned to blaming themselves for their own suffering. Everyone else is doing better, poor people would tell themselves. We must be doing something wrong.
But we knew the extremists’ narrative about economic recovery was little more than a smoke screen for their obsessive pursuit of total control. Gar Alperovitz, a political economist at the University of Maryland, offered a penetrating analysis of the “silent depression” that had caught up with us. “What we’re really beginning to experience is a process of slow decay, punctuated by a recurring economic crisis, one in which reforms achieve only sporadic gains,” he wrote in America Beyond Capitalism. Analyzing trends over time, across Republican and Democratic administrations, he noted how
growing inequality, economic dislocation, failing democratic accountability, deepening poverty, ecological degradation, greater invasions of liberty and growing imprisonment, especially of minorities, continue to slowly and quietly challenge the belief in the capacities and moral integrity of the overall system of the governing elite.5
His analytical summary was, almost item by item, a catalogue of the cries we’d heard from our coalition partners. The challenge was how to overcome the spin of the governing elite and make poverty personal in the public square.
Several coalition partners came together at the beginning of 2012 and announced that we would host a “Putting a Face on Poverty” tour, because in both our private and public politics, many Americans had become accustomed to committing attention violence against the poor. Like the religious leaders in Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, too many in our society had made it a habit to cross to the other side of the road and ignore the man holding a “will work for food” sign who has been beaten up by an economic system that thinks it does not need him. In both private and public attitudes—even in pulpits and places of worship—concern for the vulnerable was not visible. Ours was a tour designed to change the way North Carolina thought and talked about the economy.
Nearly 1.6 million of God’s human family, we pointed out, were living in abject poverty in North Carolina.6 As we traveled the back roads of North Carolina, one of American poverty’s native homes, Gene Nichol of the University of North Carolina’s Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity pointed out the irony of the fact that here, where we have the most poor people in the land, we also had the most political leaders who were utterly untroubled by it. Ten of the country’s poorest twelve states were Southern. Though about 15 percent of Americans lived in poverty generally, in Mississippi it was 23 percent; Louisiana, 22 percent; Arkansas, 20 percent; Georgia, 19.1 percent; South Carolina, 19 percent; Texas, 19 percent.
North Carolina came in close to the bottom of the list, but we joined the other former Confederate states to set the gold standard for American economic deprivation. In North Carolina, 18 percent of us were officially poor—over 25 percent of our children and more than 40 percent of our children of color. This was the reality that we wanted to help the people of North Carolina see. In one of the most economically potent states of the strongest nation on earth, over 40 percent of our kids of color were living in wrenching poverty.
What’s more, under the extremist leadership that was claiming an economic rebound, North Carolina had one of the country’s fastest rising poverty rates. A decade before, in the 2000s, we had been twenty-sixth from the bottom—a little better than average. But we were down to twelfth from the bottom, speeding past the competition. Two million of us were classified by the federal government as hungry—over 20 percent, the nation’s fourth-highest rate. Nearly 622,000 of our kids were going to bed hungry each night.
Who were these people? And why didn’t we know their names and their stories? That was the basic question behind our poverty tour. We invited journalists and students, pastors and community leaders to join us on four separate trips through each quadrant of our state.
In Henderson County we met an optimistic yet tearful young woman who had been stricken with diabetes. She wanted to marry the good man she loved, who would help her raise her daughter. But she told us she couldn’t. If she did, she would lose her Medicaid insurance. Without it, she worried, she might lose her life.
We visited with the hundreds of clients of the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro. We talked to Greg and Sammy, Leona and Kay—black and white folks who were homeless, living in extreme poverty. Many of them lined up at three in the morning to get a shower when the doors opened at six thirty. Four had recently died on the streets in a single week.
Just down the road, at Greensboro Urban Ministries, five hundred meals were served, three times a day, seven days a week, to the hungry and destitute. Still, they said they couldn’t meet the demand in a city where poverty was supposedly not a problem.
We met and talked to a fifty-seven-year-old man in Reidsville who was living in a storm drain. It wasn’t the ideal situation, he confessed, but it at least helped him stay out of the elements. He had been laid off after a plant closure, having worked thirty-eight years. In thirty-six months of homelessness, he told us he’d been hungry every single day. The “trickle down,” he reported, “never seems to trickle on us.”
One day on the tour we came to Hickory, North Carolina, where we were invited to walk down a path into the woods. There we witnessed the fresh reality of man’s inhumanity to man. As we walked along the path, we saw baby dolls and toys, eerie signs that there were children living under the cover of trees and bushes in the woods. This is what an “economic recovery” looked like for nearly a fifth of our state—people forced to live like animals in the richest nation ever to exist.
When we got to the community in the middle of the woods, we met God’s family—black, white and brown, male and female, young and old. I was brought to uncontrollable tears when our new friends welcomed us. They swept the dirt and made space for us among the grass and the weeds. They told us how the authorities would often come out to their small community and run them out of the woods because the city did not want to acknowledge its level of devastating poverty. “But we wanted you to come, Reverend Barber,” a woman said to me as she held my hand. “It might mean we lose everything we’ve got, but we wanted you to come so somebody might at least know we’re here.”
These were the moral witnesses we needed to help us stand against the extremist takeover of our statehouse. Our coalition had learned how essential it is to a fusion movement for those most directly affected to speak for themselves. But no one was listening to poor people. Republicans and Democrats alike were struggling to prove that their program was the best way to lift the middle class. Justice organizations created a platform for people of color, women, labor, the environment, and LGBTQ folk. But no one was handing a microphone to poor people. The way to beat mystery money and the secret conspiracies of the governing elite was to trust that their evil deeds would come to light as we lifted up the voices of the most vulnerable. As the psalmist had taught Israel to sing through long days of exile, “The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner.”7 We did not know the extent of the gap our coalition would have to span, but we had stumbled upon the architectural insight which would ensure our moral arch’s stability. The people the builders had rejected were to be the capstone of our coalition.
The year 2012 saw an election. Having put their redistricting plans into place, the extremists were prepared to invest with surgical precision in campaigns to guarantee them the total control they longed for. Their new maps told them exactly where they had to win. But money, they feared, wouldn’t be enough to seal their victory. In the end, they could only invest in particular candidates, none of whom were particularly compelling. Like King Herod at the time of Jesus’ birth, they were scared to death that after all of their conspiring they wouldn’t be able to manipulate the people of North Carolina.
So they did what implementing the Southern Strategy had trained them to do: they moved to stir up the fear that would most likely divide poor people who were waking up to the fact that the extremists’ “economic recovery” wasn’t doing anything for them. For so much of Southern history, the fear of black people—especially the fear of black men threatening white women—had been enough to divide and conquer poor people along race lines. The extremists had tried to tap this old fear in their 2010 takeover, direct-mailing flyers insinuating that the Racial Justice Act was going to put dangerous black men back in white folks’ neighborhoods. (In an ironic twist of fate, they used the image of Henry McCollum as an example of a dangerous black man; yet McCollum, an inmate on North Carolina’s death row, was later exonerated by the work of North Carolina’s Innocence Commission and officially pardoned by the governor.) But our moral fusion coalition had demonstrated clearly that black, white, and brown were going to stand together in North Carolina. So they moved to exploit a new fear, but cloaked it in moral language about the “defense of marriage.”
Their ploy was to get out the vote in the 2012 primary by putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot banning gay marriage in North Carolina. A judge eventually forced the National Organization for Marriage, which was intimately involved in this strategy, to turn over internal documents which revealed that their goal had little to do with morality. They had pitched this so-called “Amendment One” as a way to split North Carolina’s growing black vote, pointing out that many African Americans were religious conservatives and would not support gay marriage. The way to split a moral movement, they said, is to get them arguing about morality.
Many so-called conservative Christians, black and white, were galvanized by the buzzwords they had been taught to fear and joined the crusade against gay folk. Franklin Graham, son of the ailing Billy Graham, who had long been North Carolina’s most famous preacher and moral authority, used both his father’s name and the money that had been given to support his father’s evangelism ministry to run ads in support of the amendment. Dr. William C. Martin of Rice University, who had written a glowing biography of Billy Graham, immediately asked whether the ads could have actually come from the man he’d written about. “After realizing that he’d been cynically manipulated by Richard Nixon,” Dr. Martin noted, “Billy Graham resisted joining the Religious Right.” Dr. Graham had seen through the Southern Strategy from the very beginning and did not support its aims. Evidently, he had not been able to pass this political insight on to his son.
Though we didn’t have much time, we knew that the integrity of our coalition, which had included LGBTQ sisters and brothers from the beginning, depended upon answering the challenge of Amendment One with moral clarity. Like the Pharisees who tried to trap Jesus by means of the old political divisions of established camps, the extremists had posed a question designed to divide our ranks by casting doubt either among the LGBTQ community or among the African American community about whether our moral movement truly represented them. I recognized the trap and decided to trust what Jesus had told his disciples: “When they bring you before … the rulers and the authorities, do not be anxious how or what you are to answer or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.”8
I looked back at the history of the NAACP and recalled that during the civil rights movement, when white folks had tried to make it illegal for white and black folks to marry across the color line, the NAACP had not endorsed biracial marriage. They had, instead, recognized that the effort to restrict someone’s right to marry the person they choose was a fear-based tactic to establish hate as law. The NAACP had opposed these bans not because their coalition endorsed biracial marriage, but because they endorsed the moral and constitutional principle of equal protection under the law.
Against a similar fear-based tactic, our movement’s position had to be the same. It wasn’t our job to endorse same-sex marriage. After all, we had never had to endorse heterosexual marriage or partners living together outside of marriage. As a pastor, I had counseled scores of people on these deeply personal matters, knowing that the church had ordained me to pass on its wisdom about how to live well as sexual beings in human community. But as a pastor, I also knew that the US Constitution’s First Amendment, guaranteeing religious freedom, protected the right of every church, synagogue, and mosque to discern together what God’s definition of marriage is. Our First Amendment right entailed freedom from any government attempt to tell us what God says about marriage.
But the fundamental principle of equal protection under the law was a constitutional and moral principle which our movement had not only to endorse but also to defend. In the end, it didn’t matter whether my faith tradition told me marriage was to be between one man and one woman; all of our faiths made clear that the codification of hate is never righteous. Legalized discrimination is never just. And a moral fusion movement cannot be divided by the fear-based tactics of so-called conservatives.
Other ministers and I made the rounds to church meetings throughout our state, especially among the black churches that extremist organizers had targeted with campaign propaganda. We learned quickly that once we were able to reframe the issue, people quickly grasped how the treatment of LGBTQ citizens was an issue of civil rights and human rights. Our message only lacked reach. Amendment One passed before we could get to all of North Carolina’s rural communities. But in the places where we were able to reframe the issue, the results were clear: voters in majority-black precincts in North Carolina’s five major cities rejected the amendment. In Durham, where our NAACP office is located, not a single majority-black precinct supported the amendment. It failed by a ratio of two to one on the African American side of Scotland Neck, a rural community in Halifax County, where our movement had established a strong base by organizing against environmental racism.
Within two years, Amendment One was struck down by the courts, bringing marriage equality to North Carolina long before most in the LGBTQ community could have imagined. But we knew in 2012 that Amendment One was a smoke screen; it was never about defending marriage. It was about protecting extremists’ power by playing on fear to get people to vote against their own interests and to drive a wedge between potential allies. Added on top of their long-term strategy of dark money investment and gerrymandered districts, Amendment One was a divide-and-conquer tactic to complete the extremist take-over of North Carolina’s state government. And it worked. The year 2013 marked the first time since 1896 that Republicans held total, unchecked power in both the legislature and the governor’s office. Back then, the Republicans had been united with Populists in North Carolina’s first fusion coalition. But these twenty-first-century extremists who called themselves Republican had drunk the Tea Party’s tea and sniffed some mighty strong Koch to complete the takeover they’d been plotting for decades. North Carolina was about to witness the full force of their extremism.
In many ways, that long winter of 2012–13 was our darkest hour. As we prepared for our seventh coalition People’s Assembly in Raleigh that February, we knew the avalanche of corporately funded extremism which had poured into North Carolina since 2008 was a reaction against the perceived threat of our coalition’s power. From 16 organizations that had gathered five thousand people in 2007 we’d grown to a coalition of 145 organizations representing black, white, and brown, labor and civil rights organizations, doctors and the uninsured, businesspeople and the unemployed, women and men, gay and straight, young and old, documented and undocumented. Standing together against one attack after another, our ranks had grown fourfold, bringing as many people to Raleigh each winter as Dr. King had brought to Selma when he put out a national call for solidarity after Bloody Sunday in 1965. Our indigenously led, state-government-focused moral fusion coalition had scared the hell out of the governing elite. We knew before we started that the same forces in North Carolina’s history had orchestrated America’s only coup d’état, in 1898. Seven years of experience showed us that, although time had changed the elite’s weapons, it had not moderated their extremism.
But a century of reflection and seven years of fusionist organizing had taught us some important lessons about who we were. When we gathered in Raleigh that winter, I talked to our twenty thousand battle-weary foot soldiers about the importance of knowing who we are in times like these. The greatest threat to our coalition was not the power of our opposition. They could threaten us. They could hurt us. They might, in their blind hubris, even try to kill some of us. But they could not, in the end, deny us. Because ours was a moral struggle, we knew we would win if we didn’t give up.
The only question was how long the fight would go on—which was why the greatest threat to our coalition was the temptation to forget what we had learned about our identity. A nonviolent struggle has two possible ends: winning the opposition as friends or giving up the battle. Though our coalition included the full spectrum of North Carolina’s diversity, we had come to recognize a common vision for our future in the history of the South’s antiracist freedom movement. Our relationships with one another were not simply transactional—a means to achieve our various organization’s goals. They had become transformational, lifting each of us to a new understanding of our interconnectedness as human beings and living members of one family. None of us would be free until all of us were free. Thus, the slave’s anthem became a battle cry even for the daughters and sons of former slave owners: “Before I’d be a slave / I’ll be buried in my grave / and go home to my Lord / and be free.”
The self-knowledge that allowed each of us to sing an old slave song was what we could not forget. For as long as we identified with the oppressed and excluded, we could not be distracted or bought off. The stone that the builders rejected had, indeed, become our capstone. However long the distances between us, the magnitude of our chasms of division, we could trust that that arch would hold so long as we kept the rejected at the center. They had, after all, been our guiding light for generations. With far less resources than we had at our disposal, Harriet Tubman had joined hands with her Quaker friends and organized. Long before e-mail blasts, J. W. Hood and Samuel Stanford Ashley had pressed their way to Raleigh and come together. When folks still thought tweeting was just something birds do, Ella Baker taught our brother Bob Zellner and his SNCC friends how to sit in, stand up, and register voters. The moral arch we’d been grafted onto might be long, but we knew which way it bent. If we could just remember that we were called together as repairers of the breach, we would make it to the other side.
It was the slave’s song that could help us remember who we were. This insight, I realized, was rooted in the spirituality that my grandmamma had passed down to me—a faith she had inherited from the children and grandchildren of slaves. And it was the songs my mother played on the piano in that hospital lobby that had sustained me through my own dark night of the soul. In our collective dark night, the movement was learning the same lesson. As I’d traveled the state, often speaking four and five times a day on three hours of sleep, a woman named Yara Allen kept showing up at rallies and events. She would stand and lead the people in singing. She wasn’t a performer, but a song leader, and something in her songs steeled my soul. They whispered to me, “Hold on, just a little while longer.”
The Bible tells us that the prophet Elisha once called for a minstrel, and after the minstrel’s song, “the hand of the LORD came upon him.”9 Yara Allen’s songs had the same effect on us. When she led us in singing those freedom songs, we knew who we were. As long as we kept singing, it didn’t matter how long the extremists’ attacks lasted. We would keep standing. We would keep fighting. We would keep pushing forward together, not one step back.