BARBARA SMALLEY-MCMAHAN REMEMBERED EXACTLY WHEN she had had enough. It was 2013, and the new state legislature in North Carolina had rolled out a series of bills that slashed funding to schools, health care, and unemployment insurance for thousands who were still jobless from the financial crisis, while starkly restricting access to the vote. The state legislature held a public forum that spring to allow legislators to hear from their constituents, and Smalley-McMahan resolved to go.
An ordained American Baptist minister who had spent thirty years as a pastoral counselor, Smalley-McMahan had been part of some protests in her youth, and more recently, she had volunteered for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. But mostly she preferred one-on-one settings. At the forum, though, as she watched over a hundred people get up and speak, she noticed that the legislators seemed more interested in their smartphones than in their constituents. “They would clearly text something and look across the way and laugh at each other and it really made me angry,” she said in her soft southern accent. To see the disrespect they openly displayed—“I was undone,” she said. Instead of speaking about public schools as she’d planned, she stood up and said, “When I was a kid, I used to have a nightmare that I was lying in the road in front of my house and one Mack truck after another was running over me and all I could do was dodge the wheels.’”
At that, she said, they put down their phones. She continued, “You rolled into town like a fleet of Mack trucks, loaded down with laws that you’ve intended to pass here, and those laws are intended to mow the people down. When I was a kid all I could do was dodge the wheels. But I’m not a kid anymore and neither is anybody else speaking before you today. We are adults and we are out in front of those Mack trucks and we’re telling you to stop.”
Shortly after that, another pastor, the Reverend William J. Barber II, called together a meeting of people who wanted to do more to challenge the legislators’ agenda. The meeting was held at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church, where Smalley-McMahan was a member and where, back in 2002, the Reverend Nancy Petty became the first lesbian pastor to lead a Baptist church in the South. (The American Baptists have long been more progressive on gender and sexuality than the Southern Baptists.) That meeting led to another, a church service in the city of Durham. Smalley-McMahan didn’t know when she arrived that the service was going to lead into a training for those willing to engage in civil disobedience. But when she found out, she thought, “Why not?”1
Rev. Barber had become president of the North Carolina NAACP in 2005, when Democrats still controlled the North Carolina legislature. To him, the advocacy groups in the state fighting for labor rights, for LGBT rights, for public schools, and for environmental and racial justice seemed disjointed. “We didn’t need a new organization, but we needed to understand the intersectionality of all of our issues and make sure that we developed a way of working together that put antiracism, antipoverty and pro-labor at the center of our work,” he said. In 2006, he and some other leaders pulled together a meeting of fourteen organizations working on various issues, and from that meeting, they created a fourteen-point agenda.
They decided to hold annual “People’s Assemblies” around that agenda in front of the state legislature’s General Assembly, as well as local assemblies, and to come together to have a collective “People’s Lobby Day,” where people would be able to lobby for all of their issues at once. Inspired by the examples of Reconstruction, after the end of slavery, when Populists and Republicans came together in North Carolina, as well as the civil rights era, they aimed to build a fusion movement, a movement that brought people together in an understanding that their issues were connected, that they would only gain power by working together. After a few thousand people showed up to their first People’s Assembly on a Saturday in February 2007, they marched to the General Assembly and, like Martin Luther with the theses that kicked off the Protestant Reformation in 1517, hung their agenda on the door. “In my speech that day,” Rev. Barber said, “I said a new ethic was now being infused into the political veins of North Carolina. It was not about Democrat or Republican. It was about our deepest moral, our deepest constitutional values.” Moral values had been the language of social conservatism for a long time, but to Rev. Barber, it was time to take that language back. He wanted to give people space to define moral values, whether it was through their faith or outside of faith.
That coalition had a few early wins, including the passage of a same-day voter registration bill that made it easier for people to access the ballot. Rev. Barber believed it helped drive up turnout in the presidential election of 2008; but democracy, not electing Democrats, was the goal.
In 2010, Republicans took back the state legislature with majorities in both houses, and they were able to redraw the legislative districts into what Rev. Barber called “the worst form of gerrymandering we’ve seen since the nineteenth century.” The redistricting took back the small-d democratic gains the coalition had made. According to a Washington Post analysis, three of the ten most gerrymandered districts in the country were now in North Carolina. They packed the state’s likely Democratic voters (including large swaths of the black population) into long, sprawling, odd-shaped districts that made no geographic sense. In 2012, Pat McCrory, the former mayor of Charlotte, who was viewed as a moderate Republican, won the governor’s office. And with that, the Mack trucks of Barbara Smalley-McMahan’s nightmares rolled in, slashing education funding, cutting unemployment benefits, and forcing through voting restrictions. That was when the burgeoning coalition decided it was time for a more disruptive strategy.2
Jacob Lerner and Ivanna Gonzalez first heard that the NAACP was planning civil disobedience at a meeting of Student Action with Workers (SAW), a campus student-labor alliance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, when they were both just weeks away from graduating. Laurel Ashton, a friend of theirs who worked with the NAACP, came to the meeting and told the gathered students that there would be a protest at the General Assembly that would involve civil disobedience. For both of them, that meeting was a turning point, but for different reasons. For Lerner, who had grown up in an activist family—both his parents and his brother are labor organizers—it had always been a question of when, not if, he would get arrested standing for something he believed in. North Carolina, though, was a place where he’d built his own community, away from the world he’d been raised in. The moment felt right.
For Gonzalez, the equation was different. She was nervous for the next couple of weeks after that meeting, trying to come to a decision about whether to participate. Born in Venezuela but raised in Miami, she had found her way to labor activism after a study abroad program in London that happened to coincide with a massive public-sector worker strike. That led her to SAW and to a whole new set of skills as an organizer. Yet even through major campus protests, she had avoided getting arrested. She worried about losing the job she had lined up after graduation, and a future with a criminal record, especially as an immigrant. The decision looming in front of her took on new significance. “This was the culmination of my undergraduate years,” she laughed. “Not my finals, not my classes, but whether or not I was going to participate in this act of civil disobedience.”
The first Moral Monday protest was just a few days later, April 29, 2013. Seventeen people, including Rev. Barber, were arrested blocking the doors to the General Assembly. The following week, the group doubled in size, and Barbara Smalley-McMahan was arrested for the first time in her life. Gonzalez still hadn’t decided what she would do, and still worried about how she would explain an arrest to her family. But when she and Lerner arrived at the training meeting, and Rev. Barber began to speak, she said, “It felt like I had no other option. There was just so much going on that despite everything I felt like I had at play, I was still significantly more privileged and in a position to do this than a whole lot of other people.”
The Moral Monday coalition had lawyers giving “know-your-rights” training to ensure that the participants were prepared. And then Gonzalez and Lerner were approached by an NAACP staffer, who asked if one of them would speak to the press to represent the young people present. Both Lerner and Gonzalez remember another woman leaning over and asking, “Ivanna, are you going to let a white man be the face of the movement?”
The speech she gave, Gonzalez remembers, was one that she wrote in three minutes on a napkin. Outside of the General Assembly, some six hundred supporters gathered for a rally, and then, two by two, those willing to be arrested walked inside, singing protest songs. Inside the building, Rev. Barber spoke, and then Gonzalez. She said: “I am here as a student to stand by the liberal arts education that made me who I am today. As a woman, I am here to declare that this body is mine. As an immigrant, I am here to remind everybody that at some point our families were from somewhere else. And as a human being, I am here because I know that the attacks on my gay friends, on the people that I love in immigrant detention centers, on the housekeepers on UNC’s campus are all interconnected.”3
Fifty-seven people were arrested that week, their hands zip-tied behind them. As they were loaded onto police buses, the crowd outside cheered their support for the protesters. Those who had been arrested were taken to the Wake County Detention Center, where they were booked on charges of trespassing and failure to disperse. Gonzalez remembered being pleased that the process seemed to be going quickly, but just before she was to find out what her bond was, she heard someone say, “Wait! Is that Ivanna? ICE needs to talk to her.”4
She’d been warned by a friend, also an immigrant, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement might turn up. The friend had been arrested previously, and she had packed her passport to prove that she was a US citizen. When the officer asked Gonzalez, “Ma’am, are you here legally or illegally?” she replied, “I am an American citizen.” She gave him her Social Security number and told him where to find her passport. Laughing wryly, she remembered the relief he expressed. “Glad this is a relief for you,” she said.
But even after he retrieved her passport from her bag, he still took her fingerprints a second time. “That actually allowed me to have a more meaningful conversation with my parents,” she said. “I had a cousin who was in immigrant detention at the time. He had been in for almost six or seven months, flipped like a Ping Pong ball in different jails all over Florida. It was helpful to say this was what happened. I don’t have an accent, I look like a white girl, and I have an American passport, and this is what happened to me when I was in there. This is partially why I did it.”
For Gonzalez and many other Moral Monday arrestees, the experience itself was a chance to demonstrate the way that different issues intersected in their lives. Being a woman, a student, an immigrant, and a worker were all parts of her life, identities that couldn’t be pulled apart. Those issues of racism and sexism, of economic and social rights, had to be addressed all at once, not out of an urge to be politically correct, or even simply to broaden the size of the coalition, but because they affect people at their intersections. Gonzalez could not separate the attacks on her bodily autonomy through the legislature’s attempt to deny access to abortions from the attacks on her right to move freely as an immigrant. She could not separate the attacks on the programs at her university from the low wages paid to the workers at that same university.
When the arrestees were freed, they were greeted by supporters who came bearing home-cooked food and good cheer, the kind of “jail support” that can be as important as legal training. Eventually, Lerner said, the police streamlined the arrest process to speed Moral Monday arrestees through, because their numbers just kept increasing: in week five, 151 were arrested. By the end of the summer, there had been nearly 1,000 arrests, and the national media was paying attention to what was happening in North Carolina, in the oft-written-off South. The arrestees were black and white, clergy and professors, young activists like Lerner and Gonzalez as well as older people recently drawn into action, like Smalley-McMahan. The well-planned actions, the repetitive, almost ritualistic nature of the events, and the constant presence of the charismatic Rev. Barber helped to create an atmosphere where people felt comfortable facing arrest. The crowds did skew older and whiter, Lerner noted, and that probably influenced the way they were treated by the police—for young people of color, those like Gonzalez, the experience of challenging police is a very different and usually more violent one.
“What civil disobedience does is dramatize the seriousness, the shamefulness, and the urgency of the moral and economic failure,” Rev. Barber said. “When we get arrested, we do it to arrest the consciousness of the state and to guarantee that what they are doing will not be done in the dark.” For him and other people of faith who were involved in the protests, it was important to see their call for justice as a moral one, not simply a technocratic call for better policy or a partisan demand. They put their bodies on the line for what they believed was right and just. Moral Mondays drew the largest crowds that had ever come to a US state capital to take part in civil disobedience, said Rev. Barber, and they culminated in the largest march the South had seen since the famous 1965 Selma march for voting rights. The numbers seem all the more impressive when you consider that North Carolina cities are not particularly dense, that some people drove for hours to join a protest in Raleigh, and that unlike some northern states that have labor unions and community groups that regularly turn out members for marches, North Carolina had little in the way of infrastructure for protest.
“When I was in seminary we used to talk about the priestly and prophetic functions of ministry,” Smalley-McMahan explained. “I always saw myself in the priestly function, sitting with people who felt disempowered. I felt very comfortable behind my closed door with my clients helping them find their own center and sense of self, and I thought that’s where I would stay. But the number of laws those guys rolled out in 2013 pushed me over the edge. So then that gets into the prophetic, when you stand up to the powers that be and say no, what you’re doing is abusive and it’s not going to continue.”
After the civil rights movement, Rev. Barber argued, advocates for a more equitable economic system, for an end to racism and sexism, gave up talking about morality, and those who opposed gay rights and abortion rights took up the framework. But to him, ending poverty, creating a green economy, ensuring that children can go to good public schools, protecting the right to vote, providing health care, and dismantling the system of mass incarceration are moral issues. “Personal matters are between you, your priest, your pastor, your imam,” he said. “The issues in the public square that people of faith ought to be dealing with have to do with the common good.”
Women’s groups and LGBT organizations, as well as individual women and queer and transgender people, had been part of the Moral Mondays actions from early on, many of them inspired by Amendment 1, the ban on same-sex marriage passed in 2012 by North Carolina voters. In July, the legislature introduced the Faith, Family and Freedom Protection Act, which coupled restrictions on abortion providers with a ban on considering Islamic Sharia law in family courts. Moral Mondays were well-established by then, said Tara Romano, president of the board of North Carolina Women United (NCWU), a coalition of women’s groups; there had even been a Women’s Moral Monday to focus on the way the economy did not work for women. There was a bit of concern among some in the Moral Movement that centering on abortion would cause division, Romano said, but women made up such a large part of the coalition that it was impossible to ignore their role. Planned Parenthood took the lead in bringing people out, and on July 8, 2013, the Moral Movement put the issue of access to abortion front and center. Protesters in pink and purple T-shirts, with slogans like “Married Christian Man for Choice,” singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” under the banner of “morals,” presented a vastly different image from the one normally cast by those claiming to support “moral values.”
To Romano, it was important for faith leaders like Rev. Barber to challenge the idea that the only people who placed moral values at the center of their politics were those who opposed gay rights and abortion. While marriage equality, she noted, could be a way of assimilating queer relationships into mainstream culture, and thus into a commonly understood “moral” paradigm, many people have a hard time considering access to abortion a moral value. And yet the need for abortion, and the right of those who might get pregnant to control their own bodies, do not happen in a vacuum—abortion, too, is an intersectional issue. It comes down, Romano said, to a question of, “Who really counts in North Carolina? They use the issues of voting rights and keeping you economically insecure and controlling reproductive rights as a way of making sure that you are never going to be one of those people that counts.”
While many of the Moral Monday arrestees did community service to fulfill their sentences, often with organizations that had been part of the Moral Monday coalition to begin with (Gonzalez laughed that the state legislature, in its rush to crack down on the protesters, wound up strengthening its own opposition), Rev. Barber and other leaders within the Moral Movement took their movement on the road, “going after the consciousness of the state.” In particular, Rev. Barber wanted to challenge the “southern strategy” of dividing white from black people around economic issues. The movement picked a few local struggles to join, in particular the battle over the closure of the Vidant Pungo Hospital in Belhaven. Rev. Barber was also invited to Mitchell County, a nearly entirely white county, mostly Republican, and known, he said, for being home to some paramilitary groups. At first, he wanted to refuse, but he eventually went and spoke to two hundred people, laying out his moral argument for health care and education. “Now we have seven branches of the NAACP in Western North Carolina that are all led by primarily white people, like it was in the early days of the NAACP,” Rev. Barber said. “The liberal versus conservative, Democrat versus Republican, is too puny for where we are right now.”5
The movement held a Mountain Moral Monday in Asheville, and even a Moral Monday in Yadkinville, a town of 2,800 people just west of Winston-Salem. Wooten Gough, an organizer with LGBTQ group GetEQUAL and cofounder of the immigrant rights group El Cambio in rural North Carolina, helped pull together the rural Moral Monday action, where about seventy-five people turned up. Members of El Cambio, undocumented workers from the area, and faith leaders from the NAACP all spoke.
Gough and others from Yadkin County took a bus back to Raleigh to join the massive Moral March to be held on February 8, 2014. In previous years, the march had been known as the Historic Thousands on Jones Street, but that year the turnout was higher than it had ever been. “That was, at least in my lifetime, the biggest statewide push for some kind of collectiveness,” Gough said. “People in our area were taking an action who I have never seen taking action before.”
William Barber III had planned to take a path for his life that was different from his father’s—in college, he studied energy engineering. But growing up around Rev. Barber, he absorbed more than he’d thought, and when the General Assembly had proposed a voter ID bill that would ban students from voting where they attended school, he became involved with his college chapter of the NAACP. It was important to him not only to learn from movement elders, but also to forge his own path; when the March on Washington anniversary event excluded the voices of young organizers, he connected with Freedom Side, and he went on to help bring members of the network to the Moral March that February.
Kirin Kanakkanatt of Freedom Side and GetEQUAL was one of those who came down from New York for the march. It could have been like the March on Washington, she said, another parade with little connection to the present. There was a little of that in terms of who was speaking—Ivanna Gonzalez noted that she spoke as part of a relatively small “youth contingent.” But what Kanakkanatt remembered the most was how queer-friendly it felt; how Planned Parenthood handed out pink beanies for the cold, which dotted the crowd; how rainbow flags flew everywhere. “That march felt better than any single Pride I’ve ever been to,” she said.
THE REPUBLICAN WAVES OF ELECTION WINS, BEGINNING IN 2010, continuing to a lesser extent in 2012, and then increasing again in 2014, can mostly be chalked up to a floundering economy and a sense that the Democrats hadn’t fixed things. The coalition that became the Moral Movement had begun when Democrats ran North Carolina, before the financial crisis exploded and exacerbated the struggles many people already faced. The conservative sweep in North Carolina was much like the one in Wisconsin: it was fueled by a promise of jobs, jobs, jobs—after he became governor in 2012, Pat McCrory even promised Rev. Barber and the coalition partners that he would focus on jobs.6
In North Carolina, there were no unions to scapegoat; despite decades of rule by the party that supposedly was friendly with organized labor, public school teachers and other public-sector workers in North Carolina still lacked the right to collective bargaining. By 2013, the employment rate had begun to creep upward from its crisis level, but recovery was still far too slow and for too few people. And then the new legislature came into office. Despite poverty rates of nearly 30 percent in parts of the state, and over 40 percent of black children living in poverty, the new legislature rolled back the Earned Income Tax Credit for 900,000 people, refused federal money to expand Medicaid, cut off unemployment benefits for 165,000 people, cut funding for prekindergarten, gave the wealthy a tax cut, and shifted nearly $1 billion from public schools to voucher programs to send students to private school. The outrageousness of the cuts spurred many people of faith who took the demands to care for the poor in their religions seriously to consider their moral obligations to act.7
The legislature topped all of that off with House Bill 589, which Rev. Barber called “the worst voter suppression bill we have seen since the days of Jim Crow.” After the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder ruled part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act unconstitutional—the section that required certain states and counties, including forty in North Carolina, to get clearance from the Justice Department before changing their election laws—the North Carolina legislators proved why the act had been necessary. They ended same-day registration, early voting, Sunday voting, the right of teenagers to preregister to vote, and out-of-precinct voting, and required state-issued photo IDs in order to vote. The Voting Rights Act was passed in order to protect the rights of black Americans to vote; the voter ID bills that sprang up around the country after the election of Obama were widely assumed to be designed to make it harder for black voters. There was certainly no economic rationale for making it harder to vote; the voter ID bills were about consolidating power. In a country with already-shrinking voter turnout levels, they were designed to put more barriers in the way of access to the ballot. All of this heightened the need for civil disobedience. Telling activists to “just go vote,” when the legislature has made it much more difficult to do so, and your district lines are drawn to produce a party-line result, is insulting.
On top of the economic changes and voter rights changes, which already disproportionately hit people of color, queer and transgender people, and women, the new legislature took specific aim at abortion rights and, later, LGBT rights. When Governor McCrory, who continued to attempt to position himself as a moderate, threatened to veto the bill restricting abortion and banning Sharia law, the abortion restrictions were then snuck into a motorcycle safety bill (dubbed the “Motorcycle Vagina” bill). Opponents of the bill tried to connect its provisions with the denial of Medicaid to low-income people or the lack of sex education in schools, but were ruled off-topic by Thom Tillis, the state Speaker of the House, who went on to the US Senate in 2014. The simultaneous attacks on so many rights and freedoms at once, paired with budget cuts, helped cement the connections that the Moral Movement was trying to make.8
North Carolina wasn’t the only place where so-called “social issues” came to the fore while the economy was still struggling. Ohio’s John Kasich allowed an executive order banning discrimination in state employment based on sexuality or gender identity to expire; he later reinstated the ban on sexuality, but left out gender identity. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker’s 2011 budget slashed funding for contraceptives and reproductive health care; he later signed a bill that banned abortion after twenty weeks. In Congress, where the Tea Party wave of 2010 swept Republicans to power in the House of Representatives, two antiabortion bills were pushed through with the support of some Democrats. The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act would have restricted funding to those who were victims of “forcible” rape, meaning that those who were drugged and raped, or who failed to physically resist hard enough, would no longer qualify for the rape and incest exception to the Hyde Amendment, which already prevented taxpayer funding for abortion. The Protect Life Act would have redefined “conscience” clauses for medical providers to allow them to let pregnant persons die if saving them would harm the fetus. Between 2010 and 2015, states enacted 215 different abortion restrictions. Moreover, in the first half of 2015 alone, more than 100 anti-LGBT bills had been filed in state legislatures around the country.9
The view among many for a while had been that such “social issues” were a distraction from the real issues and were being used to convince working-class people to vote against their own self-interest; the most prominent example of this argument was Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas? But the push for anti-gay, antiabortion bills in the wake of a devastating financial crisis, with unemployment in many places in double digits, felt more like Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine in action, a way to pass restrictive bills that would hit already marginalized people while they were still reeling from the collapse of the economy. These bills, as Tara Romano argued, were a way of perpetuating inequalities, of defining who would and would not “count.” The “culture war” was not just a wedge. It was a way of securing economic and political power.10
The push for abortion restrictions and opposition to gay rights was particularly notable because the biggest conservative movement at the time, the Tea Party, was ambivalent about such issues. While many Christian conservatives did become Tea Party activists, there were also plenty of what Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson deemed “secular minded libertarians, who stress individual choice on cultural matters and want the Tea Party as a whole to give absolute priority to fiscal issues.” There was often tension between Christian Tea Partiers and other Tea Party members around the government’s role on so-called moral standards—one Tea Party leader even split her group into two, one Christian and one secular. In a national poll in 2012, only 14 percent of Tea Party supporters had said that “social issues” were more important than economic ones.11
The separation of political issues into “social” and “economic” in any case is a false dichotomy, and the idea that one’s economic self-interest has nothing to do with whether one can control one’s own pregnancies or maintain a job without discrimination is simply wrong. “Social” issues serve to create and perpetuate inequality, erecting barriers to full participation in society for certain groups. They shape our idea of who is a full citizen, and they also shape the very real material conditions of people’s lives. Those who would maintain hierarchies with themselves at the top are as interested in what political scientist Corey Robin called “the private life of power” as they are in hoarding riches; they pass bills to restrict the rights of women, workers, people of color, and queer and transgender people in order to maintain their own position.12
Angel Chandler, who at the time was an organizer with GetEQUAL and an abortion clinic escort in Asheville, North Carolina, reached out to me in 2011 after I wrote a series of articles profiling the Democrats in Congress who supported anti-choice and anti-gay legislation. Chandler’s own congressman, Heath Shuler (D-NC), was one of them. “If you’re fighting on one issue you’re usually on the front lines about all of it,” Chandler said. Democrats like Shuler, as I wrote in that series, were usually conservative on a host of issues, that is, conservative as Corey Robin explained it—patriarchal, militaristic, and opposed to the kind of government spending that helps poor people. And all of this gets painted as a commitment to “moral values.” Shuler again is instructive: while he was in Congress, he lived in the C Street home of “The Family,” a secretive elite religious organization founded in 1935 that opposed the New Deal and has ties to repressive governments around the world. Shuler was recruited to run for Congress as part of Democrats’ outreach to people of faith.13
To Rev. Barber, that’s where they went wrong—in assuming that people of faith are more like Shuler than like, say, himself. “Two thousand scriptures in the New Testament, the Old Testament, have to do with how you treat the poor, how you treat the stranger, how you treat women, how you treat children,” he said. “Now, at best, there may be five or ten scriptures in the whole text that deal with homosexuality. None that deal with abortion. And the ones that deal with homosexuality do not negate that the ultimate call of scripture is to love your neighbor.” Yet politicians and the media alike only call people of faith to talk about issues of sexuality; they assume that those are the “moral” values.
The Moral Movement was designed to challenge that ideology head-on. For Barbara Smalley-McMahan, it was time to remind people that “Jesus was about standing up, being radical, about empowering the people that were marginalized and taken advantage of by the Roman government. Exploited.” The perpetuating of hierarchies of power, the construction of certain people and certain groups as “less than,” she said, “needs to be dismantled.”
IT HAS ONLY BEEN RELATIVELY RECENTLY THAT ABORTION AND GAY rights were assumed to be the major concerns of people of faith. For much of US history, when politicians took a stand based in their faith, it was likely to be a prophetic call for justice, for liberty, and for redistribution of wealth to the poor. The abolitionists, in challenging the institution of slavery, drew on a deeply moral language: it was an outrage to enslave and abuse another human. John Brown, the white abolitionist who was hanged for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry in an attempt to start a slave revolt, was driven by his faith, as was Nat Turner, a popular religious leader among his fellow slaves who in 1831 felt that God had called him to rebel and lead them to freedom. William Jennings Bryan, the early twentieth-century orator nominated for president by Democrats and Populists, used Christian imagery to deride what he saw as an obsession with profits over people: “Man, the handiwork of God, comes first; money, the handiwork of man, is of inferior importance.”14
The famed “Scopes Monkey Trial” pitted Bryan against another Populist-identified attorney, Clarence Darrow, in a 1925 legal case over teaching the theory of evolution in the public schools in Tennessee. The trial helped drive a wedge between Christians and secularists, beginning a trend among urban secularists, often liberal, of mocking believers for their beliefs. It did not put an end, however, to calls for economic justice based in moral language. Eugene Debs, the labor leader and five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, was known for his preacherly style and his ability to hold audiences rapt for hours as he appealed to their sense of justice on behalf of the working class.15
For nearly as long as economic reformers have appealed to moral values, there have been moral panics that revolved around controlling sexuality and what was considered “vice.” Reformers like Anthony Comstock, of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, tried to stamp out prostitution and ban access to birth control (or even its mention). There was also a healthy dose of moralizing about the behavior of the poor among the Progressive-era reformers, arguments that were updated in the twentieth century into the “culture of poverty.”
Anticommunists used moralistic language against the Communist Party’s labor and voting-rights organizing among black workers, accusing the party of intending to nationalize white women and associating it with promiscuity, free love, and homosexuality. Queer people and communists both were seen as corrupting America’s moral fiber, destroying families, and plotting to undermine the country.16
The civil rights movement, particularly the pieces of it that remain in the forefront of Americans’ memories and in history classes, may be the most prominent justice movement in US history to rely heavily on biblical language and moral appeals. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) drew on skills they learned in the pulpit to captivate crowds, even while drawing upon the strategic talents of Bayard Rustin, who was openly gay and a former communist. J. Edgar Hoover at the Federal Bureau of Investigation tried to undermine King precisely by attacking him on moral grounds, threatening to out his extramarital affairs.
The kind of moral values that many Americans had assumed were universal did not hold up to the demands of the new social movements that sprang up in the 1960s. While the 1950s had been a time of conformity, with a record number of people marrying young and having children, the 1960s upended that ideal. The identity-based movements—Black Power, feminism, gay rights, Chicano rights, and more—challenged that image of America and reminded us that it had never been good for everyone, that there had always been people pushed to the margins. And what those movements wanted was not to assimilate, but to fundamentally change structures of power.17
The Black Panthers combined innovative social programs and organizing for black self-determination with militant confrontation. Though painted by law enforcement as a threat to white America, the Panthers in Chicago worked in coalition with other groups, including the all-white Young Patriots, who had taken to heart SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael’s admonition to organize white people against racism as well as the systems that kept them, too, in poverty.18
The gay rights movement exploded onto the public consciousness with the Stonewall uprising in 1969. Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn was a gathering place for queer and transgender people, some of them in the sex trade, and was also a frequent target of police. On one particular night when the police raided, the regulars at Stonewall decided they had had enough and chose to resist. Marsha P. Johnson, a black transgender woman, famously threw the first brick. Rather than fleeing the scene, the queer community rallied around the inn, embracing a newly confrontational stance. They discarded the sense of shame with which they had been expected to live.
Although the new liberation movements were often made up of individuals like Johnson who were at the intersection of race and gender identities, such identities were usually conceived of as separate. The feminism of the period coined the motto “The personal is political” to point out that problems often assumed to be individual were in fact broadly shared. But even within the women’s movement, not all women faced the same issues. Women of color, queer women, and working-class women worked to define a feminism that reflected their lives, not just the lives of the well-off white women anointed as leaders, as much by the press as the movement itself. Within the black liberation struggle, too, black women developed feminist and womanist politics, but the common public perception was that these identities were distinct and that the movements didn’t overlap.19
The “white working class” of the time developed its own form of identity politics, one pandered to by politicians like George Wallace and Richard Nixon, who positioned themselves against demanding movements that they termed “special interests.” Although, as sociologist Penny Lewis explained, white workers were not monolithically opposed to the 1960s movements, the perception that they were, shaped by events like the 1970 “hard hat riots” on Wall Street, affected the politics of the age. At the same time as the new liberation movements were rising, the economy was stumbling. Women and people of color were moving into previously white-male-dominated jobs at the same time as those jobs were disappearing. The conservative labor movement of the time wasn’t prepared to deal with this new reality or to share its power. Nor was it able to reconceptualize power altogether in the way that these radical movements urged.20
The legislation won during the 1960s seemed to codify the difference between the identity-based movements and earlier struggles. Labor rights, though they originally excluded many women workers and workers of color, were collective rights, rights to organize and bargain as a group; they operated on the principle that improving conditions for all was more important than individual striving. By contrast, the nondiscrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act protected individuals’ rights to a job or a promotion, with the emphasis on the ability to sue after discrimination rather than to proactively come together and have a voice on the job.21
The movements of the later 1960s and the 1970s mostly put aside moral appeals for sharp political analysis and demands. Moral calls seemed too much like asking the oppressor politely to take his foot off one’s neck. The anti–Vietnam War movement had built moral calls into its framework, incorporating the Catholic Left, but despite huge mass mobilizations, the war dragged on. And the moral-values language was being adopted by a new group of activists, this time on the Right, who were growing in power.
It was the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision striking down state abortion laws, and ruling it unconstitutional to ban abortion, that kicked off what came to be known as the “religious right.” Before that, said Adele Stan, a reporter who has spent over thirty years covering the Christian conservative movement, Catholics and evangelicals were “like oil and water except for patriarchy.” Abortion was not a hot topic for evangelicals at that time. Some liberal Protestant clergy had even taken part in the movement to liberalize abortion law, helping to refer people for abortions, and several Protestant denominations issued resolutions supporting women’s moral right to have an abortion.22
In the aftermath of the decision, activists Richard Viguerie, known for his innovation of direct-mail techniques; Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council; and Howard Phillips, founder of the US Taxpayers Party, realized that anger around Roe and changing social mores could be leveraged to create electoral victories. They relied on the feeling that the “traditional” family, with the male breadwinner at work and the woman at home raising children, was falling apart, although they mostly ignored the economic realities that were helping make that change. Desegregation had also contributed to the feeling of white Christians that their values were under attack; in the South, religious schools were a way to avoid sending children to integrated schools.
Viguerie, Weyrich, and Phillips recruited televangelist Jerry Falwell to become the public, Protestant face of the Moral Majority, founded in 1979. Falwell credited legalized abortion and gay rights with his decision to get involved in politics. The organization, Adele Stan noted, was set up to play a long game, to reshape politics, and particularly the Republican Party, in its image over the course of decades. Women like Phyllis Schlafly, who was Catholic, and Anita Bryant, a Protestant and a former beauty queen, took leadership roles in the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment and laws that would have banned discrimination against gays and lesbians, respectively. These women adapted the language and practices of the feminist movement to explicitly antifeminist goals: Schlafly extolled the “right” of women to stay at home and to be cared for by their men, a language that hit home for many working-class women whose journey into the workplace was likely to be low-wage, low-status drudgery.23
Ronald Reagan seamlessly blended the new religious conservatism with the antiunion, pro-business politics he’d learned during his time at General Electric. He struck a populist pose, updating Nixon’s “Silent Majority” by railing against “special interests.” He depicted anyone who opposed his proposed budget and tax cuts as part of a kind of elite akin to the robber barons and bankers of an earlier age, rather than people who had been shut out of the political mainstream in the United States for most of its existence. Reagan and his backers repackaged the language of solidarity and interdependence—traditional values of the labor movement—to describe the patriarchal nuclear family. Not only had the religious right laid sole claim to Christian values; it was staking its claim to the secular values of its usual opponents as well.24
After the folding of the Moral Majority in the late 1980s, the values language was picked up by the Family Research Council, which branded its yearly conference the “Values Voter Summit,” solidifying the idea that “values voters” were those who were opposed to abortion, gay rights, and equal pay for women, and in favor of low taxes, school vouchers, and, by the George W. Bush era, war in the Middle East. After the 2004 election, which swept Bush to a second term amid a wave of state ballot initiatives banning same-sex marriage, exit pollsters trumpeted their findings: 22 percent of Americans had said “moral values” were the reason they chose a candidate, and of those voters, 80 percent had chosen Bush. Evangelicals had not increased their turnout in that election as a whole, and presumably some of them had considered the economy, terrorism, or the war in Iraq as pressing issues, too. But the polls—and the pundits’ obsession with them—sealed the narrative.25
THE NUCLEAR FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN THE FOCUS OF SO MUCH HAND-WRINGING and moralizing in recent years was not a product of human nature but rather of a particular period in US capitalism. The family wage, designed to allow a male breadwinner to support a wife and children, was bargained for by the labor movement and accepted, though uneasily, by business leaders during the New Deal period. It allowed many working-class women, as well as their wealthier sisters, to stay home with their children; as discussed earlier, it built the middle class. The family wage—that is, material conditions—shaped our ideas of the male and female role in the workplace and in the home, in public and in private.26
It also shaped the “moral values” of the period. Men took pride in their work and in their ability to provide for their families; women took pride in their children and in their caring skills that held the family together. The family wage helped to normalize certain ideas about women’s work and its value and about gender roles. If women were to be supported by their husbands, they didn’t need to make a living wage, and could be paid less when they were in the workplace—and despite the popular mythology, some women were always in the paid workforce. If women should be at home, social systems for child care were unnecessary, and in fact were examples of the state usurping the private rights of families.
Those moral values were constructed in reaction to the position that working people were pushed into. Black men and women, who did not enjoy the same economic position during the New Deal order, also had different relationships to the nuclear family. While the upper classes did not have to invest their sense of self-worth in their labor in the same way, working people found ways to take pride in what the world had given them.27
It is interesting, then, that the same politicians and activists who profess to want to maintain the nuclear family have done the most to help dismantle it by reducing wages for most people, making it necessary, whether women like it or not, for them to work.
Marxist feminist activists in the 1970s, under the banner of “Wages for Housework,” argued that the work women did in the home in fact did have economic value, and that it was deserving of a wage. Their demands were mostly dismissed as unworkable, but the commitment of conservative women to their role in the home as the Christian right grew in power is related to their argument. These women might not have been demanding wages for housework, but they did demand a kind of acknowledgment for the reproductive labor done in the home, even if it was mainly lip service.
Into that context the Roe v. Wade decision hurtled. To antiabortion women in particular in the 1970s, the Supreme Court seemed to have devalued not only the fetus, but also the labor of the women who bore and raised children. The decision was not, sociologist Kristin Luker argued, simply about pregnancy; it was about the social role of women. Not just childbirth, but the entire spectrum of work that women did, the caring labor of tending to the feelings and needs of the family, seemed to be on the verge of disappearing. Men were not about to pick it up—indeed, antiabortion women often argued that abortion allowed men to skirt responsibility. While many working-class women embraced abortion as a way to plan their families and save themselves money and stress, family planning alone was not enough to solve their economic issues. Particularly for women whose entry into the workforce likely meant more supervision, less control over their time, and less symbolic value for a fairly meager wage, often in a service job, staying in the home didn’t seem like a bad choice.28
“Family values,” framed as concern for reproductive labor and support for the traditional, patriarchal nuclear family, became a political obsession as the economy was transitioning away from industrial, family-wage union jobs to a service economy in which more and more women worked away from home. Those service jobs relied on the same “people skills” that women were already expected to possess. The Christian emphasis on service, adopted by corporations like Walmart, allowed bosses to pay the same lip service to women in the workplace as they had to women in the home, in both cases in place of a wage.29
Homosexuality, too, was perceived as an affront to the traditional roles of men and women. It fit into the particular set of “family and moral values” concerns put forth by the newly organized religious right. The overall moral decline that so angered religious leaders like Jerry Falwell included any sex outside of marriage, but gays and lesbians came in for particular loathing because they seemed to upend traditional roles. Pointing the finger at them allowed straight male leaders to detach themselves from any responsibility for the moral decline they so lividly condemned. Although the later gay rights movement came to focus much of its energy on marriage rights, asserting the similarity of queer couples to straight ones, the early gay rights activists reveled in the challenge the movement presented to the existing family structure.30
The movements of the late 1960s, particularly the feminist and LGBT rights movements, had stepped away from the kind of charismatic leadership model that was so recognizable in the civil rights movement and earlier eras. In part, because these movements were posing a direct challenge to the structures of patriarchy, they had little choice. Queer groups like ACT UP, formed in response to the 1980s AIDS crisis in an effort to break through the barriers that homophobia had erected around dealing with the disease, were organized horizontally, with affinity groups and caucuses. They used facilitators to structure meetings and encouraged groups to take independent action. Feminist groups, which often sprang up as a result of “consciousness-raising,” eschewed formal leadership, but struggled with what activist Jo Freeman called the “tyranny of structurelessness,” as formally nonhierarchical groups in practice found themselves with people who exerted control without having been selected as leaders—often along lines of race and class.31
The post-2008 movements drew from these models, mostly putting aside hierarchies for more open-ended structures. In this, Moral Mondays was an outlier, a movement that clearly had a charismatic leader in Rev. Barber, who in speech and style harkened back to the civil rights movement. Adele Stan noted that even when the left turned its back on religion, and even in some cases began to mock the faithful, the civil rights movement and the liberation tradition of the black church was always excepted. Hence Rev. Barber was able to draw in even nonbelievers to a movement that used moral language and a preacherly style. It is not entirely surprising that a movement using the language of moral values had something of a patriarch.
“People trust him and are inspired by him and there’s a power to having that trusted person,” Jacob Lerner said, noting that the almost reverent style of Moral Mondays in a way felt like going to church. The media, too, has an easier time covering a movement with a clear leader to interview; having an obvious person to call contributed to the large amount of mostly positive coverage that the Moral Movement received. There was less of a need to rely on social media storytelling when the movement was more legible to the media.
And yet there is power in allowing more people to step up and take leadership roles or to act independently. People tend to stay involved with a movement, Lerner said, when they feel crucial to its success rather than just like one more person showing up. Although some people felt incredibly energized by Moral Mondays, others, like Angel Chandler, did not see themselves in it. Long-term, a movement’s ability to survive relies on many people stepping forward, and those people need to feel that they have space to speak and are empowered to act. Moral Mondays remained strong and powerful for the first summer, and continued to hold events that drew large crowds, but as with any disruptive action, what at first is a shock to the status quo becomes normalized, and those in power adjust to it. There is a constant need for new tactics to keep a movement growing, and the more people feel that the movement belongs to them, the more they will believe that they can try something new.
Even during the civil rights era, when Dr. King commanded headlines and phone calls from the White House, there were many others who did hard work with much less acknowledgment, from the domestic workers who walked and carpooled to make the Montgomery bus boycott a success to the distributed organizers of SNCC in counties across the South who painstakingly registered black people to vote. That labor, too, is gendered, with women doing the less-visible labor of care and organization, from powering the phone trees and stuffing the envelopes for the antiabortion movement to maintaining the phone and email lists of the Tea Party to creating safe spaces for protesters and organizing jail support teams in Raleigh and Ferguson. That work is wrongly assumed to be less important, less a demonstration of “leadership.” As Bethany Moreton and Pamela Voeckel have argued, movements themselves are a form of reproductive labor.32
By including from the start issues of reproductive justice, sexuality, and gender identity alongside the more traditionally male issues of political rights and the workplace, Moral Mondays were able to bring in many women and queer and transgender people, who in turn did the important work of organizing, door-knocking, running meetings, and providing support for arrestees. Their work shaped the movement. As Wooten Gough noted, intersectional organizing requires more than just bringing in different people in a sort of laundry list of struggles; it means putting people who face multiple attacks at once front and center. These issues, as much as any others, shape what class means in America today.
Today our values have been shaped by the workplace and the world around us just as much as the values of the people living in the New Deal era were shaped by the world in which they were living at that time. And they are very different worlds. Our twenty-first-century world has been shaped by birth control and access to abortion; the service economy and the notorious “two-income trap,” in which two working adults became necessary to maintain the living standards that used to require just one; the Internet and social media; and the mainstreaming of queer and transgender people. Even Rev. Barber, who at first glance could appear to be an old-fashioned leader, spoke the language of intersectionality and argued for the need for distributed movements across the country. “Helicopter leadership doesn’t work in this environment and it never really has,” he said.
THE SUCCESS OF MOVEMENTS IS OFTEN JUDGED, FAIRLY OR UNFAIRLY, by their ability to get candidates elected. In North Carolina, where the right to vote has been such a central part of the struggle from the beginning, that criterion was of special interest. If the movement fought to maintain and to expand access to the ballot, surely it must believe that voting is the way to create change. But battling simply to maintain access to the ballot is a different struggle from putting together a strategy to win elections.
At her sentencing, Barbara Smalley-McMahan announced that she would be doing her community service with Democracy North Carolina to register voters and get out the vote. She organized a group of twenty-one people who would meet at PieBird, a restaurant in her Raleigh neighborhood, for breakfast, and then go out to register voters. She wound down her counseling practice, devoting herself instead to the voting work, to putting together workshops that would help educate people around systemic racism, to making public change.
The fiftieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, the massive civil rights–era voter registration drive in Mississippi, was the summer of 2014, and William Barber III and his colleagues in the youth section of the NAACP decided to use it as an opportunity to push the Moral Movement further. “We began to ask ourselves, what could we do to really honor that legacy as well as engage in the moment that we were in?” he said. They decided to make the summer into their own Moral Freedom Summer. They would place organizers in forty-nine counties across the state for twelve weeks to build relationships, train people in the issues, and register voters. “We had black, we had white, we had poor, we had middle class, we had LGBTQ, we had straight, we had a representation of the movement,” he said.
Despite all that work, the 2014 elections saw Republican Thom Tillis, the Speaker of the North Carolina House often targeted by the Moral Movement, narrowly defeat incumbent Democratic US senator Kay Hagan. Democrats won a few seats away from Republicans in the statehouse, but the conservative supermajority remained in place. Around the country, the story was the same—from Wisconsin to Florida, politicians continued to win despite pitting themselves, in some cases, directly against popular movements in their states.33
In North Carolina, part of the story was the heavily gerrymandered districts—even conservative Democrat Heath Shuler dropped out of his race for reelection to his seat in the US Congress in 2012 because his district was redrawn in a way that would be less favorable to him. The NAACP, along with the ACLU and the League of Women Voters, continued to fight legal battles against the voter ID law, and in the winter of 2016, federal judges threw out two congressional districts, ruling that they had been drawn specifically to consolidate black voters. The judges ordered them redrawn before another election was held in the state; lawmakers appealed to the Supreme Court, which declined to stay the order, forcing the state to reschedule its congressional primaries.34
But the other part of the story was that many people, inspired by social movements and direct action, were less thrilled when they were told to go vote. The NAACP does not endorse candidates, and while a few Moral Monday arrestees went on to run for local office, the nonpartisan movement’s momentum was hard to translate into the very partisan field of electoral politics. Angel Chandler echoed a sentiment I heard around the country—that electoral politics is the problem, not the solution. “It’s the two-party system, that is where we get screwed every single day,” she said. “Even if one side, you feel, doesn’t do as much harm, if you’re just buying into that system, to me that’s the biggest part of the problem.”
Rev. Barber, too, though he continued to fight for voting rights, saw the role of the movement as less about elections than about shifting consciousness. “You have to change the context in which elected people operate. That is what makes them do something,” he said. “We don’t just decide what we are going to do based on one election. We are long-term in our focus. Persistent in our actions. Consistent in our principles.” Democracy was about more than just voting.
Being persistent in their actions was made a little bit harder by changes enacted at the legislative building in response to the protests. Massive protests in the Halifax Mall behind the General Assembly building were barred, and the legislators’ schedules shifted so that the protests began to move from Mondays to Wednesdays. The actions slowed from once a week, but continued, Tara Romano said, to draw big crowds and make plenty of noise. In the fall of 2014—just before the election—the Wake County district attorney dropped charges against hundreds of protesters following two judges’ rulings that the arrests had violated their rights to assemble and speak. But that didn’t stop the legislature from trying to shut down protests.35
The existence of Moral Monday also served as a draw for other organizing in North Carolina. To Jacob Lerner, it seemed unlikely that labor unions would have put money into the least-unionized state in the country until Moral Mondays proved that there was energy around economic justice; after the protests began, the Service Employees International Union began a local Raise Up for $15 low-wage worker campaign. The movement for black lives also intersected with Moral Mondays, focusing on the cases of Jonathan Ferrell, a black man shot by a police officer in Charlotte in 2013, and Elisha Walker, a black transgender woman found murdered in 2015. Bree Newsome, who scaled the flagpole and took down the Confederate flag outside of the South Carolina Capitol, was also a Moral Monday arrestee.
The North Carolina legislature, after the shootings in Charleston, passed a law protecting Confederate monuments. Once the flag became such a flashpoint, Smalley-McMahan found conversations with her more conservative friends, which had seemed productive, cut off. Previously, they had found common ground in some areas, including money in politics, funding for public schools, a raise in the minimum wage, and even reproductive rights. “Even if there may still be some agreement, we can’t talk about it because the big thing up front is the flag and the statues and raising up people who basically promoted white supremacy,” she said. “They think it’s heritage. It’s not heritage, it’s white supremacy.”
Despite the cries for local control and states’ rights coming from Confederate flag supporters and the General Assembly, Ivanna Gonzalez said, legislators in fact worked to cut off local control. The bill protecting Confederate monuments required the General Assembly to vote on removing such a monument, superseding local government authority. And the General Assembly moved to redistrict the Greensboro City Council in a move that packed black voters into fewer districts. Still, Gonzalez said, there remained plenty of energy on the local level in cities around the state—and Wooten Gough stressed that rural organizing, too, was making strides in building an intersectional movement.36
Perhaps the biggest success that Moral Mondays can claim is that it has been replicated—not just in southern states like Georgia and South Carolina, but also in northern states usually considered much more liberal. In the spring of 2015, I joined protesters in the “War Room” of New York’s Capitol in Albany. Beneath paintings of muscular colonists battling Native Americans, a circle of protesters held signs proclaiming, “Faith Stands Up to Pharaoh” and “Black Lives Matter.” They were black and white, young and old, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and atheists. Like Moral Mondays in North Carolina, their events had a theme; this one was “The New Jim Crow Has Got to Go.” Activists read letters from prisoners detailing the conditions in solitary confinement, quoted the Bible, and handed around a list of demands, ranging from “freedom from mass incarceration,” to “full employment and living wages for all,” to “the right for all people to self-identify and express their gender with freedom from violence, poverty and discrimination.” There were also specific policy asks and bill names.
The range of demands, from the mundane and even wonky to the transformative, was a feature of this and other movements, a way for organizers to build momentum, small victory by small victory, even as they kept their eyes on major social change. “The ethic that guides the movement is that part of what your obligation is as a person who is fighting against prisons is to also be concerned about the material conditions of people who are in prison now,” said Angelica Clarke, executive director of the Albany Social Justice Center and an organizer of the day’s action. And then, too, she noted, is “that bigger-picture value demand of a world beyond prison, a world that sees justice not as punishment but as a rehabilitative opportunity or as restoration.”
Emily McNeill of the Labor Religion Coalition of New York State had found the moral-values framework compelling as a person of faith. But, as she explained, whether they were religious or not, people were “hungry for a way to express something deeper than just, this is a good policy or this is a bad policy.” In New York, with a Democrat in the governor’s mansion, McNeill said, the moral language was powerful because both Democrats and Republicans were serving the interests of the wealthy. It also helped different groups who often didn’t see their interests as overlapping to come to understand their struggles as connected: that ending prisons would require living-wage jobs, that prisons were built in counties that had lost their manufacturing or agricultural bases as an alternative to real economic development, that prisons contributed to inequality, and, as Clarke noted, that New York was the most unequal state in the country.
Civil disobedience was not yet central to Moral Mondays in New York, but in Illinois, said Toby Chow, chair of the People’s Lobby and a Lutheran pastor-in-training, civil disobedience was essential to feeling as though Moral Mondays Illinois was making an impact. Their first action that involved arrests was outside of the Chicago Board of Trade, where Rick Santelli made his famous rant. They brought a big puppet of Governor Bruce Rauner with hellfire surrounding him and, inspired by the Bible story of Jesus turning the moneychangers out of the Temple, also set up a table with riches on it and flipped it over. From there, a group of protesters blocked the street in front of the Board of Trade, bearing signs reading “Rauner Repent,” and “What Would Jesus Cut?”
“I think there’s a few aspects to civil disobedience,” Chow said. “One is if you’re willing to risk an arrest, you’re going to be able to more effectively shut something down. That’s crucial, because part of what we want to do by staging these direct actions is to generalize the crisis. The politicians and these rich people who are funding them, they’re imposing this crisis on a vast majority of people, but as far as they’re concerned there is no crisis, it’s not part of their life.”
Chow continued, “It’s a form of self-assertion that really transforms the people who go through with it. Once you cross that line and say no, I’m not going to leave when the police tell me to leave, and if they have to carry me away then they’re going to carry me away, it expands your sense of freedom about what you’re willing to do and what you’re capable of doing. It has a really liberating effect on people.”
Barbara Smalley-McMahan, as part of a delegation from the Baptist Peace Fellowship, attended the massive Moral Monday action in St. Louis on August 10, 2015, that marked the first anniversary of Michael Brown’s death at the hands of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. “We were there to learn,” she said, “and the leaders in the movement there that we were most in contact with were all young and very radical, very disrespectful.” She meant that in a good way. As she explained, “there was a whole theology of disrespect that was really new and really good to hear about while I was up there.” She heard it from the likes of Cornel West and Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, who has called it “the liberation theology of Ferguson.” West and Rev. Sekou, the latter in his clerical collar with his dreadlocks pulled back, climbed over the barricades that Monday with more than fifty others and were arrested at the Thomas Eagleton Federal Courthouse. “In the early days of August a poor queer black and female Jesus took up a cross and faced tanks and tear gas,” Rev. Sekou said. “A cry from the wilderness could be heard: Fuck the police!”37
Smalley-McMahan, already changed by the Moral Mondays in her home state, came home changed again. She joined a protest days later but found it too rigid, too strict, too concerned with the right way to hold a sign. “That way,” she told me, “doesn’t work.” She began to consider how what she learned in Ferguson could be applied at home.
Rev. Barber called it all the birthing stages of a third Reconstruction, a transformative moment when all the strands of different movements began to reconnect into a fusion movement, from the Fight for $15 to Black Lives Matter to the new environmental justice movement to Occupy. “I think that we, all of these movements, are social defibrillators,” he said. “Our job is to shock this nation’s heart again.”
In the fall of 2014, Rev. David Forbes addressed the North Carolina NAACP convention, and Smalley-McMahan, sitting in the audience, was struck by what he said. “He talked about King David when the Philistines were the powers that be. David wanted to go after them with the army, and God said to wait until you hear the rustling in the top of the mulberry trees; it will sound like people marching, and when you hear that sound of people marching, the fullness of time has come, and it will be time for you to go out,” she said. “We hear the feet, the feet are marching, the leaves are rustling in the top of the mulberry trees, the fullness of time has come, and that’s when change happens. I believe we are in a new time in history and something radical is coming. I don’t know what it means in terms of our capitalistic system. I think something about that’s going to change.”