Former U.S. Congressman Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.) speaks with Penny Hooper and Karen Rettie during this week’s Moral Monday rally at Halifax Mall in Raleigh.
People may think that Moral Mondays are over now that the state legislature is no longer in session.
That is not so.
Starting in April, numbers of attendees have ranged from hundreds to thousands. This Monday may be the largest one yet. Rev. Dr. William Barber, II, President of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP since 2005, is taking it to the streets.
He invites everyone to gather at Halifax Mall at 5 pm, Monday, July 29, and march to the State Capitol at 5:30 pm for the largest interfaith service to ever be held in the southeast. He’s calling it a Mass Social Justice Interfaith Rally, and his goal is to “send every attendee from every part of the state back home to be a trumpet of conscience and agent of change.”
Rev. William Barber says, “The Moral Mondays are the result of seven years of progressive organizing for a new Southern ‘fusion politics’—a new multi-ethnic, multi-religious coalition with an anti-racist, anti-poverty agenda.” He hopes it will become a model to be used throughout the southeast.
Many have agreed that building a broader grassroots base that has momentum regardless of who is in legislature is what is needed in North Carolina for the long haul. The Moral Mondays are a platform for all people to have a peaceful and public voice and to hold representatives accountable to the voices of all the people – to restore the power of the people by reclaiming it.
NCIPL Steering Committee Member, Penny Hooper, traveled to last weeks’ Moral Monday from Morehead with 22 others and spoke out against deep water injection wells. Read the whole article here.
