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local control. Today, Tea Partiers following in Wallace’s footsteps, wearing tri-corner hats, reading Ayn Rand, and talking endlessly about tyranny and freedom, have done much to obscure King’s message, and that of the larger movement he symbolized. But their antisocial conception of freedom— Rand’s first protagonist in a novel was modelled on a serial killer—has nothing in common with the pro-social vision of freedom as King understood it, which reached its highest expression in service to others—the central message of one his last major speeches, “The Drum Major Instinct” delivered just one month before his assassination. What’s more, Branch highlights a related perversion of King’s memory: [H]e did not win favor by promising that African Americans would behave like
white people. He said nearly the opposite, quite plainly. His ringing conclusion invited polyglot America—“all God’s children”—to join hands and sing a Negro spiritual, so that everyone for that moment could share inspirations forged during slavery. King invoked a larger patriotism in which people of every stripe reach from tip-toe stance across divisions between them. Free citizenship requires meeting each other half way to build ties of comfort and strength. In short, no one took “e pluribus unum” more seriously than Martin Luther King, Jr. And the same is true of those who truly carry forward King’s message today. One such individual, who speaks in terms of a Third Reconstruction, is Rev. Dr. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, lead organizer of the “Moral Monday” protests against the hard right agenda of the GOP-
dominated state government. Over 800 Moral Monday protesters have been arrested doing civil disobedience since their protests began in April. Unlike protests in other states in recent years, such as Texas or Wisconsin, the North Carolina protests have been broadly multi-issue, as well as multiracial and cross-generational, with a strong foundation in the same biblical social justice vision that lay at the heart of King’s mission. Barber sees the presidential election of Barack Obama with a multi-racial electoral base as mirroring the racial fusion foundations of the first two Reconstruction movements— both of which were undermined by waves of racist violence— but he looks to the mass rallying of ordinary citizens as the key to long-term progress and historical success. And the movement he’s helped build in North Carolina is a testament to exactly that.
“There was a legislative agenda that was being enacted in the General Assembly that was disproportionately impacting the poor, the elderly, the vulnerable, and potentially disenfranchising even some voters,” North Carolina Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry said. “So what could have been seen as simply politics, as
usual, became much more a matter of public morality.” “I’m a real conservative evangelic,” Barber told the Moral Mondays rally on July 15. “I believe what the book says…and the book says you can’t love God on one hand and hate your brother on another.” “You can’t simply say, ‘Help me God’ and then pass
laws that are hurting people! That’s you!” Barber continued. “God doesn’t help people hurt other people! God doesn’t help people take the rights of other people, God doesn’t help people mistreat the poor.” The mutli-issue, but morally integrated nature of the Moral Mondays movement is indeed March/ to p. 12
The Local Publication You Actually Read August 23 - September 5, 2013
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