🧱 Part III: Moral Momentum — Rev. Barber, Repairers of the Breach and Poor People’s Campaign Today
Movements don’t die—they evolve. And in North Carolina, the spirit of Fusion politics didn’t vanish in 1898. It was buried. Suppressed. But not extinguished.
In the early 2010s, a new voice rose from the same soil. Rev. Dr. William Barber—preacher, constitutional scholar, and moral agitator—launched the Moral My movement in response to the North Carolina General Assembly’s hard-right legislative agenda: voter suppression laws, attacks on healthcare, anti-LGBTQ legislation, and school funding cuts.
But what Barber built was more than protest. It was political theology rooted in justice. A movement not of left vs. right—but right vs. wrong.
Barber’s genius is coalition. As co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and president of Repairers of the Breach, he’s carried the spirit of the Moral Monday movement beyond North Carolina—uniting Black and white, rural and urban, faith-based and secular, South and North—around a shared moral vision:Healthcare as a human right
- Voting rights protection
- Living wages
- Environmental justice
- Fully funded public education
Sound familiar? These are echoes of the Fusion Movement. A modern resurrection of cross-racial, working-class solidarity.
Barber does what Fusionists did: connect the dots between issues and show how oppression of any group weakens democracy for all. He preaches the Constitution like scripture. He trains young leaders. He reclaims moral language from culture wars and redirects it toward justice.
And he does it all from North Carolina—a state that remains a microcosm of national tensions and possibilities.
Where the rollback has been fiercest, the resistance has been clearest.
Barber’s campaign doesn’t ask America to return to anything. It asks us to become what we claimed we were all along.
đź“Ś Coming Next:
Part IV: Courts & Contests — Anatomy of the 2024 NC Supreme Court Race (Concession) → The battle for democracy isn’t just in the streets—it’s in the courts. Next, we examine how a single judicial race reshaped North Carolina’s future, and what it reveals about democracy in the balance.
Learn more about NC's contradictions, challenges and opportunities in the North Carolina Again and As Usual series
