🧱Part V: Breaking the Pattern — Strategies for Lasting Reform

We’ve seen the cycle: coalition, progress, backlash, erasure. It’s played out from Wilmington to the courts, from eugenics boards to legislative chambers.

But if rollback is a strategy, so is resistance. So is re-imagination.

This final installment isn’t just about what’s broken—it’s about what could be built.

Here are five strategies for breaking the pattern:

1. Build Durable Coalitions, Not Momentary Campaigns
   Fusion didn’t fail because of internal fractures—it was dismantled by external power. The lesson? We must organize beyond elections. The coalitions that last are built around shared material interest, not just shared ideology.
2. Embed Democracy at the Local Level
   Gerrymandering and voter suppression thrive where people aren’t looking. Local boards. School districts. Municipal courts. We need a movement that understands real power often hides in plain sight—and goes there.
3. Reclaim Moral Language
   Barber does this. Fusionists did it too. When justice sounds like scripture, it resonates beyond the left. It reshapes values. Progressives must speak not only about rights but about right and wrong.
4. Center the Poor—All of Them
   Black, white, immigrant, rural, urban. The current system survives by making these groups compete for crumbs. A modern Fusion must unite them around dignity, wages, housing, health, and voice.
5. Tell the Full History—and the Full Future
   Stories shape what we think is possible. That’s why this series matters. That’s why Wilmington was hidden. We must not only fight to remember—we must fight to imagine what comes next.

This work doesn’t start in Washington. It starts in counties and congregations. In classrooms and campaigns. In memory—and in movement.

The past didn’t just warn us. It gave us a blueprint.

Thank you for reading the “North Carolina Again and As Usual” series.

📌 If this series resonated with you, share it. Discuss it. Teach it. Build on it. History doesn’t repeat itself—it gets repurposed. Let’s make sure we’re the ones writing the next chapter.

🔧 Ready to build what comes next?
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