Poor and low-wealth people coming together and voting
“There are 3.2 million poor and low-wealth voters in North Carolina,” Bishop William Barber began Saturday as Repairers of the Breach concluded its congressional voting organizing tour in Asheville. “One million did not vote in the last election. If just 19 percent of that would vote, it would outdistance any margin of victory in this state.”
Barber hopes to unleash the power of Americans who never have their doors knocked or their needs addressed, people lacking health care access in North Carolina because the state is one of 12, most in the South, whose legislatures have never passed Medicaid expansion.
“If we ever needed to vote for democracy and justice, we sure do need to vote right now! RIGHT NOW!” Barber shouted, leading rallygoers chanting at Oak St. Congregational United Church of Christ.
“We don’t organize around a candidate,” Barber explained, but choose candidates based on where they stand on critical issues. “We are nonpartisan, but we are not nonpolitical.”
Barber interrupted a reading of the statistics above to be sure they sank in.
Half of North Carolina’s workers (2 million people) make less than $15 per hour. To drive home his message, Barber referenced voting margins in the U.S. Senate.
“With just one vote that was blocked last year by 48 Republicans and two Democrats — one out of Arizona, one out of West Virginia. That one vote kept two million people in poverty.”
These are policy choices, not personal choices, Barber said.
A series of speakers testified to their struggles as working people: lack of union representation, threats to reproductive rights, laws turning police into immigration agents. A 13-year-old girl spoke of unaddressed mental health issues and asked people to vote for her because she cannot. “Our future is in your hands.”
“Scarcity is a lie,” Barber insisted. Those who don’t vote become accessories to the crime when people get hurt.
Barber gave a mini history lesson, as he does, highlighting the forgotten history of civil rights. Long before John Lewis walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the women of Selma, Alabama had been organizing since the 1940s. The original plan for the March on Washington was for a week of civil disobedience. Two organizers refused to attend because that changed.
“It took us 20 years fighting Democrats” to get same-day voter registration in North Carolina. It didn’t come easy.
Power. People need to use it, Barber insisted, pointing out how many state elections turn on small margins.
“Every group except for white men with land had to fight for the right to vote,” Barber said. “Anybody that tries to undermine somebody’s vote is ultimately saying you’re not a human being. That’s why you can’t let it slide.”
Trump, Jan. 6th, 20 states passing voter suppression laws? None of it is new, Barber insisted, quoting Martin Luther King from the Selma to Montgomery march: “The threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the masses of poor negroes and the mass of the poor white folk coming together is the great fear of the aristocracy in this nation.”
If you understand that and the Southern Strategy, Barber instructed, the succeeding decades follow. Trump inherited a plan. He is merely a symptom.
“This is not new. It’s a strategy.”
Your vote is your strength. You can tell it is by how hard opponents fight to take it from you, Barber concluded.
