In ‘a critical year,’ Rev. Barber hopes Saturday’s march gives his movement momentum
This year’s Historic Thousands on Jones Street march and rally, planned for Saturday morning in downtown Raleigh, is billed as both a celebration and a challenge.
HKonJ, as it’s known, is a gathering of members of the NAACP and more than 200 other social justice groups active in North Carolina, who have been coming together since 2007 around issues that affect poor and marginalized people.
This year’s celebration, said the Rev. William Barber, who helped launch HKonJ when he was president of the N.C. Conference of the NAACP, comes after a series of successful legal challenges and political pressure campaigns in recent years by the NAACP and others. Those efforts helped roll back voting restrictions and race-based gerrymandering of voting districts in North Carolina, Barber said.
The challenge, he said, is to take the momentum of those and other successes and increase voter registration and engagement as the 2020 election nears.
“It’s a critical year,” Barber said in a telephone interview with The News & Observer this week, after addressing the Congressional Black Caucus’s 2020 National Black Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. Barber, a co-founder of the National Poor People’s Campaign, said his message at the summit was similar to one he has often preached: that America could be transformed if it addresses the needs of the poor.
‘We have not given up fighting’
From the start, HKonJ was seen as a gathering of community organizers, political scientists, religious leaders, lawyers and activists whose focus would be on what Barber calls moral issues, not partisan ones. Participants are of different races and ethnicities, ages, sexual identities, socio-economic backgrounds and political affiliations.
The federation came together over a platform of 14 points. Some who have attended events were concerned mostly about or two of the issues, while others were passionate about them all. They include improving the state’s lagging public schools; supporting the state’s historically black colleges and universities; funding affordable housing; prison and sentencing reform; environmental justice; and protecting the rights of immigrants.
Barber said it’s important for people of like minds to gather occasionally in person.
“We have to fight against cynicism,” Barber said, “and part of that is coming together over a shared agenda.”
But also, he said, “We have to show that we are still here. We have not given up fighting.”
Plans leading up to Saturday
HKonJ eventually spawned the Moral Mondays movement, which organized rallies in protest of North Carolina policies passed in 2013 by a Republican-led state legislature.
The Rev. Anthony Spearman, current president of the N.C. NAACP, said the theme of this year’s gathering is “When We Vote, We Win,” intended as a rallying cry to participate in the election and to encourage others to do so.
This year, Spearman said, organizers added “Mobilization Week” events in the lead-up to Saturday’s march and rally, with speakers holding forth on different topics. On Thursday from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., Ana Blackburn, the NAACP’s Latino liaison, will speak at Shaw University’s Lecture Hall. On Friday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., Tonia Rawls, the organization’s LGBTQ chair, will speak at the Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts.
On Saturday, participants will gather near the intersection of Wilmington and South streets for a 9 a.m rally before the 10 a.m. march toward the Capitol building. A second rally will follow on the Capitol grounds.
This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 1:09 PM with the headline "In ‘a critical year,’ Rev. Barber hopes Saturday’s march gives his movement momentum."
