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William Barber II

civil rights leader from North Carolina

William Barber II (also Rev. William J. Barber II) (born August 30, 1963) is an American Protestant minister and political activist in North Carolina, the President and Senior Lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Barber serves as president of the NAACP's North Carolina state chapter.

Don't you come talking to me about Jesus, unless you're standing with the poor.
It's better to die having fought for justice than to live and stay on the sidelines and to watch injustice have it's way without a challenge.
If we don't address this issue of poverty... we will never energize the 100 million Americans who stayed home in 2016. If you mobilize 2 to 10% of the poor around an agenda, you can fundamentally shift every election in this country.

Quotes

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2018

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2019

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  • When faith and church becomes merely a place for privatized religion and privatized salvation and privatized relationship with the divine, it is actually counter to Scripture. Jesus said that nations would be judged for how we treat the poor, the sick, the stranger, the immigrants and the least of these.
  • We forget that it was the religion of abolitionists that led them not to pray against slavery but to stand against slavery.
  • It was the Civil Rights Movement that said we don’t need to just pray for things to get better in America, we need to march in the street and challenge the injustices of society and declare that segregation was not only a political problem, but a moral problem.
  • And so anytime when we see millions of people without health care and silence too often by the church, when we see 62 million people without living wages and silence from too many of the churches, we see 140 million people living in poverty, and there not be an outcry from the church, then we actually enable greed by our apathy and absence from the public square.
  • Where we see churches who say that the moral issue is hate, disliking gay people, standing against a woman’s right to choose, standing up for guns and tax cuts for the wealthy and building a wall to block people from this country, not only are they wrong – because there are more than 2,000 Scriptures in the Bible that speak to how we should treat the poor, the stranger and the least of these...

2020

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  • The U.S. President's order to carry out a lethal drone strike violated the UN Charter's prohibition on the use of force. The assassination of General Qassim Suleimani represented an act of war against a country with whom the United States was not at war.
  • We will not be silent as our president publicly announces willingness to commit a minimum of 52 violations of international law and war crimes — attacking civilian and cultural centers, including churches, museums, mosques and libraries in Iran.
  • War is a crime against the poor civilians of Iran, Iraq, and the whole Middle East region, who pay for U.S. wars with the destruction of their lives, their health, their homes and their country’s environment. It’s a crime against the poor of the U.S. as well who pay with their tax dollars going to the Pentagon instead of to jobs, health care and a green new deal.
    • Letter Asking the United Nations to Hold Trump/U.S. Accountable for War Crimes (8 Jan 2020)
  • Republicans have racialized poverty, and Democrats have run from poverty. And we’re forcing them to deal with the reality. We are very political, but we’re not partisan... There is not some separation between Jesus and justice; to be Christian is to be concerned with what’s going on in the world... All the victories we enjoy today—voting rights, Social Security, minimum wage—100 years ago were seen as virtually impossible...Everything we won, people had to start winning in the midst of opposition that looked like it was overwhelming. I believe that’s the moment we’re in right now.
  • We're in a nation where 140 million people live in poverty, 43 percent of this nation... So when [the coronavirus disease] COVID-19 hit, America had all these wounds, these fissures. And pandemics, by their nature, exploit fissures and expand themselves through fissures. So it might hit the people in the fissures: the poor, the low wealth, black, brown, poor white communities, native communities, first nation communities. But it doesn't stay in the fissures. The pandemic might be in the fissures among the homeless for instance, in the fissures among poor black communities, but that same pandemic will make its way eventually to the White House and to the palace.
  • If we cannot shift in this pandemic as a nation, and become more merciful and less greedy, and more just and less unjust, then God help us.... One germ, one little germ has shown that it can shut down this whole nation and the world. One little germ, united with itself, has shown what it can do. And if we can't see that in this moment, there's not a bomb that can blow it out, there's not a bullet that can shoot it out, there's not a stock market that can buy it out. None of that. The only way we make it through this — and we come out better — is if we find our way together, we lift up everybody.
  • Senator Harris did a tremendous job in pointing out the economic injustice... we have to stop saying things were well before COVID. It’s almost as though we give that away to the Trump and Pence. The reality is, Wall Street was well. The reality is, those who got his tax cuts were well. The reality is, though, that before COVID, they were trying to overturn healthcare. Before COVID, they were blocking living wages. Before COVID, we were not addressing the issue of poor and low-wealth people. And we have to find a way to say that.
  • 64 million poor and low-wealth people were eligible to vote in the last election. That’s nearly one-third of the electorate. Thirty-four million did not vote. And a study that we just recently did, called power unleashed — “Unleashing the Power of Poor and Low-Wealth Voters,” said that the number one reason that poor and low-wealth people did not vote — this actually was a tri-reason...
  • Not only will Pence and Trump not acknowledge racism when it comes to police violence, they are not even acknowledging the disparate racism in economics and in healthcare, and so forth and so on. So, on the one hand, while Pence and — while Biden and Harris may not be every, fully where the Poor People’s Campaign are, they are in the world of wanting to do more.... wanting to make sure that the people have what they need, as opposed to wanting to only secure the wealthy and the greedy.
  • I come from a unique place. North Carolina was the scene of the crime of the worst voter suppression, after the case out of Alabama and when the Supreme Court gutted Section 5. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that it’s like putting away your umbrella — the Shelby case, it was — putting away your umbrella in a rainstorm. And in North Carolina, Amy, when it was done, the Republicans there said, “Now that the problem has — the headache has been removed, we can do what we want to.” And guess what. Everything Pence just said, we heard in 2013. And they tried to roll back every progressive way of voting. And they actually went to the books and looked at how did it benefit Black and Brown people and young people, and those were the rules they tried to roll back. And the court said it was surgical — surgical racism. And what I saw in North Carolina, what we defeated in North Carolina, what we filed suit against in North Carolina, is now what Trump and Pence are talking about doing on the national level: surgical racism with surgical precision.
  • North Carolina was the scene of the crime of the worst voter suppression, after the case out of Alabama and when the Supreme Court gutted Section 5. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that it’s like putting away your umbrella — the Shelby case, it was — putting away your umbrella in a rainstorm. And in North Carolina, Amy, when it was done, the Republicans there said, “Now that the problem has — the headache has been removed, we can do what we want to.” And guess what. Everything Pence just said, we heard in 2013. And they tried to roll back every progressive way of voting. And they actually went to the books and looked at how did it benefit Black and Brown people and young people, and those were the rules they tried to roll back. And the court said it was surgical — surgical racism. And what I saw in North Carolina, what we defeated in North Carolina, what we filed suit against in North Carolina, is now what Trump and Pence are talking about doing on the national level: surgical racism with surgical precision.
  • We’re telling people, vote by absentee ballot. In North Carolina, where we have 16 days of early voting, vote early. And if you vote on Election Day, then put your shield on, put your mask on, put your gloves on. Pack you a lunch. Get you a folding chair. Put some water in that lunch bag and vote. And if they want to come watch us vote, let them watch millions of people, because we’re not scared. We’re not giving away this democracy. Let them come and watch. And then stop saying Trump won the last time. He was elected by the Electoral College because of 80,000 votes.

2021

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  • Well, we are in a jam today. Trouble is real, and whether we like it or not, we are in this mess together as a nation. When this word of the Lord came to Isaiah, his people were also in a jam. Bad leadership, greed, and injustice and lies had led them into trouble, exile, and economic hardship. In that day, some tried to simply cover up the trouble with false religion and deceit. But God said to the prophet, “Sound the trumpet. Tell the nation of its sin. Tell them that just going through the motions of prayer will not get them out of this jam. I need them to repent of what got them here and turn in a new direction.” The prophet was saying what Jesus would say about nations caring for the least of these. The prophet was saying then what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in the 1930s to an America with one-third of the nation ”ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished,” besieged by the Great Depression and beset by bigotry and hatred.
  • Please God, grant us wisdom, grant us courage, until the poor are lifted, the sick are healed, children are protected, and civil rights and human rights never neglected. Grant us wisdom for the facing of this hour until love and justice are never rejected.
    Grant us wisdom and courage for the facing of this hour until, together, we make sure there is racial justice and economic justice and living-wage justice and health care justice and ecological justice and disability justice and justice for homeless and justice for the poor and low-wealth and working poor and immigrant justice—until we study war no more and peace and justice are the way we live.
    This is the only path to domestic tranquility and healing. So God, grant us as a people; grant us as an entire nation, grant our new President; grant our new Vice President; grant every preacher; grant every politician; grant every person, Black and white, Latino, Native, Asian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, people of faith, not of faith but with a moral conscience, every human being created by God, documented or undocumented; gay, straight or trans, young or old. And what a day it will be when our children’s children call us what you have called us to be: repairers of the breach. Amen.

2022

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  • Don't fear the word "poor," Barber says: If poor people voted in large numbers, that would change everything... What we found were three things: No. 1, don't go into these communities and say, you just need to vote. Say, we honor you, because we respect that some of them have not voted because they never heard anybody call their name.... We need to say the word "poor." If you look at the number of poor people — 52 million without a living wage, 140 million [overall] — you have to talk to them as human beings. Second of all, say to them, "I am not here to ask you to vote. I am here for you to join a movement that says there's something wrong with our policies that this many people can be left disinherited." Thirdly, I am asking you to believe that democracy is not just an idea, but democracy and justice are on the ballot.

2023

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  • The same forces demonizing immigrants are also attacking low-wage workers... The same politicians denying living wages are also suppressing the vote; the same people who want less of us to vote are also denying the evidence of the climate crisis and refusing to act now; the same people who are willing to destroy the Earth are willing to deny tens of millions of Americans access to health care.”
  • There is a sleeping giant in America. Poor and low-wealth folks now make up 30% of the electorate in every state and over 40% of the electorate in every state where the margin of victory for the presidency was less than 3%. If you could just get that many poor and low-wealth people to vote, they could fundamentally shift every election in the country.

The Real Epidemic is Poverty (March 30, 2020)

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The Real Epidemic is Poverty (March 30, 2020), The Progressive
  • Key to these rollbacks: controlling the narrative about who is poor in America and the world. It is in the interest of the greedy and the powerful to perpetuate myths of deservedness—that they deserve their wealth and power because they are smarter and work harder, while the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy and intellectually inferior. It’s also in their interest to perpetuate the myth that the poverty problem has largely been solved and so we needn’t worry about the rich getting richer—even while our real social safety net is full of gaping holes. This myth has been reinforced by our deeply flawed official measurements of poverty and economic hardship. The way the U.S. government counts who is poor and who is not, frankly, is a sixty-year-old mess that doesn’t tell us what we need to know. It’s an inflation-adjusted measure of the cost of a basket of food in 1955 relative to household income, adjusted for family size—and it’s still the way we measure poverty today.
  • But this measure doesn’t account for the costs of housing, child care, or health care, much less twenty-first-century needs like internet access or cell phone service. It doesn’t even track the impacts of anti-poverty programs like Medicaid or the earned income tax credit, obscuring the role they play in reducing poverty. In short, the official measure of poverty doesn’t begin to touch the depth and breadth of economic hardship in the world’s wealthiest nation, where 40 percent of us can’t afford a $400 emergency. In a report with the Institute for Policy Studies, the Poor People’s Campaign found that nearly 140 million Americans were poor or low-income—including more than a third of white people, 40 percent of Asian people, approximately 60 percent each of indigenous people and black people, and 64 percent of Latinx people. LGBTQ people are also disproportionately affected. Further, the very condition of being poor in the United States has been criminalized through a system of racial profiling, cash bail, the myth of the Reagan-era “Welfare Queen,” arrests for things such as laying one’s head on a park bench, passing out food to unsheltered people, and extraordinary fines and fees for misdemeanors such as failing to use a turn signal, and simply walking while black or trans.
  • We are a nation crying out for security, equity, and justice. We need racial equity. We need good jobs. We need quality public education. We need a strong social safety net. We need health care to be understood as a human right for all of us. We need security for people living with disabilities. We need to be a nation that opens our hearts and neighborhoods to immigrants. We need safe and healthy environments where our children can thrive instead of struggling to survive. With the coronavirus pandemic bringing our country’s equally urgent poverty crisis into stark relief, we cannot simply wait for change. It must come now. America is an imperfect nation, but we have made important advancements against interconnected injustices in the past. We can do it again, and we know how. Now is the time to fight for the heart and soul of this democracy.

Quotes about Barber

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  • The Rev. Dr. William Barber , with thousands of collaborators, is making big strides for justice and equality through his organizing of "Moral Mondays" protests, which first started in North Carolina. The protests started as a response to the "mean-spirited quadruple attack" on the most vulnerable members of our society. In the tradition of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Rev. Barber is fighting against restrictions on voting and for improvements in labor laws.
  • The Rev. William Barber II is a man who impresses me deeply... I believe that my friend Dr. Cornel West is right when he states that "William Barber is the closest person we have to Martin Luther King Jr. in our midst."....Being up on a stage with Reverend Barber is an inspiring experience, but it is also challenging. It's not easy to keep up with someone who is brilliant, passionate, and able to quote the Bible at will to amplify his point. This is also a man who, his audience understands, does more than just lecture or preach. He has been at the forefront in struggle after struggle and has been arrested dozens of times in nonviolent actions.
  • For 27 years, the Rev. William J. Barber II has been the pastor at a church in the small city of Goldsboro, N.C... His work as an activist takes him to the state capital often enough that he’s well known there... Barber is ever in motion, and he’s still picking up momentum. He’s hardly stopped since he attracted national attention as the leader of the "Moral Mondays" protests held at the North Carolina capitol in Raleigh beginning in 2013.
    Any resemblance to the work of Martin Luther King Jr is intentional: King launched his own Poor People’s Campaign less than a year before he was assassinated in April 1968. It was also in 1968 that Barber—who was born just days after the 1963 March on Washington—moved with his family from Indiana to North Carolina. His father, a teacher and preacher, had gotten a call from a black principal asking him to return to his home state to help with the cause of integration. The young boy found himself on the front lines of that fight. In the process Barber learned an early lesson: “There is not some separation between Jesus and justice; to be Christian is to be concerned with what’s going on in the world."
    And so, at his church in Goldsboro, politicians are welcome to worship and stay for a conversation, and many do. But they’re not allowed to preach. Neither Barber nor his organizations endorse candidates, though they do endorse issues.
  • The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II — an orator and activist whom Dr. Cornel West has likened to Martin Luther King Jr. — recently spoke with PEOPLE about poverty, racism, President Donald Trump's administration amid the novel coronavirus pandemic and national unrest after George Floyd's death. Barber's conclusion? People need to rise up together and push for change. "The only way we make it through this — and we come out better — is if we find our way together, we lift up everybody," he says...
    Barber is a leading voice of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and is preparing for two major events. On Tuesday, his book inspired by one of his most acclaimed sermons, We Are Called to Be a Movement, was published by Workman Publishing. And on June 20, Barber will guide the nation's first digital Mass Poor People’s Assembly & Moral March on Washington to, in his words, change the narrative about America's poor and interlocking issues like racial inequality, the lack of police accountability and voter suppression. More than 100 organizations will participate, along with national figures and celebrities including Al Gore, Danny Glover, Wanda Sykes, Debrah Messing and Jane Fonda.
  • Rev. William Barber says the 2020 election debates have steadfastly ignored the subject of poverty, even though it affected almost half the United States population before the COVID-19 pandemic and millions more people are struggling since then. “We have to stop saying that things were well before COVID,” Barber says. “The reality is, Wall Street was well.” Barber is co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and president of Repairers of the Breach.
  • Rev. William Barber says the Republican Party’s voter suppression efforts ahead of the November election, aimed primarily at Black and Brown voters, amount to “surgical racism with surgical precision.” The Poor People’s Campaign, of which Barber is co-chair, is leading a major voter mobilization effort to combat voter disenfranchisement. “They know they cannot win if everybody votes. They are terribly afraid of poor and low-wealth Black and Brown people voting,” he says.
  • There are some leaders who see faith and politics strictly as an either/or competition: You win by turning out your side and crushing the opposition.
    But the Rev. William J. Barber II, who has been called “the closest person we have to MLK” in contemporary America, has refined a third mode of activism called “fusion politics.” It creates political coalitions that often transcend the conservative vs. progressive binary.
    Barber, a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, says a coalition of the “rejected stones” of America—the poor, immigrants, working-class whites, religious minorities, people of color and members of the LGBTQ community can transform the country because they share a common enemy.

See also

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