The Zimmerman Verdict - Rev. william barber state of belief radio interview, July 20, 2013

[REV. DR. C. WELTON GADDY, HOST]: Two weeks ago on this program, you heard from the Rev. Jill Edens, who spoke passionately about her participation in the "Moral Mondays" movement in North Carolina, and her subsequent arrest. You'll remember her talking about the initiator of that model for committed citizen activism, the Rev. William Barber. Rev. Barber is the head of the North Carolina NAACP and a leading voice for justice - not just in his state, but nationwide - so it should come as no surprise that he has also been playing a leading role in the response to the Trayvon Martin case. And I'm very pleased to be able to welcome the Rev. William Barber to State of Belief Radio. Welcome! [REV. DR. WILLIAM BARBER II, GUEST]: Thank you so much. I'm glad to be with you and with your listening audience. [WG]: If you would, start by talking about your own personal reaction to the "not guilty" verdict for George Zimmerman, and how then you connect that to the other issues that you're addressing in the ongoing Moral Mondays protest in North Carolina. [WB]: Well, I think that you have to first look at the so-called "stand your ground" laws as a deep problem in this country, because we already have laws for self-defense. Stand your ground laws just add to the ability to perpetrate violence, and we often see that the license to kill is being used in a more racialized way, if you will. Trayvon Martin, if you think about it, for me, and for so many, represents a disturbing deja vu that must make us more determined to fight against violence - whether that violence is in Chicago, or Newtown, or in Sanford. And the deja vu that I'm talking about is: 58 years ago, a young man went to the store to buy candy, and he ended up dead. His name was Emmett Till. And than in Sanford, a young boy goes to the store to get candy, and he winds up killed. And the killer says that it was self-defense; but he stalked him; he profiled him; you have him on tape profiling him, using expletives to profile Trayvon. And Trayvon, not able to speak. And if you use the logic that the jury used to make this decision, it would mean that if Emmett Till had fought back against the people who abducted him - they could have argued that they killed him in self-defense. And that's dangerous for not just Black kids, but all kids! Because that means if a White kid goes in a community that happens to be predominantly Black, and somebody profiles him and says he looks suspicious, tracks him, stalks him, then incites him to tempt him into an argument, and then kills him - they can claim that they did it in self-defense. This is a very dangerous precedent for jurisprudence. I know of a case - John McNeil - where, actually, the opposite happened. A Black man defended his son on his own property in Georgia. He fired a warning shot against an armed intruder. Two White officers said it was self-defense; a White eyewitness said it was self-defense; but when the jury met and the DA pressed charges for life for *** - he received life in prison. And only after that strong, active campaign from the NAACP were we able to get him out of jail - and then to get out, he had to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter, which he had been acquitted of six years ago. So Black men are at risk on both sides of the gun, and that is very dangerous. [WG]: Rev. Barber, you, I read, left the national NAACP conference to return to North Carolina when this verdict was read, and you were quoted as saying, "Let's stand our ground." Elaborate on that, if you will. [WB]: Well, I left because I have three sons. When I heard about that morning, I looked over at one of my sons; another one was at a church conference there, and I immediately became very hurt, very angry, very discouraged. My sons are both big sons, strong, tall, but they're boys. And I felt a sense of helplessness, a sense of hurt and a sense of anger. I cried about it, and I saw my son cry when Huckabee, on Fox News, said, in essence, that if Trayvon had been more respectful and had respected Zimmerman, he wouldn't be dead. So that he said Trayvon wasn't a hero because he should have been more respectful. And I saw an anger coming from my son, and so I talked with them - but I needed to be back at Moral Monday, because I needed to see a community of people - Black and White, Latino - who still believe in humanity. I really came back for my own healing, and I testified. And in the midst of speaking to them, I said, we need to stand our ground on things like repealing stand-your-ground laws; we need to stand our ground against violence; we need to stand our ground and push for laws that outlaw racial profiling; we need to stand our ground against all forms of violence, you know, and as Coretta Scott King said, keeping children in poverty is a form of violence. Producing more guns is a form of violence. Taking kids' education and healthcare is a form of violence. So we need to stand our ground, and believe in the humanity and the possibility of that humanity to be different than what is being portrayed by these folks who are so afraid of something that all they can think of is the answer to every problem is cut taxes, make the poor more responsible, and give people more guns. [WG]: Right. [WB]: We need to stand our ground against that kind of philosophy. [WG]: So when you talk with your colleagues - and I very much understand you going back for your own good, because you need to be with people you know have your own values when you go through something like this - but when you talk to them, what do you want to call for where you live, and beyond? [WB]: Well, that's exactly right. What I was saying in that is, I went back for that, but in addition to that, I went back to say to them, "We must stop this proliferation. We've gone gun-crazy." Our legislature in North Carolina - this is what they've decided to do, for instance, in our state capital: they denied 500,000 people access to Medicaid - poor people, poor children; 170,000 people unemployment; they've kicked 30,000 kids off of preschool - poor kids; raised taxes on 900,000 poor people to get 23 families a tax credit, a tax break; attacked voting rights; and then passed bills to put more guns in the street; allowed guns in places where there's liquor being served; they allowed guns on college campuses. So they've gone gun-crazy. It's almost like we're in a, like on Star Trek, we're in some kind of extremist warp, you know, an alternative universe that doesn't even line up with our deepest moral values and our deepest constitutional values. So what I want to see is us be a catalyst for a new moral conversation. Not liberal vs. conservative; not Republican vs. Democrat; but what is immoral vs. what is moral; what is extreme vs. what is constitutional. A conversation about our common humanity; a conversation about the common good. And in that conversation, we say we're not going to permit attempts at violence against the poor; we're not going to pass laws to promote policies that hurt and damage the least among us; we're not going to promote policies that actually uphold violence and promote violence as the answer to everything - and particularly on guns, we want to roll back the access to assault weapons; we want to repeal these stand-your-ground laws in North Carolina and everywhere else; and we want to pass laws that end racial profiling. We've got to come back to our senses. I think too many people, the way I describe it, have become drunk on this Tea Party tea, and they're under the influence of Koch - K-o-c-h. And we need to come back to our senses in this country, and particularly down in the South. [WG]: You know, you could be charged with talking like a sane man! [WB]: Yeah, well, I hope so! [WG]: It is so good to hear you elaborate those values, and know that you're calling people back to them. How are you organizing around this? We got a good introduction to Moral Mondays, which is just a phenomenal concept. How else are you organizing to do what you just talked about? [WB]: Well, let me give you one piece about Moral Monday in this. We've been organizing for seven years, and one of the things you see in North Carolina with this new legislature that has started to be like the George Wallaces of the 21st century in the extreme, is that they are actually reacting to our victory. We organized for seven years to put something together called the Historic Thousands on Jones Street People's Coalition. More than 150 organizations with 100 branches of the NAACP - we formed an anti-poverty, pro-justice coalition with the moral values and constitutional values at the center of it. And inside of seven years, we passed some of the most progressive voting laws; we passed, in the South, a law called the Racial Justice Act that addressed the issue of race being used in the application of the death penalty; progressive educational policies; we pushed through and got at least one of our Senators to support Obamacare, the Health Care Act; but then this group that was a reaction in 2010, and they came in. And now what they're attempting to do is go backwards. As I said, in the first 50 days, my friend, they decided to hurt 500,000 poor people, Medicaid; 170,000 who had unemployment; and 900,000 people who were getting an Earned Income Tax Credit that even Ronald Reagan said was good. It's almost as though they have a premeditated desire to just go backwards as fast as possible. That's why on the 8th in April, 17 of us went in, and said, "This is immoral, this is extreme, this is bad public policy. It's constitutionally inconsistent, morally indefensible, and economically insane." We didn't know what would happen. But we knew we had to stand. And we had to stand in the deepest tradition of the non-violence legacy, because we had tried everything else. And from that - we went from 17 getting arrested to now over 850 people. Thousands have shown up every Monday. We now have over 600,000 hits on our social media. We're doing massive voter registration, voter education. We have a legal team; the Southern Coalition for Justice and Advancement Project out of DC are both organizing with us and examining every piece of policy against the constitution, both state and federal; and we have directly attacked the, I call it, the fairly cynical heresy of the far Christian right, that attempts to limit moral discussion as to abortion, prayer in the schools and where you stand on issues like homosexuality - which, when I read my bible, Old and New Testament, even if those things are mentioned, they are not the predominant moral issues of the scriptures. The predominant moral issues are: how do you treat the poor? How do you love people? How do you deal with economic justice? How do you treat people on the margins? And how do you treat people - even if they're different from you - how do you find the way, as Deuteronomy said, to still respect them and protect them as your brothers and sisters? [WG]: Yeah. You know, pastor, I think what you have described is going on with the group with which you work and the Moral Mondays people - that certainly is a sign of hope. I think, though, I want to ask you as well: how can we change mindsets and perspectives? This came up a lot during the trial, because people talked about the perspective from which you were looking at it. And if you were looking at that verdict from the perspective of non-minority Americans - you didn't see much empathy or understanding there. How can we change that so that the majority of Americans have some basic sensitivity to what life is like in this country for people who aren't like them? [WB]: Well, you need a long-term, I believe, consistent moral movement like we're seeing happening in North Carolina that shakes people's consciousness and calls people together in new ways. You know, every Monday at Moral Monday - let me point out to your audience a miracle: the NAACP in the South was often an organization that many, many White people were taught to hate and fear. And yet every Monday, under the banner of the NAACP, if we have 5,000 people there, 50% of them are White. 50%. When I came back last week, the White women in the audience had Trayvon Martin stickers on. The White women, in the South, now! When I went to the NAACP, my sister minister, Sharon Watkins, came over to the NAACP convention - we were in the same building - and announced that the Christian Church the Disciples of Christ, which is predominantly White, 95% White - was passing an emergency resolution to stand with the NAACP to call for a Civil Rights Investigation of the Zimmerman verdict. So when we come together and we destroy the myth - the White Southern Strategy myth, and that is that you can somehow hurt other people without hurting yourselves, and we go directly at that with a movement that's not so much, as I said, Democrat or Republican, but calls people to a higher place; calls people, as Abraham Lincoln said, to our better angels - then that's where you begin to find hope. Last Monday, a White lady from Harnett County - you have to understand Harnett County is where the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux *** used to live - and she came up to me and said, "Reverend Barber, I was taught not to like the NAACP. But the only people fighting for us poor people right now - fighting for our unemployment, our Medicaid" - she told me how her brother was sick, and how her other brother is unemployed - "is the NAACP." Then she said this: she said, "I brought five other members of my family, and we are all going to jail. We've never done this in our lives," she said, "but I'm so sick of people tearing us apart and dividing us. We're in this together." We had two Agnostics come to the back of the stage and ask me for prayer. Now that was really interesting. And one of them said, "You know, I was an Agnostic, but I never heard these scriptures." See, they never heard Isaiah 10, "Woe unto those who legislate evil." Or Luke 4, or Matthew 25 really lifted up in the circles that they've been in. And they've actually said to me, "Would you pray for me?" And, "We're standing with you," and, "Thanks for helping us rethink the whole piece about faith and about justice." [WG]: Yeah. Rev. Barber, we've got to go in just a minute here, but I want to come full circle and go back to where we started this conversation, with you returning to North Carolina because of your three sons. One of the most poignant and disturbing moments for me was, I read the experience of Otis Moss III in Chicago, who went home because he had children at home, and he said his son asked him, "Will I be next?" You've got three sons; I've got two sons. How do you answer that question? [WB]: Well, my son said this to me: "Dad, they're trying to emasculate us all. They want to take our voting rights, they want to take our lives, they want to take our educational opportunities." And I think you answer it by holding them tight; you answer it by continuing to fight against the injustices; you answer it by making sure they go around some people who do not look like them, necessarily, but also who do not think about them in terms of a threat, a thug, and something to be feared. And you answer them by saying that we - I think you own that pain. As I said, I went back because I needed saving again on Monday. I've tried doing the right... I've got degrees from three of the best schools, I try to follow the laws of the land - but I'm telling you, that verdict made me so afraid and so hurt and so angry that the thought ran across my mind, you know, about arming myself - you know, those kinds of things. And thinking about it - it was a moment that I felt hate that I didn't want to feel. And I know that the only thing that can save you from that sometimes is to go around a group of people that have not lost their sense of humanity to this vicious cycle of hate. And so I think we've all got to hold our sons a little closer, but we've also got to use this moment of pain to be more determined to fight against this senseless, constant perpetuation of violence and destruction of lives. [WG]: The Rev. William Barber is the President of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP -- the second largest in the nation. He's emerged as a leading voice for justice as organizer of the "Moral Mondays" direct action movement in his state. He's a very busy man - we got him right off of a plane ride - and I'm particularly grateful that he was able to spend a few minutes with us today on State of Belief Radio. Rev. Barber, I tell you, you are an inspiration, and I am so grateful for what you do, and we will be checking in to see how it's going. I thank you for what you do, and continued success in your work. [WG]: Well, God bless you, and thank you and your audience; and let us never forget Isaiah 58, it says: If we cry loud, and stand not against forms of injustice and the violence, that one day God will call us repairers of the breach, that it should be our mission in life. And let us as Christians never forget that we have been anointed for such a time as this, to declare Good News to the poor, and hope and healing to the brokenhearted; that we must take up that mantle, and trust that God will take our feeble efforts, when we walk by faith, to do powerful things in the earth that we live.