With new Poor People’s Campaign, NC’s Rev. William Barber evokes comparisons to MLK
When Democratic presidential candidates met for their final debate in Iowa, more than a hundred protesters gathered just outside on the snowy grounds of Drake University.
Their goal: to urge the candidates to debate poverty. Holding signs, they carried a coffin representing the tens of thousands of people they said die every year from its effects.
Leading them was Rev. William Barber, the North Carolina pastor who co-chairs the national Poor People’s Campaign.
Coming days before the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., the rally was the latest in a series of events designed to carry King’s legacy into the 21st Century.
“I believe Dr. King would be right beside us,” Barber told the Observer. “He would say nothing would be more tragic than to turn back now.”
Barber, 56, is in the middle of a 25-state tour that will culminate in June with a mass march in Washington, where thousands are expected to call for an end to poverty and inequality and for greater access to health care and education.
Barber, who was born two days after King’s historic march on Washington, frequently invokes the civil rights leader in rallies and sermons even as he himself has invited comparisons with King.
“Brother William Barber is the closest thing we have to Martin Luther King Jr. in American culture,” said Cornel West, a Harvard professor and political activist.
At the Democratic debate, two candidates did talk about poverty. The two, former Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and businessman Tom Steyer, had each made a pilgrimage to Barber’s Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro.
“Something that hasn’t come up much tonight but deserves a lot of attention — poverty,” Buttigieg said on stage. “The Poor People’s Campaign is marching on Iowa right now calling on us to talk about this issue more. . . . In politics we’re supposed to talk middle-class. They know there is no scripture that says, ‘As you’ve done onto the middle-class you’ve done onto me’.”
Barber later told an interviewer that didn’t go far enough.
“We’re thankful for a mention but we’ve got to go further, much further than a mention,” he said. “Republicans tend to racialize poverty. Democrats tend to run from poverty. We must deal with the reality of poverty.”
Moral Mondays
King began the original Poor People’s Campaign in November of 1967.
He “believed that African Americans and other minorities would never enter full citizenship until they had economic security,” according to Stanford University’s King Research Institute.
Five months later, a day after he spoke in support of the economic rights of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, he was assassinated.
A half-century later, in 2018, Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis of Union Theological Seminary’s Kairos Center started the new Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. But it’s Barber, a beefy man with a graying beard, who has become the movement’s face.
“I sense that he’s doing what King would have been doing at this time,” said Clayborne Carson, director of Stanford’s King Institute. “He does remind of me of King in some ways. That social gospel foundation for his ministry is very similar to King’s. His broad vision is very similar . . .
“Obviously King had become prominent in a much broader social movement. I see (the new Poor People’s Campaign) as more of a fledgling movement. We don’t know exactly whether it will pick up steam or whether it won’t.”
A decade earlier, Barber, then-president of North Carolina’s NAACP, had first organized Moral Marches in Raleigh to highlight issues that affected the poor such as education, the minimum wage and health care. In 2013, with Republicans in control of the governor’s office and the legislature, the protests evolved into Moral Mondays at the N.C. General Assembly.
Republicans criticized his tactics. One called it “liberal theater.” But the protest model soon spread. And Barber’s national profile rose. In 2016 he addressed the Democratic National Convention.
“He’s probably got a better chance than anybody else out there,” Carson said, “to become the symbol of this mobilization of grassroots power as King (did) during the 1960s.”
‘Honoring prophets’
A day after the presidential debate, Barber spoke to a packed sanctuary from the pulpit of Des Moines’ First Christian Church. Wearing a black cassock and red stole, he described the Poor People’s Campaign in often rousing oratory. He also invoked King — and the King holiday.
“We act like all Dr. King said was ‘I have a dream,’” he told the crowd. “MLK once diagnosed America as having a neurotic sickness and a septic commitment to racism, poverty and militarism. Now, now you’re not going to hear that on the holiday next week . . .
“I don’t like that word ‘celebration.’ You don’t honor prophets by celebrating them. You honor prophets by going to the place where they fell reaching down in their blood and picking up the baton and carrying it the next mile of the way.”
Timothy Tyson, a Duke University historian who has marched with Barber, said he may be more like another North Carolinian, Ella Baker.
Unlike King, who was the face and the voice of the civil rights movement, Baker was the organizer. She helped organize King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950s and later the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
“Dr. King in a way was like a gospel singer,” Tyson said. “He didn’t organize the movement. He went to where the movement was and . . . affirmed the importance of what they were doing. And then he caught a plane and went somewhere else.”
Barber, he said, “can connect with anybody from the president to the people whose circumstances are almost unimaginable . . That’s his effectiveness as an organizer . . . He brings out the best in people.”
Like King, Barber’s goals are ambitious.
“I can’t tell you this is the movement that is going to fix it all,” he told the Observer. “But what we know is that this is bringing people together for a long haul movement deeply committed to changing the narrative.”
