Professor Michael Zank: Good evening everyone, and welcome to the second of our 2021 Elie Wiesel Memorial lectures. The theme of our fourth annual lectures is the legacies of human rights. My name is Michael Zank. I am a Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at Boston University, where I also direct the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. I will be your host for tonight’s webinar with Reverend Dr. William J Barber II, who will speak about the human rights legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. The annual Elie Wiesel Memorial lectures are named for the Nobel laureate, holocaust survivor, and long-time BU faculty member, Professor Elie Wiesel. The series builds on the encounters Elie Wiesel held on campus every fall and engages themes and topics related to professor Wiesel’s life, thought, and teaching; prominent among those themes was professor Wiesel’s outspoken advocacy for human rights. My thanks as always to our center staff and leadership: Dr. Theresa Cooney, Dr. Ingrid Anderson, Jeremy Solomons, and Khadija El Karfi, to my colleagues in Jewish Studies and in Religion, in the CAS Dean’s Office, and the Provost and President of the University for their intrepid support of the Center and its many activities. Thanks to our many loyal supporters and friends who have been part of this growing community, and finally, warm greetings to Marion and Elisha Wiesel, who have been friends of the Center since its inception. Following my remarks, Dr. Barber will be further welcomed by BU School of Theology Dean, Sujin Pak, and Dr. Barber’s lecture will be followed by a Q&A. You can post your questions in the Q&A anytime. I will be moderating. About our speaker tonight, Louis Chude-Sokei, Professor Of English, George and Joyce Wein Chair in African American Studies, Director of the African American Studies Program, writes, “there really is no more apparent heir to the true legacy of Martin Luther King at work in the Black and American activist world than reverend William Barber. I emphasize true because where much of the MLK myth has been appropriated in ways that dilute its focus on poverty as much as race, social justice as much as assimilation, Barber is recognized as having taken those less marketable aspects of King into a new generation that needs those aspects far more than the media myth deployed by even figures on the right. And given how much work BU has been doing in and around race and social justice, the invitation to Reverend Barber has further energized and catalyzed various communities and institutions, not to mention attracted a wide wide audience. This is a phenomenal opportunity.” My colleague Margarita Guillory, Associate Professor of Religion writes: “for over four decades Reverend William Barber has galvanized African-American communities to challenge social, political, and economic inequities. Reverend Barber’s activism extends beyond these communities, he’s equally committed to advocating for socially vulnerable individuals and communities who are disproportionately impacted by racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Reverend Barber’s goal is to secure basic human rights of those impacted by structural injustices; as such, his work provides concretized examples of human rights work that could provide a roadmap for BU students and community members at large who are interested in learning more about activism or who want to do the work. His revitalization of the Poor People’s Campaign will further enrich the narrative of one of BU’s well-known alumni, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” As these statements indicate, this lecture aims to appeal to a wide range of students, faculty, staff, and community members. Our lectures are supported not just by the Elie Wiesel Center but by faculty and administrative leadership across the University. It is important to us to be part of a growing alliance working to transform the culture of one of America’s most highly ranked research universities for genuine and sustained equity, diversity, and inclusion. It is also important for us to be visible and relevant for communities that have not traditionally found their way to campus and who need our attention and support. We believe that your voice, Dr. Barber, is one of the most eminent and clear voices in the struggle for change in our society. When it comes to the human rights legacy of the Reverend, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, your emphasis on economic justice and what you call a third reconstruction picks up where Dr. King was forced to leave on. We are eager to join and support this mission. We want to learn from you and be inspired by you. And now, I call on Dean Sujin Pak to tell us more about our distinguished speaker.
Dean Sujin Pak: Good evening. It is my honor to introduce our distinguished speaker tonight; the Bishop and Reverend Dr. William J Barber II is the President and Senior Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, a National Call for Moral Revival. Bishop with the fellowship of affirming ministries, Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary, Pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and the author of four books entitled We Are Called To Be A Movement; Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing; The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and The Rise of a New Justice Movement; and Forward Together: A Moral Message For The Nation. Bishop Barber is the architect of the Moral Movement, which began with weekly Moral Monday protests at the North Carolina General Assembly in 2013, and in 2018 Bishop Barber helped relaunch the Poor People’s Campaign, which was begun by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther Jr. King in 1968. It calls for a moral agenda and a moral budget to address the five interlocking injustices of systemic racism, systemic poverty, the war economy, and militarism, ecological devastation, and the false moral narrative of Christian nationalism. A highly sought-after speaker, Bishop Barber has given hundreds of keynote addresses at national and state conferences, including the 2016 Democratic National Convention, and spoken to a wide variety of audiences, including national unions, fraternities and sororities, motorcycle organizations, drug dealer redemption conferences, women’s groups, economic policies groups, voting rights advocacy, LGBTQ equality and justice groups, environmental and criminal justice groups, small organizing committees of domestic workers and fast-food workers, and national gatherings of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other people of faith. Bishop Barber delivered a response to Pope Francis’s Encyclical to the Bishops of the church at the Vatican city in 2017, and he also spoke before the fifth UNI Global Union World Congress on June 18, 2018. He was added to Black Achievers Wall in the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England, and has been conferred ten honorary degrees. Bishop Barber served as president of the North Carolina NAACP from 2006 to 2017 and as a member of the National NAACP Board of Directors from 2008 to 2020. A former Mel King Fellow at MIT, he is now currently Visiting Professor of Public Theology and Activism at Union Theological Seminary and is a Senior Fellow at Auburn Seminary. Bishop Barber was named one of 2020’s BET 100 Entertainers and Innovators and as a Social Justice Warrior. He is one of the 2019 recipients of the North Carolina Wward, which is the state’s highest civilian honor, and furthermore, he is the recipient of the 2018 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award, and 2015 recipient of the Puffin Award. Indeed, we are honored to hear from you tonight with this prestigious bio. Please join me in welcoming Bishop Reverend Dr. William J Barber.
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Bishop Reverend Dr. William J Barber II: Let me thank all of you for such a humbling welcome. I mean, first of all, thank God for God’s graciousness and the strength to be here. Let me thank every one of you, from the President, the Provost, to the Dean, to the people, to the Professors, to the students that had a part in me being allowed this humbling privilege to the memory of Elie Wiesel, and to his family members that may be tuning in, to my co-chair the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis with the Poor People’s Campaign, A National Call For Moral Revival, and the co-chair of the Kairos Center, to the staff of Repairs of the Breach, to the 47 state coordinating committees across this country of the Poor People’s Campaign, a National Call for Moral Revival, the more than 2000 Christian clergy Jewish rabbis, Muslim imams, and other ministers of faith, and more than 200 partners. I am overwhelmed and honored and humbled to be with you on this evening. I want today to talk about why we must have a mass poor people and low-wage workers assembly and Moral March on Washington to declare new possibilities of America on June 18th, 2022. I actually come with bearing an ask and specifically lifting up this major gathering that’s being organized right now to face and challenge the lives of scarcity, to shift the moral narrative with a generationally transformative declaration, on a particular day, that will send us forth, to continue to say somebody’s been hurting our people, poor and low-wealth people far too long. It’s gone on far too long. And we won’t be, we can’t be, we must not be silent anymore. The truth of the matter is, we face a crisis of civilization, a crisis of possibility. In the midst of debates about top lines, and legislation packages, or whether means-testing would bring the total cost down for a particular program, distract us from the bigger questions of whether we as a people believe it is possible for the richest nation in the history of the world, to provide for everyone’s need and to ensure equal protection under the law. And not to establish some forms of benevolence but to establish justice. To establish justice. Here we are in this particular moment. That we are being called to. And in the midst of all that is going on, we have tremendous opportunity, but also tremendous possibility not to meet the moment that we are in. Too many people are being treated as invisible, are treated as being disposable. A few weeks ago. I was at the Vatican, and the question was raised about the structures of sin. And it was said that it has to be a structure of sin, and we have to name it as such. When one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent of the people in the world have more than they could ever spend. While fifty, nearly 50 percent of the world faces poverty and extreme poverty. COVID-19 pandemic has put a spotlight on this nation’s poor and low-wage workers. It was already there, but it put a spotlight on it. And the fissures caused by it. And it is laid bare our crisis of possibility. The very people this nation has too long neglected were called for a moment, essential workers, when we wanted to stay home and protect ourselves from the deadly virus. And now, many of them, even yesterday, are walking off the job in mass to say we will no longer take risks for mere 7.25 dollars an hour. For restaurant workers, two dollars and 13 cents an hour. We can no longer take a risk and be denied even a raise in the minimum wage for 12 years. And a raise to a 15-dollar living wage that was first asked for and demanded at the march on Washington when the agenda called for a two-dollar minimum wage in 1963, which, if pushed forward to today, would be 15 dollars. We now must put a face on this crisis of possibility. It is a crime in a rich nation for people to receive starvation wages. God never intended for one group of people to live in inordinate wealth while others live in abject and deadening poverty. Poverty is not God-ordained. It is not God-ordained. It is man-made, and man-made, human-made because of policy. It is the result of policy and the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, ecological devastation, the denial of health care, the defunding of our children’s possibilities through public education, militarism, and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism, and Christian nationalism. It is wrong. It is, as we said in Rome a few weeks ago, sin and a result of structural sin. No wonder Jesus said at his first public sermon that to be truly evangelical, to be truly one following in the way of Jesus, you must preach good news to the poor. Good news to the ptochos, the word is in Greek, those who have been made poor by economic exploitation. And in this America, we must address the interlocking injustices that connect with poverty. For here we are in this country. Even before COVID, 43 percent of this nation, 140 million people, live in poverty and low-wealth. A recent study came out and said that only 31 percent of this country today can afford a thousand-dollar emergency. You disaggregate those numbers. Those numbers of poverty for white people and poverty and low-wealth is 66 million people or around 20, some 29 percent. If you look at it in terms of African-Americans, it’s 26 million people, or 60.9 percent of all Black people, are poor and or low wealth now. That number is 40 million lower in raw numbers than the number of poor white people. Sixty-eight percent of first nation brothers and sisters. Sixty-eight of our Latino brothers and sisters. And over 50% of our children are poor and low wealth in the wealthiest nation ever in the history of the world. The majority of those in poverty become women and children. And in the face of this reality, too often, what we have seen is either an attempt to simply focus on trickle-down economics, voodoo economics. Things come down from the top if you just take care of the billionaires and the super-wealthy. Or neo-liberalism that says if you just lift from the middle, it will pull other people up. The fact of the matter is that’s what existed prior to COVID. Seven hundred people were dying a day from poverty before COVID hit. According to a study by the Mailman School of Public Policy at Columbia, that’s a quarter-million people a year. Before COVID. Remember when seven people died from vaping, and there were White House conferences and congressional hearings. Seven hundred people dying a day from poverty and not a hearing or not a word. In fact, no matter the government, poverty measurement is so wrong that it says there’s only 39 million poor people in this nation that live below the poverty level, and many politicians say, well, if you make 7.25, it puts you above the poverty level. Well-being above the poverty level in this country, according to the government’s way of measurement, means if you make twelve thousand eight, eight or nine hundred dollars a year, you’re not poor. That is absurd. In the face of this, we’ve watched our country give two trillion dollars worth of tax cuts to the wealthy in 2017. But not raised the minimum wage for more than 12 years. And there’s already, not there’s not one county, in this country, where you can afford a basic two-bedroom apartment working at 7.25. In most states, you’d have to work upwards of 75 to 80 hours a week at minimum wage. We gave tax 2 trillion dollars of tax cuts to the wealthy and the elite corporate crew. While 400 people in that group make an average of 97 000 dollars an hour. A society where three people had more money than the bottom 50 percent of America’s combined. In a country where we swear in our politics to promote the general welfare of all people, not just the well-being of the elite, and the wealthy, and the corporate interests. And so, we must have a mass poor people’s low-wage workers assembly and moral march on Washington as a declaration that we cannot be silent or invisible anymore. We must transform the political narrative in this nation. And we must be of power among the 40 percent of this nation’s electoral population that now are poor and low wealth. The truth is when indigenous people on reservations still face cruel decisions that track all the way back to the wartime treaties, and when corporations frack and drill on their sacred lands and pours in their aquifers, like what’s happening in Oak flats among the apache nation, we face a possibility. We face a possibilities crisis. When 53 years after, Episcopalians, and Anglicans, and Catholics, and Baptists, and Methodists marched from churches and were beaten on bridges, Black and white, and some died to win voting rights, and Jewish and Christian. We have in this country now blatant voter suppression in 49 states. Over 400 bills have been filed in an attempt to roll back voting mechanisms that not Black people but 53-56 million Americans used in the last election. We’re facing not Jim Crow but a weird form of Jane, and Jim, and Jane Crow, and James Crow, in a suit. And when we see the refusal, even now, to restore the Voting Rights Act, that would at least say to states that have a history of suppression, whatever you do has to be pre-cleared before it’s enacted. And when we watch the For the People Act that John Lewis wrote in his dying days be scuttled and reduced down to something called a Freedom to Vote Act, which is even topically wrong, because we don’t have a freedom to vote, we have a right to vote. When impoverished communities here at home are polluted day in and day out. When we spend 53 cents of every dollar right now in this country on the war economy. And less than 15 cents on education and health care. Fifty-three cents of our discretionary funds on war and the war economy. And only 15 cents, less than 16 cents, on educational health care, and other things, we face a possibilities crisis. When we have 87 million people in this country, even after COVID, who are either uninsured or underinsured. And we come through COVID and has not changed the callousness of many politicians who get free health care just because they got elected. But they don’t want their own constituencies to have the same thing. And even after 700 000 people dying and many more getting sick, we still have those that will refuse to support universal health care. In fact, they won’t even support just increasing the number of people that can receive Medicaid expansion. We face a possibilities crisis. When the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism does not follow the call of Jesus, Muhammad, or Moses, it certainly doesn’t follow the Christian text, which says to nations, when I was hungry did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me? When I was a stranger or an immigrant or undocumented, did you welcome me in? But instead, its preachers preach a false gospel of division. They use the gospel, or a false form of the gospel, another gospel, to build walls. They say so much about what God says so little and so little about what God says so much. When we see that going on right in our face, and they literally act as though to have a moral position in this world, in this society, is to fight women’s freedoms, is to be against our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, to be for tax cuts, and to act as though Jesus was an original founding member of the NRA. We have a crisis of possibility. When during this pandemic, we gave low-wage workers a name change, and we started calling them essential, but we still aren’t giving them what’s essential to survive. And I want you to think about this, many of these workers, many in our communities, they were facing extreme economic distress and insecurity before COVID 19. It made them more vulnerable to the pandemic. They were the first to have to go to work. They were the first to get infected. The first to get sick. And the first to die. Before COVID, they were not paid enough to build up savings to tie them over in an emergency. But we call them essential. They lack paid sick, and medical leave, and health insurance benefits, but we said at least you’re essential. But we have continued in many policies to treat them as though they’re expendable. We have in this country a crisis of possibilities, a crisis even of civilization. As I stand here tonight, I think about the Black man who told me, on one of our trips across the nation, I clean peoples’ backsides in a medical facility, and I can’t even afford to go there if I get sick, and afford the health care. I think about a lady that I met in West Virginia. A low-wage worker, up where Manchin claims to be the Senator, who so many are bothered by back in the heels, works for the group Moms in Appalachia. They’re demanding 15 dollars. Many of them are coal miners, daughters, or coal miners, wives. She said Reverend Barber, every Monday, we have taco Monday, and then we do taco Tuesday sometime. And I said why? You like eating tacos? And she said no, we do that to raise enough money to pay for each other’s supplies for our menstrual cycles. I remember the Episcopal Preach I met when I was in Aberdeen, Washington. Priest is trying to minister in a place of only 16 000 human beings, but over a thousand of them are homeless, almost a tenth of the population are homeless. It is the zip code with the largest number of homeless white millennials. Homeless white millennials. There in Aberdeen. Or I think about Pamela, who died from COVID who was vulnerable to her and her sister. She was one of the first devotees of the new Poor People’s Campaign, a National Call for a Moral Revival, down in Alabama. Some five miles from the road that Martin Luther King, and Rabbi Heschel, and others walk down, in the center of the Montgomery march. If you go five miles off that road today, it looks in many places like the civil rights movement never happened. Pamela was there. She had been tricked by predatory lenders into buying a trailer. For almost five times, she was paying some five times what it was worth. It was run down. Animals could come in. She had sewage in her yard. They wouldn’t run the pipes to her trailer. And all of her children had breathing disorders. She said I want to show you, Reverend Barber, what many of us face because of policy. And I want to make sure that we work together, to make sure things have changed in this world. Or I think about the brother on the street in Tenderloin in San Francisco as we were walking to Glad Memorial Church, where Cecil Williams has done so much work there before he passed. And the brother said Barber, Bishop Barber. I said man, you know me? He said yes. He said we may not be able to march, but we’re with you, keep fighting, remember us. I said, what did you do? He said I was a man of means, middle class, then I had a health care crisis, and I ended up on the street, the wealthiest nation in the world. Or I think about when we were in Wisconsin, just before national political campaign there. And we were under the bridge talking to brothers and sisters, and they said we won’t be here tomorrow, and I said why? They said because every time there’s a political convention, they run us away, so the cameras won’t see us. The politicians won’t see us. It’s almost as though they want to make sure they don’t see us because then they don’t have seemingly any more responsibility to see us when they do policy. In my own state of North Carolina, I’ve seen the kind of rejection that is so unnecessary. I met a little boy named Ezequiel who spoke up for his dad, Pastor José, who’d been in this country since 1985. He had a little glitch, a little problem of administrative error on a form, and under the Trump administration, they called him for imminent deportation. A church took him in. Offered him sanctuary for nearly four years, he had to stay there. Because there were those who wanted to reject him, and he was a pastor and a person who had worked in the community. He was not able to come off that property until the new election. Or I see Amy, as I talk to you tonight. A poor white woman who was struggling to feed her kids up in the mountains of West Virginia, you saw a clip of her. When the governor of that state expanded teachers’ salaries after a wildcat strike, in the state, my grandfather came from. He did a sneaky thing. They didn’t find out until afterward. He expanded the teacher’s salary a little bit by cutting Medicaid and cutting food stamps. And she talks about how this is so wrong and so immoral. I think about Leon, a veteran I met in a homeless camp. He said to me, I fought for this country. He has a flag planted on a tree branch outside of his tent. I asked him why. He said pastor, I keep that flag up, so when people come here, I can tell them they allowed me to run billion-dollar pieces of equipment in the military. But now that I’ve come home, I can’t flip a hamburger. I fly that flag so that people will look at that flag and be called to some kind of responsibility. Now we didn’t just get here any kind of way. No, we didn’t just get here any kind of way. The truth of the matter is, what we see today has what my grandmother called roots. Nell Painter, that famous historian at Princeton Theological Seminary, I hope you all don’t mind me calling another seminary or another university. She’s actually in history. She says, too often, what we see is an American call and response. Say, we get a call, a movement, that challenges the status quo of those on top, things change some, and then the response is outbreaks of meanness, and many are vile, and they embrace rhetorical weapons, and sometimes even physical weapons. She said you could see it in the bloody history of lynching, the bloody history of trying to put down unions, the bloody history of even fighting against women’s suffrage. We have roots in this country. Dr. King, when he said, five, four years ago, at the beginning of the speech that really was entitled “Normalcy–Never Again!,” he was grieving over the fact that really we thought we had dealt with the issue of race, for instance, some hundred years ago. Because in the 19th century, following the Civil War, fusion coalitions came together throughout the South under the protection of the armed forces to reconstruct the nation as a republic that would, in fact, guarantee liberty and justice to all and move toward the establishment of justice, and ensure equal protection under the law. In my own state, in 1868, 69, and 70, Black and white ministers won a congregation is from the Midwest. Another an African-American who came down from Pennsylvania relocated in 1863 in the South to fight on behalf of liberation. They helped rewrite the constitution. It was in that period that we got the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, equal protection under the law, the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing voting rights, saying that no state, no entity, can deny or abridge the right to vote. But with the emergence of the Second Reconstruction, something else started happening. I mean the First Reconstruction, a movement of meanness began. And the mantra was, we got to take our country back. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1875, which made racism a federal offense. Then there was an election in 1877, where the candidate lost a popular vote, won the electoral college vote by cutting a deal with the South and saying if you give me the electoral colleges, votes from the South, I’ll give you the Supreme Court, I’ll pull troops out of the South, I’ll give the South back to you. They did, and he did Rutherford B. Hayes. And insight, of six years, the 1875 Civil Rights Act had been overturned. By 1896, you had Plessy v. Ferguson that said separate but equal was constitutional. And then a series of riots all over the country, 1897, 1898, right on into 1900. And by 1900, the last African-American in the United States Congress had been put out. Voting was driven down. Those who had had the right to vote, those coalitions of poor and low-wealth Black and white people, were torn apart. And then, around 1914, a president was elected. He was very well educated, but he was a racist. He played “The Birth of a Nation” in the Oval Office. Told his staff that this is the kind of history, this is the kind of teaching. It was a movie that glorified the clan and demeaned and diminished Black and white reconstructionists. That same president, Woodrow Wilson, would lie about a pandemic in the middle of war, who cost 600 000 people, who end up dying. He would try to blame it on the Spanish people by calling it the Spanish pandemic. That’s what we faced a hundred years ago. How sometimes, we forget that what we see today has roots. And then you have the emergency of the Second Reconstruction, what we call the Civil Rights Movement, it was really about fusion coalitions coming together, civil rights, and labor, and immigrants, and women, and poor folks of every shade, came together. 1954 you get the Brown v. Board of Education, Black and white, and Jewish lawyers, going to a Supreme Court and battle an all-white Supreme Court. Where one of the Supreme Court Justice has been a former leader in the Ku Klux Klan, and they battle in the law, and they win. Then Rosa Parks sits down in the late 1950s. Think about that. And then the nation stands up. And Rosa Parks was empowered by two white women who sent her to Highlander to learn how to do civil disobedience. A movement starts. Black and white, and other people coming together. They call it a kind of jazz, bringing together gospel traditions, and old testament traditions, and social justice traditions. 63, you get the March on Washington. Originally the March on Washington was supposed to be a week of events. It was supposed to be non-violent civil disobedience. It was going to challenge President Kennedy and the Congress to a Civil Rights Act, and that Civil Rights Act was going to include voting rights as well, it was going to include a living wage of two dollars an hour. On that day, Dr. King said the title of the speech was not “I Have a Dream.” It was “Normalcy — Never Again.” And then you get the 64 Civil Rights Act, after much blood, sweat, and tears, because just 15, mere 15 days after, the end of August 1963, racists blew up girls, little babies in church. They thought it was going to destroy the movement. But they spoke to us even from the grave. Their blood talked to us. And people began to move and organize together. Young whites, and young Blacks, and Jews, and whites, and Black people came together began to build Freedom Summer. 65, 64, you get the Civil Rights Act, 65 the Voting Rights Act, started because a young man was killed by the police, a Black man was killed by the police, and at first, they wanted to take his body to Montgomery. And people had been fighting in Selma a long time before John Lewis or Dr. King or others got there. Miss Boynton was one of them, the lady that we see in the historic pictures, who was beat down on the bridge. They had been laying the sea, laying the groundwork. And they began to mobilize. And out of that movement dramatized the ugliness of racism, where at the end of the march, Dr. King said, the reason there was so much voter suppression, and segregation is because of the fear, the white aristocracy’s fear that poor and low wealth black people, he called it the negro masses of masses of negroes and masses of poor white people, would come together and form a coalition of voting block that would transform the economic architecture of the nation. They caused politicians who were elected not to pass the Voting Rights Act. Lyndon Johnson once had been a segregationist, but he was changed by the movement. There were other people they didn’t elect, the new Congress they changed the atmosphere in which that Congress had to exist. But what happened was a response, as Nell Painter said, the response to the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the response to it was a Southern strategy. The Southern strategy was designed. It’s in writing. Jonathan Schell wrote a book about it called The Illusion, and for 52 years, this deliberate illusion has been, 50-something years has been at work. Since 66, 67, 68, it was designed according to Buchanan, Pat Buchanan, and his Nixon, a colleague Kevin Phillips; they wrote a philosophy called “positive polarization.” This didn’t start with Trump. Positive polarization was a political strategy, a way to divide the country intentionally for political advantage. A way to use the animosity towards the Civil Rights community, the growing power of the women’s movement, the peace movement, use that animosity, particularly in the South, to divide. And they said they wanted to make at that time the Republican party, the party of white people in the South. And they said if they intentionally divided the country, they could cut the country in half, Buchanan said, and that they would have the larger half. And they would use that half to pit people against one another, control from Maryland all the way over to New Mexico. Controlled more than 160 plus electoral college votes before a vote was ever cast. Control nearly 33 of the Congress and more than 20 some seats in the United States Senate. But in order to do it, they said they had to keep sowing the division. You see, Trump didn’t create this. He wasn’t smart enough to, don’t give him that much credit. Trump inherited this. Trump inherited this. He was not the first president to play on the worst fears and use divide and conquer tactics. But he charismatized it. He financed it. He put more even more hate with it. The truth is the package may be different, but the content is the same. So when people say we’ve never seen this before, that’s not historically accurate. Because we have, we know what it looks like. We know what it feels like. We’ve seen it. But we also know what can deal with it. Because, for instance, we recognize in this moment that what has to always take on this extremism is fusion coalition, moral fusion coalition organized. What has to take it on is, is being able to clearly identify issues that are not left versus right, or moderate, or democrat versus republican, but pushing deep into our deepest moral values, and our deepest constitutional values, our deepest religious values. And building from there movements that shift the narrative of the country, change the focus of power, and change what we see as possible. We have to name this extremism, not just as conservatism. No. I often tell people I don’t even like those puny terms. They’re too puny for what we feel. I’m a conservative, you know. And a liberal, you know. I often tell people I want to conserve all the promises of love and justice in the Bible and liberally spread them everywhere. But we have to start using a different kind of language. What we see when people, for instance, block health care and block economic development in poor and low-wealth communities is what Coretta Scott King one time called it. She said it was violence. She said violence is not only a bullet like the one that murdered my husband but starving a child is violence, denying living wages is violence, blocking labor rights is violence. We need to understand so much of what we see now has roots. Has roots. Has roots. But we have to understand what it also says to us. If the forces of extremism had to turn back to the playbook of the 1960s, to try to not only have a physical insurrection on January 6, but keep trying to have a political insurrection to undermine our democracy, but if they had to turn back to the way of doing things even in the 1960s. It’s not because we’re weak. It’s because we’re strong, and they have to lie and make up stories about widespread voter fraud. It’s not because we’re weak. It’s because we’re strong if they have to gerrymander voting districts, and fight tooth and nail, and find people that would even block something as simple and simplistic as a Build Back Better Plan and argue that we don’t have the money when we spent 21 trillion dollars in the war economy since 911, in war and militarization of our communities and our borders. But when people have to go to that level of distortion, and delusion, in order to try to hold on to a form of extremism and to hold on to systemic racism, and poverty, and ecological devastation, and denial of health care, and underfunding our children, and the war economy, and the false middle moral narratives, distorted moral narratives to the religious nationalism. That doesn’t say they’re strong. It actually says they’re weak, and they know, as they used to say in South Africa toward the end of apartheid, they would say what you’re seeing is the death pains of a dying reality. And we need to know right now, we have what we need to bring about a Third Reconstruction. That’s what we have to have in America. That’s why we have to single that with the Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly tomorrow, March on Washington June 18th of next year. Not a day, but a declaration. We’ve got to build a stage for a poor, low-wealth, impacted people of every race, creed, and color to speak. Not people speaking for them but them speaking, turning this nation’s ears in the eyes, making them have to see the faces so that seeing the faces of other Americans can turn the hearts, and the moral focus, and the agenda, and the narrative of this nation. And there’s no time to waste. Democracy versus becoming a more and more civil oligarchy, which only leads you to autocracy, is the battle of our time. We must escalate the nonviolent moral struggle for Third Reconstruction. It’s time to make ending poverty a top legislative prop by ending poverty and low wealth. We wrote a piece called the Third Reconstruction resolution, it’s in Congress now, and it actually lays out 12 points that we have to resolve to do if we’re serious about meeting the challenge. We can’t accept 43 percent, almost 50 percent of this nation, living in poverty and low wealth. We can’t accept the millions of people that don’t have health care. We can’t accept re-segregation of our public schools happening in a way greater than it was in the 1970s. We cannot accept the outright attack on the fundamentals of our democracy. There are three infrastructures we must protect. The infrastructure of our democracy voting. The infrastructure of our daily lives, which is education, and wages, and health care, and housing, and other things, immigration reform. And we must protect the infrastructure of our roads, our bridges, and our technologies, not one but all. We must, we must ensure that the legislation that improved the conditions of the 140 million that were passed during the pandemic because this legislation passed in the pandemic showed that if you invest in the poor communities, it can change their reality. But it must be expanded. We must expand the protection for frontline and essential workers. We must have guaranteed income expansions. And expansions of unemployment insurance, and resources for child care, and social welfare programs, like SNAP and WIC, and child tax credit, earned income tax credit. We need moratoriums on all evictions. And make sure that we expand that to include undocumented people. Because in this country, people, not citizens, have equal protection under the law according to the 14th Amendment. It’s time. We can even use the power of deficit spending, economists say, to invest and meet these pressing needs of the 140 million-plus poor and low-wealth people because that deficit spending will come back five and tenfold. It will spur, and we can’t keep saying, well, we don’t do that. We do it for war. We do it for tax cuts for the wealthy. We can no longer allow politicians to be slaves to corporations and the greedy. And not have a conscience that will serve humanity. MIT Otto’s Swam in the class once said we have a problem with our American economic system, and it’s called conscious, the problem of not realizing how interrelated we are. It’s time to guarantee quality health care for all through the expansion of Medicaid and ensuring Medicare, and enacting universal single-payer health care, the very thing that every Senator, every congressperson gets by just being elected. They get the best health care. What they get when they get elected should be the same thing for the people. We’ve got to guarantee safe and quality housing for all, guarantee the right to water. We cannot continue to allow the poisoning of the water where four million people can get up every day and buy unleaded gas and can’t buy unleaded water. We must enact relief from student debt, and medical debt, and housing debt, and utilities debt, and other household and personal debts that cannot be paid. We must enact comprehensive and just immigration reform that demilitarizes our Southern border, and immigration enforcement repeals mandatory detentions and deportation, and child detentions, and family separations. And instead, we must reunite families. And ensure a regular, timely access to legal documentation and residency, and expand eligibility for public welfare programs to include immigrants who give so much to this country. As one Latino told us this morning at a rally, we didn’t truthfully, historically, we didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us. Because Arizona, and New Mexico, and Texas, and California were once Mexico. We must ensure all the rights of indigenous people, the first story people of this land, and the tribal nations, including the right to the lands that they have, and to block those that try to drill on their lands and destroy their lands. Yeah, we must face climate reality and climate issues, and we must create jobs in that way. We must end unjust mass incarceration and violent policing based on the demands of grassroots organizations and communities, who are the most egregiously impacted by these policies. And we must look at it, for all of it. Yes, African-Americans may be the most percentage-wise target, but we also must bring it to the fold. Native Americans that have to deal with violent policing, and immigrants, and Latinos, yes even poor, and many of our white brothers, and Asian brothers and sisters. And we must even the more, when politicians’ greed and money are trying to kill and murder the hope and the possibility of our democracy. We must do even more to become a more perfect unit. You know, the truth of the matter is, there is a whole lot of history around this that we can, in fact, come together. We have to have a coming together. We can’t just stay in our silos. The truth is, when women were rejected and didn’t have the right to vote, Sojourner Truth and Lucrecia Mott and others, they came together, and they won the right to vote. When slavery was in the land, William Lloyd Garrison, a white man, came together with Frederick Douglass and others, Harriet Tubman, and others, and they formed a fusion movement to bring about abolition. Plessy v. Ferguson looked like it had won victory, but when Thurgood Marshall, a rejected Black lawyer, who almost didn’t make it out of law school, got together with white lawyers, and Black lawyers, and Jewish lawyers, and Christian lawyers, and together they changed this nation. When apartheid was at its height Nelson Mandela, who was rejected, he got together with the mothers of South Africa, and together with Bishop Tutu of the Anglican church and Peter Storey, a white man of the methodist, and they brought all of that together, and they turned apartheid around. Turned around. They came together, and they all came from a Mr. rejected, and the rejected of our time, every race, and color, and creed must come together. That’s what we mean by a Mass Poor People’s Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly March on Washington. Rejected coming together. And we can come together with our allies, and with advocates, and with religious leaders. That’s the only way there’s ever been pushes toward a moral perfect union. We have to come together. The rejected must lead, and we must be with them there. Caring for the poor, and living wages, and health care for all, and environmental justice must come together to reject. We have to lead this revival. That’s why every day, I’m praying for that to happen. Because America’s poor and low-income people know that we face a crisis of possibility, they know that we cannot continue on this current path. Pope Francis said, one day today, we see that the world has never been so rich, and yet, despite such abundance, poverty and inequality persist and grow, and in times of opulence when it should be possible to put an end to poverty, the powers, the powers want to keep us from doing that. And that’s why the Poor People’s Campaign, we’re bringing people together. That’s why we launched this campaign in 2018. That’s why we conducted an audit to find out what was really the reality of the 140 million of poverty in low wealth in this country. That’s why we’ve done another study to show that poor low-wealth people now make about 30 percent of the electorate, and in all battleground states, over 40 percent of the elected. It’s time now. Because we have seen a monumental betrayal and a grotesque form of political malpractice. When we look at the ways in which poor and low-wealth people, too often, are being pushed aside, are being hurt, or being denied. Too much of our politics is being weaponized. Too many people are being hurt. We must make sure that, particularly with our children, far too many people do not see that the Muslim child, and the Christian child, and the Jewish child, and the Black child, and the white child, and the native child, and the brown child, Latino child, all are made in the image of God. We cannot ignore our common life anymore. We have to work together. We have to stand together. So let me close here. Because I know there’s some theologians that said, yes, Barber, all that’s true. But do you have a biblical scripture for it? You know we can’t just go around doing everything, anything. Do you really have a scripture for it? Well, in fact, I do. First of all, before I get to scripture, I want to remind you something Dr. King said at his last sermon. We talk about how he said, I’ve been to the mountaintop, but before that, he said nothing would be more attractive than for us to turn back now. We must give ourselves to this movement, he said; a year before that, silence is betrayal. Rabbi Hessel, the great rabbi, said there is an evil which most of us condone and are guilty of. It is the evil of indifference, the evil of indifference to evil. We remain too neutral. We’re not easily moved by the wrongs. And that is an evil that is insidious. That we must exercise from our human reality. And then the very founder, the very namesake of this lecture, brother Wiesel once said, we must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men and women are persecuted because of their race, we must take sides. We cannot simply stand on the sidelines. But I hear you’re still saying, Reverend Barber, is there a scripture? Oh yes, in the Bible, there’s a scripture that’s honored by Christian, Muslims, and Jewish people, and other faiths is found in Amos chapter 5. Now, we often quote this scripture, but we quote the end of it, let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty strain. But I went back, and I read it in Hebrew, read it in the message Bible, and I found something there that actually calls us to have a Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly March on Washington, or any capital of any country, to challenge injustice, to challenge lying, to challenge mistreatment of the poor, to challenge how people have been rejected. Because if you go back a little bit, Amos 5 starts saying, and it says it in the message Bible, it says, that this violence and injustice is epidemic. And some people have literally given up and saying what’s the use? Then you read a little bit further, in Amos 5, and it says that God says to Amos, if I can get a remnant, I don’t need everybody, but if I can get a remnant of people who will fill up the streets, and shut down the malls, and the factories, and who will cry, and wail, as though something is really wrong, who will cry in well, and not be satisfied with injustice, who will cry and wail, and recognize that there’s something possible besides what we see. Amos 5 says that God then says, then when I hear you, when I see you assembled, when I see you willing to shut down the streets, the factories, and when I see you in the public square crying and wailing about the realities, then I will come, I God will come and help you. My God. Could God be waiting on us in America? Could God be waiting on us in the world? I want to see. I want to see that scripture come to reality because it says that if we, not everybody, but a remnant, a remnant of people just like it was in the civil rights movement, it was a remnant it wasn’t everybody, it’s like it was an abolitionist movement, it was a remnant sovereignty, wasn’t always everybody. But if a remnant will call a meeting, call a meeting of the poor, call the meeting of the rejected, call a meeting of every race, creed, and color, and every religion, and every faith, and even those without particular religious faith, but they believe in the moral arc of the universe. So we’re calling it Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly March on Washington June 18, 2022. This is the only thing that has ever changed the nation. It’s not when we just have a day. But when we have a declaration. Remember the March on Washington, and it wasn’t the day. It was a declaration. Because at the end, Dr. King said, go back, go back, go back, go to work. They came from work, they were inspired to keep working, and they went back to work. And that’s what we must have. We must do more mobilizing, organizing, registering, and educating, and empowering. That’s what must happen. The rejected. The rejected, we all must come together and have a meeting. And that meeting must be a declaration that we will not accept anything less than one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. And the truth is, according to Amos 5, when we get together, when all of us who love to love, get together, when a remnant of us who love justice, get together, when a remnant of us who love lifting people, get up and get together, when we come out of our silos, and come into coalition together, when a remnant of us who love mercy, get together, when we get together, what a day of God’s visitation, what a day of justice, what a day of transformation, what a day of newness, what a day of possibilities. It is our time. God is speaking what he spoke to Amos to us. I need that remnant. I need you now. I need you to mobilize. I need you to cry. I need you to not be comfortable. I need you to wail. I need you to break this nation’s heart with love, truth, and mercy and call it to repentance and public policy. And if you do, you haven’t even seen the fullness of possibilities that can be accomplished. And so I came tonight to invite you to join in the coming together. The remnant of shutting down the factories, the streets, the schools, the malls join us in a year-long mobilization for June 18, 2022, of Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly March on Washington. Martin was trying to do it, and they shot him. Maybe we ought to say to Martin. We got this now. You just cheer us on from the heavens. We got this now. There will be a Third Reconstruction. Because we will not stop wailing until right is a reality and justice rolls down like waters. And righteous like a mighty stream. You know, I close here. I’ve often said this during this season, I know I’m a little long, but I’ll stop here. One day I was sitting down, and I was musing. I have a little bit of Howard Thurman in me, just a tad, and I was conversing with Frederick Douglass and others, just talking with them in the spirit. I’m not crazy. I was just thinking about their words. And in that moment, I started asking why am I still breathing in the midst of COVID? I’m not better than people who caught COVID. I’m sure I’ve been around it. I know people that were good people, that were faithful, they died. Why am I still breathing? And then, at that moment of deep reflection, the spirit said wrong question. Wrong question. That’s like asking the question, why were you born, or why are you still here? You can never really answer that question because it’s so wrapped up in grace and mercy and decisions that you had nothing to do with. Here’s the right question, that day in the spirit. What are you going to do with the breath you have left? The issue is not why you’re still breathing. The issue is the fact of the matter, every day, all of us live six minutes from our last prayer. If any of us lose breath for six minutes, most doctors tell us that’s over. Your brain is dead. Your heart is stopped. Six minutes, six minutes. That’s all most of us have six minutes. The Bible says we’re just a step from there. But the question that the spirit said that day to me was, what are you going to do with your six minutes? Or your six hours? Or your six days? Or your six months? Or maybe your sixty years? Do you recognize that breath is too precious to waste? Have you come to the conclusion that Mr. COVID that breath is too precious to waste. And the only thing you ought to be using your breath to do is to breathe some more love, breathe some more justice, breathe some more righteousness, breathe some more trust. You ought to be using your breath to resuscitate. Resuscitate those who have lost their breath in the middle of the battle. You ought to use that breath to resuscitate. A call to love, and mercy, and grace. And whether you have six minutes left or six hours, or six days, or six weeks, or six months, or sixty years. If you use your breath to breathe more justice into the world and to join with others. Then one day, you’ll hear well done. That good and faithful servant. We used to say in the club, six minutes. Six minutes dug it fresh. Six minutes to the dance floor. But I want to flip all of that, turn it on his head, and say six-minute Boston University. Six minutes Divinity School. Six minutes to all of you guys. Six minutes. Six minutes. Possibly your whole life is in it. Don’t waste a bit of it in things that don’t matter. Whatever breath you have, with every step you take, use it for justice, and mercy, and love, and truth. Because anything else is merely a waste of precious breath. Spirit of the Lord breathe on us that we might be the remnant. That we might call the meeting. That we might wail. That we might bring into being a Third Reconstruction with your help. Amen.
Professor Zank: Thank you, Bishop Barber, for addressing us in such a powerful and meaningful way. I found myself smiling a lot, even though the things you were speaking about felt grave, and difficult, and almost insurmountable. But it was also a message of encouragement for people to get engaged. I have a comment from my colleague and friend, Ingrid Anderson, who thanks you for what you said and she says, we are honored to have you with us tonight. Where do you see something in the legacy of Martin Luther King that people usually overly overlook and pay no attention to? Where do you feel that his image and his message has been kind of sanitized and turned into some nice commodity that we can all handle and keep at a distance? Where would you see the provocation that comes from?
Bishop Reverend Dr. William J Barber II: You know the Bible says in Matthew 23, we love the tombs of the Prophets. And that’s the first place I often think about with Dr. King, and not only him, Fannie Lou Hamer, those welfare rights women who, actually, were the ones that called him to the Poor People’s Campaign. We forget how radical he was. He wasn’t just for love. He was love that was rooted in justice. He said love by itself is weak, and anemic justice by itself is too harsh. And people act as though he was tame. He was labeled as dangerous from the very start. He was labeled as dangerous after the March on Washington. We have to remember people tried to kill him and those who are working with him. The other thing is that.
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