North Carolina’s Moral Mondays

Ari Berman writes for The Nation: “On an overcast afternoon in early July, 300 activists pack into the white-columned Christian Faith Baptist Church to prepare for the ninth wave of Moral Monday protests at the state legislature. ‘Supporters on the right, civil disobedience on the left,’ they’re told as they enter. The racially and socioeconomically diverse crowd has the feel of an Obama campaign revival. Eighty people take the left side of the pews, wearing green armbands to signal their intention to get arrested, nearly all of them for the first time. ‘The goal of Moral Monday,’ says the Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, ‘is to dramatize the shameful condition of our state.'”