Nov. 15, 2015
Moral Monday Leader Encourage Voters to the Polls for EqualityBarber says Democrats don't always do what they should with power either
Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “This is no time for foolishness,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II in an energizing message at the Richmond, Va. Branch NAACP’s Freedom Fund Awards Gala Nov. 7.
Dr. Barber urged the audience of about 300 people to fight against inequities in Virginia as they have since 2013 with regular and massive Moral Monday demonstrations in North Carolina — by protesting the General Assembly’s refusal to expand Medicaid health care to hundred of thousands of uninsured Virginians and by “mobilizing and marching our voters to the polls.”
He called the 20 ministers in attendance to the foot of the stage at Second Baptist Church of South Richmond and challenged them to plan “the first civil disobedience” to push Virginia to expand Medicaid.
“In such a time in this country where the Constitution says there is equal protection under the law, too many people are sniffing Koch — what’s being put out by the conservative Koch brothers — and are drunk on the poison of the Tea Party,” Dr. Barber said.
The 52-year-old pastor and president of the North Carolina NAACP also serves on the board of the national NAACP. He has worked tirelessly, though unsuccessfully, against rollbacks in voting rights in North Carolina that affect African-Americans and communities of color.
He said the NAACP has a mission to educate people about the inequities and injustices perpetrated in communities across the South, including inequitable funding for education, a lack of health care for all, unfairness in the criminal justice system and policies such as refusing to raise the minimum wage that are anti-labor and anti-poor people.
He said while African-Americans are disproportionately affected in many cases, large numbers of white people also are harmed by the decades-long strategies designed to pit black people and white people against one another.
“It’s more than the Republican Party,” he continued. “It’s extremists. The Democrats don’t do what they should when they have the power. And the Republicans do what they shouldn’t when they get the power.
“When race trumps common sense, it’s no time for foolishness.”