The equalizers
The Rev. William J. Barber II
SPEAKING UP FOR THE POOR
FOR 27 YEARS, THE REV. WILLIAM J. BARBER II HAS been the pastor at a church in the small city of Goldsboro, N.C. But on a recent afternoon, he could be found at a hotel in Raleigh, about an hour away from home. His work as an activist takes him to the state capital often enough that he’s well known there. Not long after, he’d move on to an event in Charleston, S.C., and then to Iowa, where he’d lead a march demanding a presidential debate on poverty.
Barber is ever in motion, and he’s still picking up momentum. He’s hardly stopped since he attracted national attention as the leader of the Moral Mondays protests held at the North Carolina capitol in Raleigh beginning in 2013. His newsmaking actions were founded on the idea that being a person of faith means fighting for justice—whether by working beside a conservative mayor to protest the closing of rural hospitals or by calling for an NAACP boycott of the state in response to the legislature’s actions, like its infamous “bathroom bill.”
In 2018, the 56-year-old minister—a MacArthur “genius” grantee who founded the community-organizing group Repairers of the Breach—put a new spin on that work. He and the Rev. Liz Theoharis of the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary launched the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Under the principle Barber calls “moral fusion,” they take a holistic view of the relationship among injustices, from ecological devastation to systemic racism, and he believes solutions must come from listening to those most affected. “We believe they have agency,” Barber says of the 140 million poor or low-income Americans, “and their stories need to be heard, their faces need to be seen. They have the answers.”
The campaign now has a presence in a majority of states and is planning an assembly in Washington, which it hopes will draw thousands, for June 20.
Any resemblance to the work of Martin Luther King Jr. is intentional: King launched his own Poor People’s Campaign less than a year before he was assassinated in April 1968. It was also in 1968 that Barber—who was born just
