This reflection was written in response to the Winter 2015 immersion course during which we traveled to North Carolina to join the Historic Thousands on Jones Street Moral March and learn from the North Carolina NAACP and the Forward Together Movement.
There are a lot of things happening in North Carolina, all of which are remarkable, and yet the thing that sits with me the most is the fierce presence of love undergirding it all. Moral Mondays, as a movement, provides two major model inspirations for organizers and dissenters across the country- an affirmative intersectional being and a long-term vision. What I mean is that while it is one thing to acknowledge “intersections” ie that many types of work and struggle are interconnected, it is different to create a space in which those struggles are all given “stage-time” and where the validity of someone else’s struggles is not questioned-there is no hierarchy where it suggested that one goal must come at the cost or delay of another…
Part of the long-term vision is not simply a defeat of unjust legislation, or a securing of new legislation, or even deeper community bonds and growth, but that there would be a renewal and restoration of those currently pushing forward problematic and harmful ideologies. Rev. Barber reminds us that we should hope and pray for changed hearts, for new minds, that we be reconciled with those with whom we currently disagree, not in name only, but in truth, that injustice be removed to permit love to move.