Category Archives: Black & White & Other Colors

Breaking: Barber Goes National – Updated

The Kairos Center [an organization created by Union Theological Seminary inNew York City] is excited to announce that the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II will be transitioning out of his role as the president of the North Carolina Conference of the NAACP in June, in order to join the growing leadership of the New Poor People’s Campaign. [The New PPC is a project of the Kairos Center.] The North Carolina NAACP announced the news in a press release this morning,

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Ringing Spring’s Bell for Continued Quaker Resistance

The talk was lively and nonstop, even with breaks. The gathering moved almost seamlessly into broader issue discussion, with resource people as participants, to consider ways to keep moving and build cooperation and momentum.
The Consultation was not aimed at producing resolutions or a new organization, but to assist in encouraging and facilitating cooperation for continued resistance. Encouragement also seemed in plentiful supply, and we closed with some music, from Scott Holmes, who doubles as an aggressive lawyer fighting mass incarceration when he’s not writing songs. He’d written a new resistance song just for us.
Perhaps this model of locally-driven multi-issue and multi-group consultations would be of use to other Meetings. It is neither expensive nor complicated, and the organizing was done by a small cadre of volunteers, using social media as the main means of promotion. And one of its most welcome outcomes was a lift in spirits. We’ll all need more of those; there’s still much to ring the resistance bell about.

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A Quaker Race Riot In Philadelphia?

So will anything come from all this at the PYM session on March 25?

It isn’t supposed to. Such sessions are typically very much scripted and scheduled in advance, with little time or space for anything spontaneous to happen. And the published schedule indicates that there will be some time for questions about the staff changes. This may leave room for some venting. But on the other hand, there have been disruptions at recent PYM sessions, so sometime things don’t go according to plan.

But the changes will not be up for review; wise or not, the General Secretary oversees (sic) the staff, and staffing decisions are her call. And with a legal action in the offing, Duncan-Tessmer has all the more incentive to listen and say little beyond, “Thank thee Friend.”

Yet even if the lid stays on this weekend, these rumblings are signs of a body in significant internal disarray. And frankly, with the burgeoning return of organized, high-power racism (not to mention numerous other plagues) all around it, this turmoil could not come at a more inopportune time.

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“Dilemma for Dr. King” – A 60th Anniversary Review

This is why as the Johnson administration talks of escalating the war beyond 450,000 men, of bombing Hanoi-Haiphong and even of confronting China on the Asian mainland the virtual silence of the unchallenged spokesman of American conscience becomes ever louder and more painful to those who have followed [Dr. King] thus far. The war in Vietnam is perhaps the gravest challenge of Dr. King’s career and conceivably its culmination. Who among us today could blame him if, faced with this dilemma, he agonizes over his course of action? No one, surely; but Martin Luther King, Jr., is not only answerable to us of today: he must walk with history as well. And if in his agony he should fail to act, it must be asked: can history forgive him?

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