Another part of the Republican vote suppression scheme is aimed right at my old home turf, Cumberland County, a heavily nonwhite area which includes Fayetteville & Fort Bragg. And part of the plan is probably going to work. And this is important. To see why, a bit of background: in 2004, George W. Bush beat … Continue reading Vote Suppression for Lunch: North Carolina, Part Two
Durham, which is a city and a county. It’s a largish county, with about 300,00 population. It’s the most heavily Democratic of NC’s 100 counties. In 2012 its citizens cast 109,000 votes for Barack Obama, about a 75% margin. (Romney won NC by 97000 votes)
I already voted, on the first day of early voting, October 20. (Early voting was one of the targets of vote suppression, which the courts largely restored.) So did many others.
The Moral Monday protest campaign, aimed at the reactionary NC legislature and its stick-it-to-everybody-but-the-rich program, was by many measures, quite successful in its first season of actions, in the spring and summer of 2013.
Above all, on my list, its biggest success is a kind of “negative”, that is: it has not splintered and vanished; two years later its core of supporters is still there, and yesterday (April 29 2015) it began the work of regathering and relaunching for 2015, at the state capital in Raleigh.
This action was not heralded as the beginning of the Revolution, but rather another round in what has been seen from the start as a long-term struggle.
In fact there were plenty of nonviolent black people on the Baltimore streets last night, doing their level best to protect other people of color, and black-owned (or black servicing) shops and property.
[Note: This essay was originally published in Friends Journal; but it’s now behind their paywall. It still seems timely today; maybe more so.] Quakerism was born in a time of revolutionary upheaval. Yet it learned how to survive when the revolution failed and was followed by decades of persecution. I sometimes hear Quakers waxing nostalgic … Continue reading “Survival & Resistance” A Message from 2006 That is Timely Again