Michael Schulson is a writer in Durham, North Carolina.

For Republicans in North Carolina, 2016 looked like a crowning moment. Donald Trump won the swing state by four points. Senator Richard Burr fended off his Democratic challenger there by six. Republicans held on to supermajorities in both chambers of the general assembly. At the state legislature in Raleigh in December, Republicans were scrambling to weaken executive power after the incumbent GOP governor, Pat McCrory, conceded a close race to his Democratic challenger. There were rumors that Republican legislators would also try to pack the state supreme court, where a progressive had won the swing seat.

But as Democrats across the country consider how to respond to President Donald Trump, some progressive leaders, from grassroots organizers to the head of the pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC Priorities USA, are looking to North Carolina, of all states, as a model.


That’s largely thanks to the work of Reverend William Barber II, a pastor in Goldsboro who has run North Carolina’s NAACP chapter since 2005. Barber’s “Moral Monday” protest movement has by now gained national attention, but with the defeat of McCrory, the movement can finally point to an electoral success. And it has continued to gain momentum: In December, after a week of protests in response to the Republican power grab, in which approximately 20 protestors were arrested in acts of civil disobedience, commentators across the media sphere were discussing whether Republicans in Raleigh had lost their minds.

McCrory’s loss, along with the continuing success of the Moral Monday movement, offers some tantalizing questions for Democrats as they figure out how to channel and sustain the anti-Trump energy that has brought millions of people out to protest the new president and his policies. Did a grassroots progressive movement actually manage to unseat a Republican governor? And, if so, does it provide a replicable model for progressives nationwide as they regroup? It does seem like Moral Mondays played at least some role in ousting McCrory. But North Carolina’s politics are distinctive, and the Moral Monday movement, which prides itself on being principled not political, may be difficult to reproduce in other states. Nonetheless, Barber and his group are continuing a pivot toward a more national role, and Democrats are watching.

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Four years ago, state politics in North Carolina looked a lot like national politics today. After a long period of Democratic control, Republicans had swept into executive office and secured solid majorities in both legislative chambers.

McCrory had been in office for just over three months when, in April 2013, Barber and 16 other people, most of them clergy, were arrested while protesting a new voter ID law. Over the next three years, the basic formula played out again and again: Republicans would make a political move. Barber would lead protests. State, and sometimes national, attention would swivel toward Raleigh. During legislative sessions, protests would often be held weekly, on Monday evenings, giving rise to the Moral Monday name.

Approximately 1,000 protestors were arrested during the first year of Moral Mondays. A rally in February 2014 attracted tens of thousands of people. Organizers claimed it was the largest civil rights protest in the South since the 1965 march in Selma, Alabama. This was tonal politics. Whether you agreed or disagreed with the protestors, it was obvious something controversial was happening in Raleigh, and that plenty of people were upset.

Conservative legislators passed conservative legislation anyway. But the protests may have exacted a price. Even as Republicans won local and federal elections in North Carolina, key statewide offices—the attorney general, the secretary of state and, most importantly, the governor—went to Democrats in the 2016 election.

Did Barber’s grassroots movement really play a role? There’s evidence it might have, and the argument goes something like this: McCrory, the former mayor of Charlotte, and only the fourth Republican governor in North Carolina since the end of Reconstruction, had run as a moderate, center-right pragmatist. But after his inauguration in 2013, he quickly started collaborating with a much less moderate legislature and signed onto legislation that cut unemployment benefits and blocked an expansion of Medicaid that would have provided health coverage for 500,000 North Carolinians.

Then, the Moral Monday protests began, and the governor’s ratings cratered. According to Elon University polling, McCrory’s approval rating dropped 10 points between April 2013, when the protests started, and September 2013. By then, the poll found, three out of every five North Carolinians had heard of the Moral Monday movement, and approximately half of those people approved of it. Perhaps more significantly, after the first summer of Moral Mondays, the portion of North Carolinians who actively disapproved of McCrory had nearly doubled, from 25 percent to 46 percent, Elon found. Public Policy Polling, a left-leaning firm in Raleigh, noticed a similarly sharp drop in McCrory’s approval rating around the time that Moral Mondays began. Other than a brief approval bump around the time of Hurricane Matthew in 2016, the governor’s numbers never recovered.

“Most voters don’t pay close attention to state government. But the Moral Monday movement pushed back hard. Its constant visibility forced all of these issues to stay in the headlines,” wrote PPP’s Tom Jensen in a recent postmortem of the gubernatorial election. “The seeds of [McCrory’s] final defeat today were very much planted in the summer of 2013.”

It’s possible that McCrory’s popularity drop just happened to coincide with the protests. To be sure, McCrory had other troubles during his term, including tussles over coal ash disposal, a controversial toll road proposal and, especially, HB2. That bill, which became a national flashpoint in 2016 because of its restrictions against transgender people, led to major boycotts in the state. The Atlantic Coast Conference pulled league championship games from North Carolina. Bruce Springsteen backed out of a concert in Greensboro. A pre-election Elon poll found that less than 40 percent of North Carolina voters approved of the law, while 50 percent actively disapproved of it.

McCrory’s biggest losses in the 2016 race came in the city he had once led, Charlotte, and surrounding Mecklenburg County; he had won the area narrowly in 2012 but lost by more than 100,000 votes in 2016. State Senator Jeff Jackson, a Charlotte-area Democrat, said McCrory lost key votes because of a perception that he was unable to stand up to the legislature. “Add to that HB2, and then add to that a local issue involving a toll road, and there was never any question that he was not going to carry Mecklenburg again.”

Jackson was skeptical that the Moral Monday movement had much to do with the loss. But five political operatives and analysts I interviewed in North Carolina, from across the political spectrum, all agreed that the protests had probably contributed to McCrory’s downfall.

Sunshine Hillygus, a political scientist at Duke University who has studied the role of wedge issues in politics, said that while HB2 was “critically important” to McCrory’s loss, the Moral Monday movement was “able to keep issues on the table and attention on McCrory in particular.” Michael Munger, also a political scientist at Duke and a libertarian candidate for governor in 2008, points out that while Trump and Burr did better than expected in North Carolina, the governor’s race was different. “Is there some factor that seems to have targeted McCrory specifically? The answer is Moral Monday,” Munger says.

What’s clear is that the race was close, and the movement consistently focused its protests on the governor. “There are a number of factors you could point to,” Munger acknowledges. “It is plausible to think Moral Monday had an impact.”

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In the aftermath of the 2016 election, and the early days of the Trump “resistance,” both movement leaders and national left-leaning groups are asking themselves: Can North Carolina and Moral Mondays provide a national model for progressive organizing?

The movement is not a seamless fit for a national, partisan agenda. In many ways, the Moral Monday protests seem to have thrived precisely because they feel local, independent and at least somewhat disconnected from party politics. Movement leaders like to observe that Barber first organized major protests in Raleigh years ago, when Democrats controlled the governor’s office and general assembly. “The goal of a moral movement is never to be tied to any one particular political party,” Barber told me in an interview late last year.

The pastor also explicitly situates himself within a prophetic religious tradition, rather than a political ideology. He and his fellow protesters frame their work as a continuation of the Civil Rights movement and, especially, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, rather than as a movement with electoral goals. Politicians are not allowed to speak onstage at events. Instead, Barber and others speak frankly in the language of religious activism and human suffering. “The goal of a moral movement is to put a face on the pain of extremism so that you’re not just talking about numbers,” Barber says.

Sitting in the atrium of the state legislative building, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a Durham pastor and a leader in the movement, explained some of the basic elements of its localized model. The protests, he said, work by asserting moral implications for specific legislative actions—Wilson-Hartgrove describes what they do as a kind of “citizen oversight.” They attack policies, not people: “Because we believe it’s wrong to attack your enemies, we’ve never attacked McCrory as a person,” he says. “We refused to let people come here with signs that mocked him.”

Still, the movement clearly has a progressive orientation. Barber spoke in a primetime slot at the Democratic National Convention earlier this year, and he has been highly critical of President Trump—for instance, issuing a strong rebuke to his immigration executive order. An announcement about the Moral Monday movement’s annual “march on Raleigh,” scheduled for next week, mentions that this year’s “people’s assembly will be held in the wake of the election of Donald Trump.” Strategically, the policy positions Barber supports are more or less aligned with those of the Democratic Party.

The movement also has gone on the road before. Since 2014, smaller Moral Monday protests have taken place in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia and other states. Starting in 2015, Barber and movement leaders organized Repairers of the Breach, a small nonprofit dedicated to coalition-building in other states. For much of the past year, Barber has been holding revivals in cities around the country, as well as classes for clergy and community organizers that delve into Moral Monday tactics.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the movement seems to be redoubling that turn toward national involvement. On New Year’s Eve, he held a teach-in and revival event in D.C., and earlier this month, he led hundreds of protesters to deliver a petition to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell protesting Trump’s nomination of Jeff Sessions for attorney general. The movement is also exploring partnerships with national organizations, mostly smaller faith-based partnerships. Details are still sketchy, but in the months ahead, Barber says, “We’re going to be working in about 25 specific areas in the South and in the Rust Belt and in some of the northern areas.” The goal, said Wilson-Hartgrove, is to help build up state-level coalitions, with an eye toward more national organizing in the future.

In April 2017, on the anniversary of King’s assassination, the group plans to release what Barber describes as “a race-economic audit of America”—a document that will analyze national progress on class and racial issues since 1968. The spring of 2018, which will be both a midterm election year and the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination, seems like a natural time for the movement to launch a larger national campaign that is framed as a continuation of King’s work. “In 2017, 2018, we believe that we need a national Moral Revival Poor People’s Campaign,” Barber told me.

Still, as Hillygus points out, “there are things about North Carolina that make it a little bit different.” The state has a long history of progressive politics and strong African-American political networks. Republicans have controlled the capital for the past four years, but it’s in the middle of the Research Triangle area, with its large academic institutions and deep pool of progressive voters. And Barber is an unusually skilled orator and organizer.

Cornell William Brooks, the national president and CEO of the NAACP, cautions against assuming that what works in North Carolina will work elsewhere, citing the state’s long history of interracial progressive coalition-building. “To build a fusion coalition movement atop that makes a great deal of sense. If you look at a state like Mississippi or South Carolina or Alabama, the histories are different.”

Reverend Francys Johnson, the president of the Georgia NAACP, has worked closely with Barber to help bring Moral Monday events to Georgia. He suggested to me that the national NAACP office was “miffed at what to do with Reverend Barber” and his leadership from the state level. “Nobody’s miffed,” Brooks says. “We let Reverend Barber do what every NAACP state conference president in the country does, which is serve their people, in their state, in service of the nation’s interest, under the umbrella and the leadership of the NAACP. He is a state conference president. That’s what he is. But I also want to give credit to all the others who are doing their work.”

Even relatively successful attempts to adopt the Moral Monday model have faced hurdles. Georgia has had large Moral Monday-inspired protests since 2014. In key respects, the state’s demographic and political situation mirrors North Carolina’s. But the Moral Monday protests there have not achieved the size or prominence of those in North Carolina. “One of the challenges is Reverend Barber is in North Carolina,” Johnson says. “Additionally, we just need some time. It took eight years for Reverend Barber to get his feet under him.”

Still, national progressive leaders are taking notice. The Moral Monday method is “a model we think is effective and want to replicate in state capitals around the country,” says Nick Rathod, the executive director of the State Innovation Exchange (SiX), a national organization that works to advance progressive causes at the state level. Rathod and SiX recently hosted Barber at their annual conference in Washington, D.C., where Barber gave a keynote speech to 400 state legislators from around the country.

Scott Anderson, the executive director of Committee on States, a national organization that coordinates wealthy progressive funders, says the Moral Monday movement has been coming up in post-election conversations. Anderson lives in North Carolina, and he has been arrested with Barber. “Progressives need that kind of moral, and sometimes disruptive, voice out there,” he says.

In recent conversations with Politico Magazine and with the Washington Post, Guy Cecil, a veteran Democratic operative and the chairman of Priorities USA, cited Barber’s work as an important model for progressives nationally. Barber “understands issues of identity and economics are intertwined,” Cecil told the Post. “We need a Moral Monday Movement in state capitols and here in D.C.”

After I asked him multiple questions about how the Moral Monday protests could be applied nationally or taken to Washington, Barber seemed to become annoyed with the implication that the movement would come to serve a national political agenda. Instead, he argued that effective local movements work “from the bottom up” to set that agenda, and force national leaders to respond to them.

“Some people think a movement is national because you have a march in Washington, or because you have an address in Washington,” Barber said. “Selma became national because you nationalize a local movement.”

“Movements don’t come from D.C. down. They come from Birmingham, Greensboro and Montgomery up. And that’s something we’ve got recapture,” he said.

