Chicago, Illinois

The Rev Dr William Barber stands at the pulpit where Martin Luther King Jr preached 50 years ago, issuing an impassioned call to arms, his deep baritone filling the church.



“It’s time for a breakthrough,” he calls, almost howling, sweat dripping from his brow, as an organist punches frantic chords in accompaniment. “We’ve got to break through the silence. We’ve got to break through the hate. A breakthrough until every poor person has a guaranteed income.”

“Hallelujah!” the 600-strong congregation cries back. The walls of the Stone Temple Baptist church almost seem to shudder.

“A breakthrough until voting rights are secure, until we are truly one nation,” he calls, hurling his notes from the lectern and hauling his 6ft 2in frame across the stage.

The oration is infectious, Barber’s typical brand of liberation theology fusing constitutional politics and biblical principles of love and mercy. It makes not just the hairs on your neck stand on end, but your whole body sway.

The 54-year-old pastor from North Carolina is not just here to preach – this is the start of what he hopes will be a nationwide movement to complete the work that King could not. It is the first organised campaign of civil disobedience in the Donald Trump era. It’s aim? To bring about a “moral revival across the US”.

People gather at the end of the Poor People’s March, on 19 June 1968 in Washington DC. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Chicago is the eighth stop on the pastor’s exhaustive tour of 14 states, laying the foundations for a new Poor People’s Campaign – the last movement of the civil rights era, which effectively ended after King’s death. The 1968 campaign attempted to push Congress into passing an economic bill of rights including a package of guaranteed income, equitable housing and funds for poor communities. But, this time around, with the new campaign still in its infancy, the aim is broader: to unite the disenfranchised groups in the US – across the spectrums of race and sexuality – under a common cause.

“We have to remember that the civil rights movement did not just end,” says Barber before the evening service. “It was assassinated by killing the leaders, it was assassinated through division. Throughout our trips, what we’re finding is there is still a need for that coalition that Dr King talked about in ’68 in coming together to address the evils of racism, militarism, systemic poverty and ecological devastation.”

We were driving through the streets of Chicago’s West Side as the sun was setting, and Barber’s point was perhaps best made simply by looking out of the window on to some of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods. Fifty years after King came to Stone Temple Baptist church as part of his campaign against slum housing, some areas here still have a poverty rate of 60%. In a neighbourhood a few miles from the church, the life expectancy is just 69 years.

“Some issues are not about left and right, Republican and Democrat – they’re about our deepest moral values,” says Barber. “And we believe that you have to have a campaign, a movement, that seeks to reshape the moral narrative.”

The pastor has spent the past four years as the backbone of the Moral Mondays campaign in North Carolina, a civil disobedience movement that ballooned after fighting a series of state voter suppression laws, which disproportionately affected poor people of colour. The movement now covers a broad range of progressive issues.

The sustained campaign began commanding national attention when, every Monday, scores of protesters started entering the state capitol building and laying their bodies down for arrest. More than 900 people were arrested throughout the campaign; Barber has lost count of how many times he was placed in handcuffs.

The movement scored major victories, culminating in a supreme court decision ruling state voter laws unconstitutional, and the unseating of the Republican governor Pat McCrory in 2016.

You can’t go boasting about taking people’s healthcare. That’s not Christian. William Barber

The Chicago service had begun earlier with gospel songs from the civil rights era and testimony from some of the disenfranchised groups Barber hopes to galvanise: an Afghanistan war veteran suffering from PTSD; an environmental activist fighting pollution of the Calumet river; and 27-year-old Ashley Mesch, a care worker for the elderly who is paid poverty-line wages of $10.10 (£7.66) an hour and who struggles to support her family.

Mesch recently joined the local Fight for $15 movement, which was dealt a blow earlier in the year when Bruce Rauner, the Republican governor of Illinois, blocked state legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15. After hearing Barber’s sermon, Mesch says she is ready to put her body on the line and take part in her first direct action next year.

“Hearing the reverend was rejuvenating,” she says. “I’m absolutely ready to do anything that needs to be done. I might get arrested, but people need to hear the message.”

Barber – who co-chairs the campaign with the Rev Dr Liz Theoharis, a pastor from New York City – hopes to sign up 1,000 people in 25 states and DC for a season of civil disobedience in the spring of next year. Protesters will stage sit-ins at state capitols and in the US Congress under a “moral agenda” encompassing a host of issues, from LGBTQ and voting rights to immigration reform and access to healthcare. The campaign will not say yet how many people have signed up, but it has partnered with dozens of local groups across the country to avoid what Barber describes as “helicopter leadership”. “Liz and I are almost like a travelling course of theology and public activism, and then we turn it over to the anchor groups in each of the states,” he says.

It is perhaps the most ambitious civil rights campaign since the 60s, and will be underpinned by Barber’s work in North Carolina, where he served as president of the NAACP state chapter for more than a decade before resigning earlier in the year to take on this national role.

A sign at the town entrance. Photograph: Christopher Fowler/The Guardian

Goldsboro, North Carolina

A few days after the service in Chicago, Barber is back at the Greenleaf Christian church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, where he has led the congregation since 1993. Despite the campaign’s rigorous schedule, he tries to come back for Sunday service every weekend, tending to his flock in one of North Carolina’s most racially segregated cities.

These days, he is no longer just preaching to the 200 or so congregants in the pews, but tens of thousands of people online as well.

In 2016, he gave an electrifying speech at the Democratic national convention, calling for “moral defibrillators of our time” to “shock this nation with the power of love” – it was an address that thrust an already well-known civil rights leader on to the global stage.

Before Sunday service begins, Barber, a seeming perfectionist, stands in the aisles talking to the choir about their posture on camera and warning them not to touch the microphones hovering above their heads. “We’ve got 40,000 watching us online,” he says. “It can distort the sound.”

That morning, he gives a sermon titled: “How can I love those who are doing things that I cannot like?”

This was the day after Trump told the Voter Values Summit, an annual meeting of conservative activists, that he was “stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values”. The president went on to renew a pledge to “step by step” remove Barack Obama’s signature healthcare legislation that offers insurance to millions of low-income Americans.

Barber at the Greenleaf Christian church on 4 September 2016. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

Barber is at his magnetic best again, offering a thundering rebuke. “It hurts me to say the so-called Values Summit is not about Judeo-Christian values; it’s not about Christianity, but about the values of the heretical, rhetorical extremism, funded by a whole lot of money,” he says. “Their values are cash and not Christ. Greed and not grace.

“But I do not have any deep hatred for the president, because there is so much potential for good. I love him as a human being. But I can’t like, because what the president did was irreligious and irreverent. You can’t go boasting about taking people’s healthcare. That’s not Christian.”

The congregation applauds. “You’re right pastor,” they shout. “Amen.”

After the sermon draws to a close, Barber invites me back to his study. The pastor is semi-reclined on a stool – he has a form of advanced arthritis that causes him near-constant pain and has left him walking with a cane.

Barber views this new movement not just as a challenge to the extremist Republicanism embodied by Trump’s presidency, but also to what he describes as “white evangelicalism and its connection to white nationalism”.

This hardline Christianity has arguably been the dominant religious force in US rightwing politics for decades. White evangelicals are the religious group most likely to vote Republican, holding substantial voting blocks in swing states such as Florida, and they voted overwhelmingly for Trump, following a string of high-profile endorsements from denomination leaders who were buoyed by his commitment to rolling back access to abortion and protecting the second amendment. However, Barber, a mainstream Protestant, brands it a “heretical form and presentation of faith to cover up for people’s greed and desire for power”.

The Bible, after all, he says, contains little on abortion, which 70% of evangelicals think should be illegal in most or all cases, or homosexuality – the majority of the denomination disapprove of same-sex marriage – but has thousands of passages on how to treat the disenfranchised.

Earlier in the year, Barber called out a group of faith leaders who visited the Oval Office and prayed for Trump’s success as the president signed a proclamation to usher in a national day of prayer. The pastor described the event as “theological malpractice bordering on heresy” and drew instant criticism from the evangelical right.

But Barber has long suffered much worse. He receives regular death threats, and travels to events with a security detail. He never identifies any of his five children during sermons and is still developing “the discipline of praying for my enemies”.

William Barber speaks at Stone Temple Missionary Baptist Church on 12 October 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. Photograph: Joshua Lott/The Guardian

Barber was born in 1963, the year four young girls were killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in an act of white supremacist terror. He is acutely aware that thinly veiled political rhetoric can quickly lead to violence. Now it is Trump; then it was Alabama’s governor, George Wallace.

Among Greenleaf’s largely African American congregation are some who remember those days vividly. Wilbur Barnes, 87, for instance, who has worshipped here all his life, and compares his pastor to the leaders of the civil rights era. “He is special,” says Barnes. “He is committed to good, devoted to his people and to social justice. I can’t go to these events around the country, but I am always with him.”

As Barber prepares to head out again on another intense week of campaigning, first to Memphis, then to New York, Boston and finally El Paso, he issues a quick warning to his inner circle of clergy.

“We’re heading down to the border where it’s likely I’ll be arrested again.”

Everyone smiles and nods their approval.

El Paso, Texas

As we approach the border fence separating the US from Mexico, its towering, rusted prongs casting long shadows in the dust, Barber tells me his first thought is of the walls of Jericho referenced in the Old Testament. “It’s sinister,” says Barber. “But that wall came tumbling down.”

In the Bible, the walls fell after divine intervention, allowing the Israelites to conquer the city inside. Today, Barber says, the border fence also represents sin: “It’s criminal because it’s a symbol of racism and white supremacy and it represents the sin of greed. Forty billion dollars are going into this wall, not into healthcare or living wages.”

Barber has spent the past two days meeting with immigrant activists partnered with the Poor People’s Campaign.

On Sunday, he trudges out into the Rio Grande – the river that divides the US from Mexico – and watches families broken by deportation briefly reunite. Authorities sometimes turn a blind eye to meetings in the river so long as they take place in the middle and people do not exchange possessions. As Border Patrol agents watch on, María Oralaz, an undocumented 60-year-old living in El Paso hugs her two sons, who now live in Mexico, their ankles covered in muddy water. She has not seen them for 16 years.

The border wall between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. Photograph: Herika Martinez/AFP/Getty Images

The emotional reunion leaves Barber stunned. “My mind just seemed like it wasn’t functioning. To see that in the 21st century, in the richest nation on earth …” He trails off. “It left a deep fire in my belly and a deep commitment to do this work, together with the people affected.”

Oralaz returns to the banks, leaving her family behind. “I feel more safe to know that there are people supporting us,” she says. “Firstly, I’m undocumented, secondly, I’m poor. This campaign will make us stronger.”

The act of civil disobedience the organisers had planned – to try to shut down an entry port in El Paso – is eventually called off, meaning Barber can return to North Carolina without arrest this time.

On the drive down to the border fence, our final trip together, I ask if he ever contemplates whether a campaign with such broad goals and steadfast opposition is likely to fail. “I think failure is not having a vision,” he says. “The sin would be not to have an ambitious goal.”

At an event earlier in the day, Barber addressed another rally of around 400 people. “Great men and women of the past are no longer here,” he said. “But we are their children. It is our turn now to change the country. The first victory is when we decide to fight together.”

He ambles down from the platform and immediately leads the group on a march across the city, a broad smile lighting up his face.