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Rev. Dr. William Barber II is president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and one of the leaders of the Moral Mondays movement. He shared his thoughts on today’s protesters with me by email.

I believe that deep within our being as a nation there is a longing for a moral movement that plows deep into our souls—a movement that recognizes that we can’t be, as the scriptures say, ‘at ease in Zion’—a longing that recognizes that the attacks we face today on fundamental civil rights, including attacks on the great hallmark of equal protection under the law and the promise to establish justice, which are supposed to be at the heart of who we are as a nation, are not a sign of our weakness, but rather the sign of a worrisome fear by those who hold extremist views and do not welcome a truly united society.

It is this longing that explains why today, despite the attacks, we are seeing a merging of the tributaries that run toward the great stream of justice: people regardless of race, creed, color, gender, sexuality, or class—whether in the Hands up, Don’t Shoot, I Can’t Breathe, and Black Lives Matter movements; the Fast Food workers Raise Up and minimum wage movements; the Voting Rights and People Over Money movements; the Women’s Rights, End Rape Culture movements; the LGBT Equality movements; the Immigrant Rights, Not One More movements; or the state-based anti-racism, anti-poverty, pro-justice, fusion Moral Monday movement— we are flowing together.

We are flowing together because we recognize that the intersectionality of all of these movements is our opportunity to fundamentally redirect America. And I believe, if we do not become at ease in Zion, if we continue pushing forward together, this will be the birth of what will be a Third Reconstruction movement in America, a movement that will push us toward our truest hope of a ‘more perfect union’ where peace is established through justice, not fear, and where, in the prescient words of a great poet, ‘opportunity is real, and life is free… where equality is in the air we breathe.’