WS Chronicle

From Wire, Staff and Special Reports

The president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP will receive an annual $100,000 prize for creative citizenship, The Associated Press reports.

The Nation Institute said this month that the Rev. Dr. William Barber II will receive the annual Puffin/Nation Prize, which honors people who challenge the status quo. The prize is intended to encourage recipients to continue their work and to inspire others. The award will be presented Dec. 8 in New York City.

Barber is the minister at Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, and he built the Forward Together Moral Monday movement that supports issues such as voting, immigrant and labor rights.

He will write an annual report for The Nation magazine, with the first essay appearing in January. The magazine published similar essays by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from 1961 to 1966.

The Advancement Project, a multi-racial civil rights organization, provides more background on Barber.

Barber has served on a volunteer-basis as the president of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP since he was elected in 2005. He volunteers as one of 64 members of the NAACP National Board of Directors, and is chair of the National NAACP’s Legislative and Political Action Committee. 

In his role as president of the N.C. NAACP, Barber convened the Forward Together! Moral Movement, an alliance of more than 200 progressive organizations in North Carolina united around a multi-racial, multi-issue agenda.

In July of this year, the issue was voting rights and the legal action the N.C. NAACP has taken against the state of North Carolina.

Mass Moral Monday March in Winston-Salem

Barber was among the plaintiffs who testified on the opening day of trial in the legal challenge to North Carolina’s “voter suppression law,” H.B 589. His testimony was followed by a march of thousands through the streets of Winston-Salem, united in the call for equal voting rights. The march attracted at least 3,500 people. The federal judge had not released a ruling in the legal case as of Tuesday.

For 10 years, the Forward Together! Moral Movement has fearlessly organized for progressive change through civil disobedience. When conservative extremists took over the state legislature in 2013, Barber united the coalition for weekly Moral Monday protests. These weekly demonstrations have spotlighted economic justice, universal healthcare, and public education, and have been used to push back against the gutting of social programs and voting rights in the state.

The movement united for 200 actions, and in February of 2014 brought together 80,000 people in a mass demonstration.

Barber is among the over 1,000 protesters arrested as part of Moral Monday organized actions, during which he has been arrested five times. Progressive organizers have adopted this model of sustained, strategic civil disobedience across the nation.

Set in the long tradition of civil rights advocacy, Barber has marched beside thousands. Since 2006, he has invited progressive organizations into the Historic Thousands on Jones Street People’s Assembly, known as “HK on J.” The group’s annual march has brought tens of thousands to North Carolina’s capital to champion a 14-point anti-racism, anti-poverty, anti-war agenda.

The Puffin/Nation Prize is the most recent in a series of awards acknowledging Rev. Barber and the Forward Together! Moral Movement’s incredible impact on civil rights.

Other awards

In September, he received the Roosevelt Institute’s Freedom of Worship Medal in honor of “his courageous work drawing together new coalitions of progressives in his native North Carolina and across the country.”

With this award he joined a long list of prominent defenders of civil liberties, including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Nelson Mandela.

Also in September, Barber won the CBC Chair’s Award, which was awarded at the Congressional Black Caucus’ Legislative Conference Phoenix Awards Dinner in Washington, D.C.

Barber is also the recipient of the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, North Carolina’s highest citizenship award.

Already the published author of “Forward Together: A Moral Message for the Nation,” Barber will release a collection of his Moral Monday speeches, The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement, in January 2016.

Also, he will write an annual report for The Nation magazine on the state of race, civil rights and the revival of grassroots anti-racism movements, with the first essay also appearing in January 2016. From 1961 to 1966, the magazine published similar essays by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.