WS Chronicle

Linda Sutton, a member of the Community Mobilization Committee, discusses the importance of the upcoming elections during a meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 2, at Emmanuel Baptist Church. Over two dozen people attended the meeting.

BY CASH MICHAELS 

FOR THE NCBPA

The political stage is set for this Saturday’s 10th annual Moral March in Raleigh/HK on J People’s Assembly, kicking off at 8:30 a.m. with a pre-march rally at 2 East South Street near Shaw University in downtown Raleigh, with a march down the Fayetteville Street Mall to the steps of the State Capitol kicking off at 10 a.m.

It is called the “Get Out The Vote Gathering and Mobilization,” sponsored by the N.C. NAACP and the Forward Together Movement. The People’s Assembly at the Capitol will end at 12:30pm. NAACP will be headed to the march.

The organization will be traveling by bus with other local residents. Members will take part in the activities, including get-out-the-vote training. The organization has been mobilizing in Winston-Salem, along with its partners – the Voting Rights Coalition, Ministers’ Conference of Winston-Salem and Vicinity and others – to get committees in place for the 2016 elections.

At the assembly, there will be voter registration for the tentative March 15 primaries (tentative thanks to a federal appeals court ruling last Friday throwing out redistricting maps for the 1st and 12th Congressional Districts, and ordering that they be redrawn within the next two weeks. Winston-Salem is in the 12th District).

Following the Moral March on Raleigh, there will be a Souls to the Polls training about how faith communities can register, educate, and mobilize their congregations and communities to the polls.

On Friday evening, Feb. 12, there will be a pre-Moral March/People’s Assembly mass meeting and worship service, featuring Rabbi Fred Guttman, starting at 7 p.m. at First Baptist Church, 101 S. Wilmington Street in Raleigh.

The agenda, as always, for the Moral March, includes the expansion and protection of voting rights; economic justice and livable wages per labor rights; educational equity through proper funding for quality public schools and support for historically black colleges and universities; health care for all Medicaid expansion, women’s health and environmental justice; equal protection under the law through justice without regard to race, creed, class, gender, sexual orientation or immigration status; and police reform.

According to the USA Today newspaper, over 80,000 demonstrators participated in the 2015 Moral March/People’s Assembly, making it one of the largest social justice gatherings in the nation at the time. This year organizers say they are trying to attract even more participants in an effort to register at many as possible for this year’s state and national elections.

A highlight of Saturday’s People’s Assembly will be an address by David Goodman, the brother of the late Andrew Goodman, who, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael “Mickey” Schwerner and James Chaney, were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Miss. in June 1964. They were there to help register black people there to vote.

David Goodman, along with his wife, heads up the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which promotes creative and social action among young people nationwide. Mr. Goodman will serve as ambassador for the assembly.

Last year, the foundation recognized actor/social activist Danny Glover and “Selma” director Ava DuVernay, among others, with the 2015 Hidden Heroes Award, named after Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney.

Many of the speakers this year will be persons negatively impacted by the 2013 voter restrictions passed by the Republican-led NC General Assembly and signed by Gov. Pat McCrory.

The entire event will be livestreamed across the nation.

For more information regarding the Winston-Salem NAACP’s plans, call President Isaac Howard at 336-287-4861. For more information regarding the Saturday event, call the N.C. NAACP office at 919-682-4700, or go to www.naacp-nc.org or www.hkonj.com.

Managing Editor Donna Rogers contributed to this report.