NC's Moral Monday Marches Kick Off 54 Years After Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In With Massive March of 80,000 in Raleigh (WTF? Turn Your Watch Back 50 Years)

After talking with North Carolina Attorney General (and possible 2016 gubernatorial candidate (by his own admission)), Roy Cooper, one evening recently about how having no "initiative" or "referendum" ability in NC has severely confounded our ability to lessen if not get rid of the toxic Rethuglican policies brought to us by the Kock-Pope-bought General Assembly and Governor's mansion, I thought I'd write an essay about how the NC Moral Monday Marches were helping to raise citizen awareness in our state and nationally but found my friend over at Man With A Muckrake had already done a great job on that subject.

We shall overcome!

by mudrake | 02/10/2014

North Carolina’s Moral Monday Movement Kicks Off 2014 With a Massive Rally in Raleigh

On February 1, 1960, four black students at North Carolina A&T kicked off the 1960s civil rights movement by trying to eat at a segregated lunch counter at Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro. Two months later, young activists founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University in Raleigh, which would transform the South through sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration drives.

So it was fitting that North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement held a massive “Moral March” in Raleigh today which began at Shaw University, exactly 54 years after North Carolina’s trailblazing role in the civil rights movement.

Tens of thousands of activists — from all backgrounds, races and causes — marched from Shaw to the North Carolina State Capitol, where they held an exuberant rally protesting the right-wing policies of the North Carolina government and commemorating the eighth anniversary of the HKonJ coalition (the acronym stands for Historic Thousands on Jones Street, where the NC legislature sits).

This from Bill Moyers



The day began cold and cloudy, a fitting metaphor for politics in North Carolina last year.

Since taking over the legislature in 2010 and the governor’s mansion in 2012, controlling state government for the first time in over a century, North Carolina Republicans eliminated the earned-income tax credit for 900,000 North Carolinians; refused Medicaid coverage for 500,000; ended federal unemployment benefits for 170,000; cut pre-K for 30,000 kids while shifting $90 million from public education to voucher schools; slashed taxes for the top five percent while raising taxes on the bottom 95 percent; axed public financing of judicial races; prohibited death row inmates from challenging racially discriminatory verdicts; passed one of the country’s most draconian anti-choice laws; and enacted the country’s worst voter suppression law, which mandates strict voter ID, cuts early voting and eliminates same-day registration, among other things.

The fierce reaction against these policies led to the Moral Monday movement, when nearly 1,000 activists were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience inside the North Carolina General Assembly. Rallies were held in more than 30 cities across the state and the approval ratings of North Carolina Republicans fell into the toilet. Sample signs at Saturday’s rally: “OMG, GOP, WTF. It’s 2014, not 1954!!!” “Welcome to North Carolina. Turn Your Watch Back 50 Years!