AFTER 30 YEARS AS PASTOR,
BISHOP BARBER RETIRES FROM
HIS GOLDSBORO CHURCH
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
Last Sunday, while some were preparing to celebrate Juneteenth, and most were honoring Father’s Day, Bishop William J. Barber II, renowned minister and national civil rights leader, was retiring from the church he proudly pastored for the past 30 years - Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro.
Before a packed sanctuary, Bishop Barber, also the president of Repairers of the Breach and co-convener of the Poor People’s Campaign, delivered his last sermon before the congregation at Greenleaf entitled, “Would You Consider the Testimony of a Cripple About the Grace and Glory of GOD.”
“I have no reason to be standing here but by the grace of God,” he told the congregation and many visitors.
It was one of the rare times in public over the years that the former NC NAACP president publicly talked about his personal struggle with a unique form of arthritis known as ankylosing spondylitis, which, according to the National Institutes of Health, causes inflammation in the joints and ligaments of the spine.
The disease has contributed to Bishop Barber’s large size, and inability to walk long distances without a cane. He told the church how he experienced serious bouts of depression earlier in his life, and was told by doctors that he might lose his ability to stand. That threatened the need for Bishop Barber to be able to stand in the pulpit to preach early in his ministry, and he prayed to GOD for the strength to overcome.
That strength came, later allowing Barber not only to preach, but to lead numerous Moral Monday and other demonstrations in the streets over the years regarding social justice issues.
His own life of physical struggle allows him to now bear witness that GOD doesn’t just use the strong, but also those who have suffered an affliction in life that by all accounts, should make them weak and useless.
“There is a thread throughout Scriptures, that GOD does His best work with cripples,” Bishop said, noting that the main characters in several books of the Bible are crippled or broken in some way, and yet become divine examples of GOD’a grace to inspire others.
Barber, 59, told congregants that it is no different today, and that even the best Christians are nothing without the grace of GOD.
The message was important because of Bishop Barber’s main mission in life now - to inspire, particularly young people of all colors and backgrounds, to pick up the mantle of social justice in this nation, and confront the ills that continue to plague the poor, and deny racial and gender justice to millions. Thus, Bishop Barber’s new role as founding director of the recently established Yale University Center for Public Theology and Public Policy.
“GOD’s grace and GOD’s glory is most evident when we are weak,” Bishop Barber preached, adding that in many cases, GOD’s greatest saints and servants are “crippled by design” in order for them to represent the grace of GOD “without arrogance.”
Bishop Barber counseled the congregants and visitors that they must come to terms with their personal state of being crippled, what is biblically known as “lo-debar,” be it emotional, physical or spiritual, and realize that only by serving GOD do they become strong, and spiritually whole.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to preach to you for 30 years, Greenleaf,” Bishop Barber told the church he’s called home since 1993.
While acknowledging the importance of Father’s Day, Bishop Barber also warned all about the commercial and national exploitation of Juneteenth - what was originally supposed to be the acknowledgment of how enslaved Africans in Galveston, Texas received word of the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of slavery, two years late.
While Juneteenth has traditionally been commemorated in Texas for many years, it became a federal holiday when Democrat Pres. Joe Biden came into office, and many states and municipalities, including North Carolina, decided to also recognize it.
Many critics, however, have been warning this year that the true meaning of Juneteenth has been lost amid the celebrations, parades, holiday and retail sale events.
Bishop Barber admonished his congregation not to be tricked, and that Juneteenth should be a time for refection and recommitment to the cause of freedom, and the end of present-day slavery.
As part of his retirement festivities, Bishop Barber was lauded at a local event in his honor on June 10, which was keynoted by MSNBC personality Joy Reid.
Pres. Joe Biden also sent a congratulatory video, and Vice President Kamala Harris a letter acknowledging Bishop Barber’a many years of civil rights and social activism.
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FEDERAL LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST
NC FELONY DISENFRANCHISEMENT
LAW
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
The battle to restore the NC voting rights of former felons has now moved from the state Supreme Court to federal court. That’s because the 5-2 Republican majority ruled in April that over 55,000 former felons are not eligible to exercise their right to vote.
The Republican majority said the matter was simple - the ex-felons were prohibited by a NC statute, known as the “Strict Liability Voting Law,” originally enacted in 1877 with the explicit intent to disenfranchise Black voters, and reenacted in 1899 as part of a broader legislative attempt during the Jim Crow era to suppress the Black vote, from voting because the law is constitutional, the court said. So unless and until that law is struck down, those ex-felons will not be allowed to cast a ballot.
Ex-felons must complete all requirements of their imprisonment, the GOP justices said, or they have no voting rights and are still felons.
The state High Court’s two Black Democrats vehemently disagreed.
The [court] majority’s decision in this case will one day be repudiated on two grounds, wrote Justice Anita Earls for the court’s minority. First, because it seeks to justify the denial of a basic human right to citizens and thereby perpetuates a vestige of slavery, and second, because the majority violates a basic tenant of appellate review by ignoring the facts as found by the trial court and substituting its own.
Justice Earls continued, With regard to the first and most serious issue, the majority interprets the North Carolina Constitution to reduce the humanity of individuals convicted of felony offenses to the point of cruelty: People who are convicted of felony offenses are no longer people, they are felons. The majority believes that, as felons, they are not free even after their sentences are complete, they are merely felons for the rest of their lives.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, agreed.
So last week, it filed a lawsuit in federal court asking the court to declare the NC law unconstitutional on Fourteenth Amendment grounds.
Their main argument - that it should not be illegal for ex-felons to vote “…while on parole, probation, or post-release supervision for a felony conviction, even if they mistakenly believe or are told in error by election workers or their parole officers that they are eligible to vote.”
They also argue that the law is not being fairly enforced by prosecutors.
“While some prosecutors have charged individuals who mistakenly voted before completing their post- release supervision, others have declined to prosecute individuals where there was no evidence of intent,” the SCSJ motion states.
“For over 120 years, the voices of North Carolinians who have been convicted of felony offenses, specifically Black North Carolinians, have been chilled by the selective and arbitrary enforcement of North Carolina’s strict liability voter prosecution law,” said Mitchell Brown, Senior Counsel for Voting Rights at SCSJ. “We hope that the Court rules in our favor, outlawing a racist, vague law that criminalizes mistakes and misunderstandings regarding voter eligibility by individuals with felony convictions who merely are trying to re-engage in the political process and perform their civic duty.”
The SCSJ brief examined why the law is unconstitutional:
• While only 22% of North Carolina’s citizens are Black, Black citizens represent 63.6% of all cases investigated for potential violations of the Strict Liability Voting.
Law. between 2015-2022. The. NCSBE’s chief investigator acknowledged this
disparity was “significant.”
• Similarly, 56.3% of all cases referred for prosecution in 2015-2016 and 2018-2022 involved Black voters. In 2017, Black voters constituted 68% of the 441 cases investigated as a result of the 2016 general election audit, most of which were referred for potential prosecution.
• Black citizens are also overrepresented in the NCSBE’s investigations compared to the overall percentage of Black inmates in state (50%) and federal (51%) prisons in North Carolina. Moreover, only about 40% of individuals on post-release supervision are Black.
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