“MORAL INDICTMENT” OF
NC GENERAL ASSEMBLY FOR
“ATTACKS ON THE POOR…”
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
Citing “…attacks on the poor, low-wage workers, health care, voting rights, the LGBTQ+ community, women and on democracy itself,” Bishop William Barber’s Repairer of the Breach, along with the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign, and several other grassroots social justice organizations on Monday, accused the Republican-led NC General Assembly of “deceptive and deadly culture wars and political lies which they continue to use to pass death-dealing public policies that hurt us all, especially poor and low-income North Carolinians.”
During a “Moral Monday press conference” outside the NC General Assembly building on Jones Street, both organizations declared that North Carolina is in a “State of Emergency” and that the NC legislature deserves a “moral indictment” for it’s alleged actions.
To dramatize the point, a symbolic Cease and Desist letter was delivered to the legislative building Monday afternoon.
“It’s time for North Carolinians to once again stand on our long tradition of truth, love and justice,” said the statement by Bishop Barber. “The corrupt leadership of the NC General Assembly is utilizing a White Nationalist agenda to give the wealthy and corporations tax breaks, to pay for millionaires to send their kids to private, discriminatory schools, to make it harder to vote and get healthcare, and to make it easier to destroy the environment and get a gun.”
Barber noted that his organization was joining “together with seventy-five leaders of organizations, faith leaders and impacted leaders who represent tens of thousands of constituents,” and that this was a “…first step toward escalating nonviolent action and holding our legislators accountable.”
Bishop Barber also noted that August 6th was the 58th anniversary of passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), “…a somber reminder that we have less voting rights today than we did 58 years ago.”
Even though voter ID will be in force throughout the state as of this fall with municipal elections, there is still ongoing litigation as to its legality.
The State Board of Elections announced last week that local county boards of election are now offering free voter photo IDs for registered voters who do not already have some kind of state-sanctioned photo ID. Voters should bring proof of their name, date of birth and the last four digits of their Social Security number. Their pictures will be taken, and they can get their free photo ID right away, or have it sent to their home.
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AUTHOR TA-NEHISI COATES
BOOKS BY BLACK AUTHORS
BANNED IN NORTH CAROLINA
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
School bells are weeks away from ringing across North Carolina, and beyond the normal drudgery of getting students properly prepared, many parents are bracing themselves for something they thought they’d never see in their lifetimes - the banning of books at their local schools and public libraries.
Spurred by the conservative political movement, school systems and libraries across the nation, and in North Carolina, have had to deal with demands primarily from white Republican parents that certain books be taken off the shelfs of local libraries, or be removed from local school curriculums because they are deemed “not appropriate” for their children.
According to the American Library Association, during 2021, at least 729 attempts to ban library books were made. And in a report from PEN America, 2,532 book bans were issued in 18 school districts in 32 states during the 2021-22 school year.
Forty percent of the challenged titles “prominently featured people of color.”
By “not appropriate,” these book banning parents, like Moms for Liberty, claim they don’t mean books geared towards African American or LBGTQ subjects, but rather books that contain what they consider to be sexually explicit content.
In some cases, these parents have actually filed criminal complaints in their local counties and school districts to have what they consider to be books with offensive materials removed.
Many of the titles are by African American authors who write about the Black experience, and dealing with racism in America. Toni Morrison, Nikole Hannah Jones, Nic Stone and Ta-Nehisi Coates, are just some of the popular Black authors being targeted by conservative parents groups.
Nikole Hannah Jones has had her award-winning The 1619 Project targeted by no less that conservative congressmen and even former President Donald Trump while he was still in office. Conservative Republicans objected to the book documenting how America was built on the institution of slavery.
Nic Stone’s acclaimed book, Dear Martin, a New York Times bestseller about a fictional Black student in a white school who writes letters to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was yanked from an approved high school reading list in Haywood County, N.C., after just one parent’s complaint.
The school district superintendent made the decision to pull the book on his own. He admittedly did not read the book beforehand.
Ta-Nehisi Coates actually attended a South Carolina school board meeting where a high school teacher was under fire for using his 2015 book, Between the World and Me, to help teach students about what it is like to grow up Black in America. The book became an issue when some of her students complained to a school board member, claiming that it made them feel “uncomfortable” and “ashamed to be Caucasian.”
Ironically, the North Carolina House has now twice passed a bill outlawing teaching any lesson that makes students feel “ashamed” or “uncomfortable” because of what history may show their race allegedly did to another race in history. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the leading Republican candidate for governor, has spoken out against books and school curriculums that teach that America has a history of systemic racism.
For the past several years, school systems in Wake, Alamance-Burlington, New Hanover County and other areas have reported book challenges by conservative parental groups, forcing some to take various titles off school or public library shelves for review.
Wake County has instituted a new process for reviewing challenged books, but take the books down until that process is completed.
According to WUNC-FM, over the past two years there have been over 189 book challenges across North Carolina’s 115 school districts. Most of the books are written for middle school students, and are about race and racism.
To opponents of book banning, there is little doubt that the movement is purely about politics, especially now during the run-up to the 2024 elections.
Janice Robinson, the North Carolina program director for Red, Wine and Blue, an Ohio-based progressive group, told NC Newsline, “We believe that this is just a smokescreen for the anti-CRT (critical race theory, the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that’s been going around the country. It’s the right wing really pushing their political agenda at the expense of our kids.”
“When you look at the books being banned, they’re books on African American history, about race or LGBTQ issues,” Robinson continued. “Parents have a right to be concerned, but there is a process that schools and school libraries have in place to address those concerns. The problem is that people are going around the process and pulling books off the shelf because one parent has an issue with it.”
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