The Rev Dr William Barber’s arrival in the world was full of portent. He was born on 30 August 1963, two days after Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech at the March on Washington, and two weeks before a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four African American girls. When Barber was three months old, President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
“My parents were asking, ‘What kind of America have we brought this child into in the 20th century, where it could be blown up sitting in a church for Sunday school?’” Barber recalls. “One day in North Carolina, when they were turning back voting rights and healthcare and attacking the gay community and Latinos, I met my mom and she had a tear in her eye. She says, ‘I never thought that I would have a child 50 years ago and that child would grow up and end up having to fight to hold on to some of the things that we tried to win.’ And then she looked at me and said: ‘But you’d better fight.’”
His willingness to do so, from the pulpit and on the streets with rare eloquence, passion and clarity that cuts through the noise of cable news and social media, has seen Barber compared to King as America’s new apostle of nonviolent resistance. He is co-chair of The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, a grassroots movement planning six weeks of civil disobedience this spring to “save America’s soul”. It evokes King’s own poor people’s campaign, which petered out after he was gunned down 50 years ago.
That trauma, too, touched Barber in infancy. He recalls: “I would have this picture in my mind of my mother just crying and bent over. She was looking at the TV and my father came in and was weeping. I was about four, almost five, and I guess it was so traumatic that I still can’t remember but my mother told me later that was when Dr King got shot and it came across the TV. I can even sometimes now just hear her screaming.”
Asked what King means to him half a century later, Barber, pastor of Greenleaf Christian church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, speaks for 14 minutes with barely an “um” or an “ah” or a pause to draw breath. He expresses admiration for the civil rights leader’s commitment to “interlocking injustices”, a model for the intersectionality of his own poor people’s campaign. “You cannot separate systemic racism from systemic poverty from ecological devastation from the war economy from the distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism that tries to suggest those issues I just mentioned are not moral issues, and the only moral issues are things like being against gay people and against abortion and for prayer in school.”
Barber, 54, also praises King for his “loving radicalism”. At Riverside church in New York in April 1967, he spoke out against the Vietnam war, describing the US government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. His final sermon, which he never got to preach, was to be entitled Why America May Go to Hell. But this edgier, confrontational King, who lost friends and alienated people, tends to be forgotten in today’s rush to sanctify, sanitise and simplify in ways that would make him uncomfortable, Barber argues.
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