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On a recent Sunday morning, the guest preacher at First Baptist-West, one of Charlotte’s oldest Black churches, has selected Isaiah 58:1 as his Scripture passage. It begins with a call to get loud. “Do not hold back,” it says. “Raise your voice like a trumpet.”
But for most of his 45 minutes at the pulpit, Bishop William Barber II rarely raises his deep voice. Instead, the architect of North Carolina’s now-famous “Moral Monday” protests chooses the tone of a Sunday school teacher as he walks the congregation through the long and sometimes bloody history of African Americans’ struggle for the right to vote and to elect representatives of their choice.
The high point of that journey, says Barber, his burly frame draped in a black robe adorned with patches of African mudcloth, was Congress’s approval of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson after a coalition of Democratic and Republican senators cut off a filibuster by their Southern colleagues.
And the latest low point? That came in April, Barber says, when a U.S. Supreme Court majority, ruling on provisions in the landmark law that had allowed for the creation of Black majority congressional districts, decided, “Let’s kill it all.” The court’s six conservative justices said that times have dramatically changed since 1965, that Black residents are no longer kept from voting, and that legislators need to be colorblind in the drawing of districts.
Barber says the Affordable Care Act and other popular legislation would never have passed without support from members of the Congressional Black Caucus. And, he argues, voter suppression measures and gerrymandering promoted by President Donald Trump and passed by GOP-controlled legislatures, especially in the South, are fearful, racist reactions to America’s growing diversity.
To Barber, the new assault on voting rights is a sin. “Your vote isn’t something America gave you,” he says. “Your vote is something God gave you.”
Then, as the bishop nears the end of what he calls his “national sermon,” he finally turns up the volume, calling for a massive voter turnout in November.
Gripping the pulpit, he invites applause and shouts of “Yes, sir!” from the congregation: “We need to organize thousands of buses to take people to the polls right here IN NORTH CAROLINA! Right here IN ALABAMA! Right here IN MISSISSIPPI! We need to have a national march to the polls!”
In recent months, Barber, who lives in Wilson County, has put the “active” in activism. In February, he organized a 51-mile march from Wilson to Raleigh to protest congressional gerrymandering; in March, he staged an anti-Iran War rally in front of the White House; and in April, he presided over a conference at Yale Divinity School on “The Moral Issues of the 2026 Midterm Election.”
“Your vote isn’t something America gave you.Your vote is something God gave you.”
Rev. William Barber
As a charismatic preacher who came up through the Black Church and the Civil Rights Movement, the 62-year-old Barber has always made his points through sermons and protests that focus on poverty, health care, voting rights, and what he calls “the immoral war of choice” with Iran. His grand goal is to mobilize Black, white, and brown people—especially those with low incomes and little to no history of voting—to flex their underused political muscle by going to the polls.
He and his movement have become part of the growing resistance to Trump and those aligned with the president, including Christian nationalists and conservatives on the nation’s high court. The pushback against Trump & Company is a broad collection of dissident voices that has also included the “No Kings” protesters, defenders of immigrants, the first American-born pope, and peace-walking Buddhist monks.
With the crucial midterms just ahead in November, they all seem to be moving forward on a crowded highway, with each seeking their own lane. But there are obstacles in Barber’s path.
Building an interracial coalition under a moral banner could prove difficult when deep differences over politics, religion, and racial issues are pushing people away from dialogue and cooperation.
‘We Have Already Overcome’
Some things have changed since the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Take the Black Church. Many pastors acknowledge that more Americans today identify as non-religious and rarely, if ever, show up in the pews on Sunday morning. That’s especially true among young people. One result: It’s curbed the once-dominant power of the Black Church, with its biblical frame of reference, to push for change outside its doors.
“It’s still important, but different,” said First Baptist-West pastor Ricky Woods, whose church was founded by formerly enslaved people in 1867. “With the younger people, the church has not been as much [of a focal point] as it was. … That’s placed them at a little bit of a disadvantage in being able to make the moral arguments.”
Then there are those voices on the right who argue that the Supreme Court was correct: they agree that the evils the Civil Rights Movement fought against—legal segregation, poll taxes, literacy tests—are long gone. America has even elected a Black president, they say.
“For us as a people, we have thrived and overcome slavery and Jim Crow, and now we’re living in a different era,” said Clarence Henderson, a civil rights pioneer from High Point who has become a prominent Trump supporter. “That song says, ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Well, we have already overcome.”
“For us as a people, we have thrived and overcome slavery and Jim Crow, and now we’re living in a different era.”
Clarence Henderson, Trump supporter
It’s doubtful that’s the majority view in the Black community, where concerns about economic inequality and police brutality, for example, remain widespread.
But polls suggest it is the view among many white working-class voters. And that’s a group Barber hopes to woo away from Trump’s MAGA base this year to form a powerful multiracial coalition of voters angry enough about high prices and low wages to vote against the president’s party.
Barber is casting his crusade as a “moral” case against Trumpism. Will that message resonate with voters, so focused this year on their pocketbooks?
Barber insists the economy is a moral issue.
“They’re not separate,” he told The Assembly. “Forcing people to pay higher prices for gas [because of the war with Iran], while at the same time you block living wages and you cut health [subsidies]—that’s immoral.”
Barber and his lieutenants also point out that while the bishop may do the bulk of his preaching in churches and at rallies, most of the people who will hear his message do so online. He posts clips on Instagram and on his “Our Moral Moment” Substack, which goes out to more than 240,000 subscribers.
“In the age of Black Lives Matter and the ‘No Kings’ effort, there are other tools that have to be employed,” said the Rev. Rodney Sadler of Charlotte, formerly co-chairman of the Barber-led Poor People’s Campaign in North Carolina. “But [sermons and marches] do have an impact, primarily with people of faith, people of a particular age. They also capture people’s imagination.”
“[Sermons and marches] do have an impact, primarily with people of faith, people of a particular age. They also capture people’s imagination.”
Rev. Rodney Sadler
Still, Barber trumpeted the same moral message in 2024. He published a book called White Poverty and offered a personal endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s last Democratic opponent. She not only lost white working-class voters, but many young Black and Latino men drifted to Trump’s banner.
The Barber team’s hope, said Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, who co-wrote two books with him, is that these voters will be up for grabs in 2026 as they “recognize that this is a presidency largely about serving rich people and hasn’t done a whole lot for them.”
Another hope, which Barber tapped into during his sermon in Charlotte, is that anger—especially in the Black community—over the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act will fuel a big turnout in November.
In recent decades, though, Black voter turnout ballooned dramatically only when Jesse Jackson—and, later, Barack Obama—ran for president, said Rob Christensen, a longtime political reporter and author of several award-winning books on North Carolina history.
“There’s been waves of enthusiasm in the Black community,” he said. “The question is whether all these things that are going on that people think of as curtailing their rights and their representation will create another wave.”
After Barber’s recent sermon at First Baptist-West, a line of congregants formed to talk with him. Among them was Karen Jones, 81.
“I can remember poll taxes,” she said. “And I can remember my mama talking to me about not being able to vote.” The Voting Rights Act “did a lot to help,” she said. “But we need to get out there and beat on some doors and get to people … who can do any-and-everything, but don’t vote.”
The Birth of Moral Mondays
Barber’s bio starts with a small detail that, in retrospect, some may see as a hint of his future calling.
He was born on August 30, 1963, just two days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the historic March on Washington.
Barber’s father was a preacher and teacher; his mother, an office worker at the local high school.
At 15, Barber was elected president of the NAACP youth council in Washington County, N.C. While a student at North Carolina Central University in Durham, he volunteered for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign. Deciding he’d be, like Jackson, a man of the cloth with a focus on issues in the public square, Barber received a master’s degree in divinity at Duke University and a doctorate in public policy from Drew University.
Then, one day in 1993, just after accepting a job offer from Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro, the former high school football lineman woke up in pain, unable to move.
An ambulance took him to the hospital. Doctors eventually diagnosed a severe case of ankylosing spondylitis, a rare form of arthritis. It “had frozen his neck, the base of his spine, and his hips in place,” the Raleigh News & Observer’s Martha Quillin wrote in a 2018 profile, and he spent several months in the hospital.
But Barber persevered, with the help of a cane, though the pain is still with him daily. He returned as pastor of the church and, in 2006, became president of the NAACP’s North Carolina chapter, the largest in the South.
Then, beginning in 2013, Barber and his growing movement took center stage as Pat McCrory, North Carolina’s new Republican governor, and an emboldened GOP-controlled legislature set about enacting a sweeping conservative agenda.
Barber led weekly “Moral Mondays” in Raleigh to protest restrictions on abortion and voting rights, rollbacks on environmental protection, and repeal of the Racial Justice Act, which had allowed defendants to challenge their death penalty sentences if they could prove that racial bias played a role. And, at a time when many poor North Carolinians were suffering because they couldn’t afford medical care, the legislature and governor rejected Medicaid expansion offered to states under the federal Affordable Care Act. (The legislature expanded Medicaid in 2023.)
Eventually, the number of protesters numbered in the thousands, with many refusing to leave the state Legislative Building and getting arrested for trespassing. Barber’s multiracial coalition included clergy as well as non-churchgoers, labor union members and civil rights workers, public school teachers, and college students.
The protests made national headlines, and left-leaning activists in other states began holding their own “Moral Monday”-like events.
Barber went national, too. In 2016, he made a splash at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and was quoted in virtually every newspaper and TV report on the gathering.
“In this season, when some want to harden and stop the heart of our democracy,” he told the delegates, “we are being called, like our fore-mothers and -fathers, to be the moral defibrillators of our time.”
“In this season, when some want to harden and stop the heart of our democracy, we are being called, like our fore-mothers and -fathers, to be the moral defibrillators of our time.”
Rev. William Barber
In 2017, Barber stepped down as the head of the N.C. NAACP to lead a new “Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival.” The first one, from 1968, was the brainchild of Dr. King, who was assassinated before it began.
The New Yorker and other national publications have profiled Barber and named him a leader of the resistance to Trump. “Religious liberals sat out of politics for 40 years,” read a 2017 New York Times headline, accompanied by a color photograph of Barber. “Now they want in on the game.”
New Fusion Movement?
The Third Reconstruction. That’s the title of one of Barber’s books–and that’s the grand goal he’s been pushing for decades.
A grassroots moral movement anchored in the South that unites Black, white, and brown people from various backgrounds who can look past their differences to promote justice, fight racism, and look out for those in need.
“Barber thinks about things in terms of reconstruction,” said Sadler, who has known him for 30 years. “The First Reconstruction is what took place after the Civil War. … And the Second Reconstruction, he would say, would have been the King movement, the Civil Rights Movement in the ‘60s.”
Both were relatively brief, but saw whites and Blacks join forces. The formerly enslaved and white farmers formed a “fusion” coalition to fight Democratic plutocrats in the South in the late 19th century; Black civil rights workers and white activists locked arms and marched for an end to Jim Crow in the 1960s.
North Carolina author and historian Tim Tyson, who has long worked with Barber’s movement, thinks it was Jesse Jackson and his “Rainbow Coalition” who inspired Barber’s early sense that the best way to improve the lives of people often ignored by the powerful is to bring the marginalized together under a common banner.
It’s why, in interviews with The Assembly, Barber kept coming back to the idea of getting poor people to the polls—their votes could determine election outcomes and enact their agenda.
Barber said, “Dr. King said that the greatest fear of the greedy, racist oligarchy was for the masses of poor Negroes, poor white people, and Latinos to come together to form a voting bloc that could fundamentally shift the economic architecture of the nation.”
In their book, Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove, who is white, looked to North Carolina history to argue that it could happen. A grassroots rebellion in the 1890s by the “Fusionists”—white farmers and laborers of the Populist Party joining with Black Republicans—led to their victory at the polls in 1894. The coalition elected a governor and took control of the state legislature.
Duplicating that in 2026 to make it last for more than one election cycle sounds like a tall order to many.
“If there’s a Democratic wave [this year], it’s likely to be driven by the economy,” said author-political reporter Christensen. “These are people driven by their pocketbooks. So I don’t know how you connect, for example, people angry over the rising cost of gasoline with those who are angry about the gerrymandering or the cutting of anti-poverty programs.”
Barber said he found hope during a recent encounter at the Mayflower restaurant in Wilson on a Sunday afternoon. A white man in a cowboy hat and boots came over to him.
“Reverend Barber,” the man said.
Barber remembered responding warily. “Yes, sir.”
“I’m a Republican,” the man said.
“OK, I’m an independent,” Barber said. “I’ve voted for Republicans as well. My granddaddy was a Republican, but he was a Lincoln Republican … and an Eisenhower Republican.”
“We’ve got to get together: Black and white,” the Republican continued. “Because while all this stuff is going on, the farmers are hurting, people can’t feed their families. I have people who lost their health care because of that crazy bill they just finished passing. I’m going to go to your site and sign up because I want to be a partner.”
Barber’s conclusion: “Something is starting to stir, where people are recognizing that the race-driven, hate-driven, greed-driven, oligarchy-driven mentality is hurting us all.”
Religious Right v. Religious Left
Besides co-leading the Poor People’s Campaign and teaching at Yale Divinity School, Barber also presides over Repairers of the Breach, a national group that trains moral leaders and builds social justice movements. Its name comes from the Bible, from the same chapter of Isaiah that calls for sounding the trumpet.
Among the most booming battles in this election year is the one between conservative white evangelicals, who laud Trump for appointing the Supreme Court justices who reversed Roe v. Wade, and Social Gospel liberals like Barber, who accuse Trump of being un-Christ-like in his harsh treatment of immigrants and the poor.
It’s the Religious Right vs. the Religious Left. And North Carolina is home to prominent leaders of both sides.
In Boone, there’s Franklin Graham, who delivered prayers at both of Trump’s inaugurations. He’s called progressive Christianity “a lie” and said “the hand of God” spared Trump from would-be assassins.
Barber, who delivered the sermon at President Joe Biden’s interfaith inaugural prayer service, has dismissed Christian nationalism as “a form of heresy” and called an AI-generated image of Trump as Jesus “a war on divinity.”
Graham and Barber also had opposite takes on the recent “America Reads the Bible” marathon at the White House. Trump read from 2 Chronicles 7:11-22, in which God speaks to King Solomon. Graham, who also participated in the marathon, said on Facebook: “Grateful for a president who is unashamed to read the Bible from the Oval Office.”
Barber’s answer might be taken as a summary of why he is working so hard to convince voters to put the brakes on Trump’s agenda in November.
He said that Trump doesn’t practice what he preached in his reading of the Old Testament passage.
“It said you’re supposed to be humble, which he’s not,” Barber said. “You’re supposed to pray, which he doesn’t. And you’re supposed to turn from your wicked ways, which he’s not done because wickedness in the Bible is mistreatment of the least of these.”
Trump, Barber said, is indicted by the very Scripture that he read.
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