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Congratulations! You've begun some great work in thinking about identity, equity, and justice in our community.

Please continue to use the tracking chart provided to stay on course.

Attend all scheduled zoom calls (Sundays at 9am) for more activities and debrief opportunities. Zoom link will be emailed separately.

This 21-day plan includes suggestions for readings, podcasts, videos, observations, and ways to form and deepen community connections.

Understanding white privilege is a powerful lens into the complexities of doing social justice work, so we’ve focused our resources on that specific issue.

Make a commitment to continue the conversation.

Got questions? Email Rev. Gina or Laura Cooper.

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Implicit Bias: when we understand that we all have it, how can we confront it?

Our biases can be dangerous, even deadly — as we've seen in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, New York. Diversity advocate Vernā Myers looks closely at some of the subconscious attitudes we hold toward out-groups. She makes a plea to all people: Acknowledge your biases. Then move toward, not away from, the groups that make you uncomfortable. In a funny, impassioned, important talk, she shows us how.

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How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them

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Our biases can be dangerous, even deadly — as we’ve seen in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, New York. Diversity advocate Vernā Myers looks closely at some of the subconscious attitudes we hold toward out-groups. She makes a plea to all people: Acknowledge your biases. Then move toward, not away from, the groups that make you uncomfortable. In a funny, impassioned, important talk, she shows us how.

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Nature vs. Nurture: Can babies discriminate?

Reflection: Given what you've read about discrimination, think about how your family talks about race. How can we be better at home? At school? For further reading, check out this article from Medium: Your 5-year-old is already racially biased

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At the Children's Research Lab at the University of Texas, a database is kept on thousands of families in the Austin area who have volunteered to be available for scholarly research. In 2006 Birgitte Vittrup recruited from the database about a hundred families, all of whom were Caucasian with a child 5 to 7 years old.

The goal of Vittrup's study was to learn if typical children's videos with multicultural storylines have any beneficial effect on children's racial attitudes. Her first step was to give the children a Racial Attitude Measure, which asked such questions as:

How many White people are nice?
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)

How many Black people are nice?
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)

During the test, the descriptive adjective "nice" was replaced with more than 20 other adjectives, like "dishonest," "pretty," "curious," and "snobby."

Vittrup sent a third of the families home with multiculturally themed videos for a week, such as an episode of Sesame Street in which characters visit an African-American family's home, and an episode of Little Bill, where the entire neighborhood comes together to clean the local park.

In truth, Vittrup didn't expect that children's racial attitudes would change very much just from watching these videos. Prior research had shown that multicultural curricula in schools have far less impact than we intend them to-largely because the implicit message "We're all friends" is too vague for young children to understand that it refers to skin color.

Yet Vittrup figured explicit conversations with parents could change that. So a second group of families got the videos, and Vittrup told these parents to use them as the jumping-off point for a discussion about interracial friendship. She provided a checklist of points to make, echoing the shows' themes. "I really believed it was going to work," Vittrup recalls.

The last third were also given the checklist of topics, but no videos. These parents were to discuss racial equality on their own, every night for five nights.

At this point, something interesting happened. Five families in the last group abruptly quit the study. Two directly told Vittrup, "We don't want to have these conversations with our child. We don't want to point out skin color."

Vittrup was taken aback-these families volunteered knowing full well it was a study of children's racial attitudes. Yet once they were aware that the study required talking openly about race, they started dropping out.

It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin, every parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity. But according to Vittrup's entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They might have asserted vague principles-like "Everybody's equal" or "God made all of us" or "Under the skin, we're all the same"-but they'd almost never called attention to racial differences.

They wanted their children to grow up colorblind. But Vittrup's first test of the kids revealed they weren't colorblind at all. Asked how many white people are mean, these children commonly answered, "Almost none." Asked how many blacks are mean, many answered, "Some," or "A lot." Even kids who attended diverse schools answered the questions this way.

More disturbing, Vittrup also asked all the kids a very blunt question: "Do your parents like black people?" Fourteen percent said outright, "No, my parents don't like black people"; 38 percent of the kids answered, "I don't know." In this supposed race-free vacuum being created by parents, kids were left to improvise their own conclusions-many of which would be abhorrent to their parents.

Vittrup hoped the families she'd instructed to talk about race would follow through. After watching the videos, the families returned to the Children's Research Lab for retesting. To Vittrup's complete surprise, the three groups of children were statistically the same-none, as a group, had budged very much in their racial attitudes. At first glance, the study was a failure.

Combing through the parents' study diaries, Vittrup realized why. Diary after diary revealed that the parents barely mentioned the checklist items. Many just couldn't talk about race, and they quickly reverted to the vague "Everybody's equal" phrasing.

Of all those Vittrup told to talk openly about interracial friendship, only six families managed to actually do so. And, for all six, their children dramatically improved their racial attitudes in a single week. Talking about race was clearly key. Reflecting later about the study, Vittrup said, "A lot of parents came to me afterwards and admitted they just didn't know what to say to their kids, and they didn't want the wrong thing coming out of the mouth of their kids."

We all want our children to be unintimidated by differences and have the social skills necessary for a diverse world. The question is, do we make it worse, or do we make it better, by calling attention to race?

The election of President Barack Obama marked the beginning of a new era in race relations in the United States-but it didn't resolve the question as to what we should tell children about race. Many parents have explicitly pointed out Obama's brown skin to their young children, to reinforce the message that anyone can rise to become a leader, and anyone-regardless of skin color-can be a friend, be loved, and be admired.

Others think it's better to say nothing at all about the president's race or ethnicity-because saying something about it unavoidably teaches a child a racial construct. They worry that even a positive statement ("It's wonderful that a black person can be president") still encourages a child to see divisions within society. For the early formative years, at least, they believe we should let children know a time when skin color does not matter.

What parents say depends heavily on their own race: a 2007 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that out of 17,000 families with kindergartners, nonwhite parents are about three times more likely to discuss race than white parents; 75 percent of the latter never, or almost never, talk about race.

In our new book, NurtureShock, we argue that many modern strategies for nurturing children are backfiring-because key twists in the science have been overlooked. Small corrections in our thinking today could alter the character of society long term, one future citizen at a time. The way white families introduce the concept of race to their children is a prime example.

For decades, it was assumed that children see race only when society points it out to them. However, child-development researchers have increasingly begun to question that presumption. They argue that children see racial differences as much as they see the difference between pink and blue-but we tell kids that "pink" means for girls and "blue" is for boys. "White" and "black" are mysteries we leave them to figure out on their own.

It takes remarkably little for children to develop in-group preferences. Vittrup's mentor at the University of Texas, Rebecca Bigler, ran an experiment in three preschool classrooms, where 4- and 5-year-olds were lined up and given T shirts. Half the kids were randomly given blue T shirts, half red. The children wore the shirts for three weeks. During that time, the teachers never mentioned their colors and never grouped the kids by shirt color.

The kids didn't segregate in their behavior. They played with each other freely at recess. But when asked which color team was better to belong to, or which team might win a race, they chose their own color. They believed they were smarter than the other color. "The Reds never showed hatred for Blues," Bigler observed. "It was more like, 'Blues are fine, but not as good as us.' " When Reds were asked how many Reds were nice, they'd answer, "All of us." Asked how many Blues were nice, they'd answer, "Some." Some of the Blues were mean, and some were dumb-but not the Reds.

Bigler's experiment seems to show how children will use whatever you give them to create divisions-seeming to confirm that race becomes an issue only if we make it an issue. So why does Bigler think it's important to talk to children about race as early as the age of 3?

Her reasoning is that kids are developmentally prone to in-group favoritism; they're going to form these preferences on their own. Children naturally try to categorize everything, and the attribute they rely on is that which is the most clearly visible.

We might imagine we're creating color-blind environments for children, but differences in skin color or hair or weight are like differences in gender-they're plainly visible. Even if no teacher or parent mentions race, kids will use skin color on their own, the same way they use T-shirt colors. Bigler contends that children extend their shared appearances much further-believing that those who look similar to them enjoy the same things they do. Anything a child doesn't like thus belongs to those who look the least similar to him. The spontaneous tendency to assume your group shares characteristics-such as niceness, or smarts-is called essentialism.

Within the past decade or so, developmental psychologists have begun a handful of longitudinal studies to determine exactly when children develop bias. Phyllis Katz, then a professor at the University of Colorado, led one such study-following 100 black children and 100 white children for their first six years. She tested these children and their parents nine times during those six years, with the first test at 6 months old.

How do researchers test a 6-month-old? They show babies photographs of faces. Katz found that babies will stare significantly longer at photographs of faces that are a different race from their parents, indicating they find the face out of the ordinary. Race itself has no ethnic meaning per se-but children's brains are noticing skin-color differences and trying to understand their meaning.

When the kids turned 3, Katz showed them photographs of other children and asked them to choose whom they'd like to have as friends. Of the white children, 86 percent picked children of their own race. When the kids were 5 and 6, Katz gave these children a small deck of cards, with drawings of people on them. Katz told the children to sort the cards into two piles any way they wanted. Only 16 percent of the kids used gender to split the piles. But 68 percent of the kids used race to split the cards, without any prompting. In reporting her findings, Katz concluded: "I think it is fair to say that at no point in the study did the children exhibit the Rousseau type of color-blindness that many adults expect."

The point Katz emphasizes is that this period of our children's lives, when we imagine it's most important to not talk about race, is the very developmental period when children's minds are forming their first conclusions about race.

Several studies point to the possibility of developmental windows-stages when children's attitudes might be most amenable to change. In one experiment, children were put in cross-race study groups, and then were observed on the playground to see if the interracial classroom time led to interracial play at recess. The researchers found mixed study groups worked wonders with the first-grade children, but it made no difference with third graders. It's possible that by third grade, when parents usually recognize it's safe to start talking a little about race, the developmental window has already closed.

The other deeply held assumption modern parents have is what Ashley and I have come to call the Diverse Environment Theory. If you raise a child with a fair amount of exposure to people of other races and cultures, the environment becomes the message. Because both of us attended integrated schools in the 1970s-Ashley in San Diego and, in my case, Seattle-we had always accepted this theory's tenets: diversity breeds tolerance, and talking about race was, in and of itself, a diffuse kind of racism.

But my wife and I saw this differently in the years after our son, Luke, was born. When he was 4 months old, Luke began attending a preschool located in San Francisco's Fillmore/Western Addition neighborhood. One of the many benefits of the school was its great racial diversity. For years our son never once mentioned the color of anyone's skin. We never once mentioned skin color, either. We thought it was working perfectly.

Then came Martin Luther King Jr. Day at school, two months before his fifth birthday. Luke walked out of preschool that Friday before the weekend and started pointing at everyone, proudly announcing, "That guy comes from Africa. And she comes from Africa, too!" It was embarrassing how loudly he did this. "People with brown skin are from Africa," he'd repeat. He had not been taught the names for races-he had not heard the term "black" and he called us "people with pinkish-whitish skin." He named every kid in his schoolroom with brown skin, which was about half his class.

My son's eagerness was revealing. It was obvious this was something he'd been wondering about for a while. He was relieved to have been finally given the key. Skin color was a sign of ancestral roots.

Over the next year, we started to overhear one of his white friends talking about the color of their skin. They still didn't know what to call their skin, so they used the phrase "skin like ours." And this notion of ours versus theirs started to take on a meaning of its own. As these kids searched for their identities, skin color had become salient.

Soon, I overheard this particular white boy telling my son, "Parents don't like us to talk about our skin, so don't let them hear you."

As a parent, I dealt with these moments explicitly, telling my son it was wrong to choose anyone as his friend, or his "favorite," on the basis of skin color. We pointed out how certain friends wouldn't be in our lives if we picked friends for their color. Over time he not only accepted but embraced this lesson. Now he talks openly about equality and the wrongfulness of discrimination.

Not knowing then what I do now, I had a hard time understanding my son's initial impulses. Katz's work helped me to realize that Luke was never actually colorblind. He didn't talk about race in his first five years because our silence had unwittingly communicated that race was something he could not ask about.

The Diverse Environment Theory is the core principle behind school desegregation today. Like most people, I assumed that after 30 years of desegregation, it would have a long track record of scientific research proving that the Diverse Environment Theory works. Then Ashley and I began talking to the scholars who've compiled that very research.

In the summer of 2007, led by the Civil Rights Project, a dozen scholars wrote an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court supporting school desegregation in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle. By the time the brief reached the court, 553 scientists had signed on in support. However, as much as the scientists all supported active desegregation, the brief is surprisingly circumspect in its advocacy: the benefits of desegregation are qualified with words like "may lead" and "can improve." "Mere school integration is not a panacea," the brief warns.

UT's Bigler was one of the scholars heavily involved in the process of its creation. Bigler is an adamant proponent of desegregation in schools on moral grounds. "It's an enormous step backward to increase social segregation," she says. However, she also admitted that "in the end, I was disappointed with the amount of evidence social psychology could muster [to support it]. Going to integrated schools gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them."

The unfortunate twist of diverse schools is that they don't necessarily lead to more cross-race relationships. Often it's the opposite. Duke University's James Moody-an expert on how adolescents form and maintain social networks-analyzed data on more than 90,000 teenagers at 112 different schools from every region of the country. The students had been asked to name their five best male friends and their five best female friends. Moody matched the ethnicity of the student with the race of each named friend, then compared the number of each student's cross-racial friendships with the school's overall diversity.

Moody found that the more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school, and thus the likelihood that any two kids of different races have a friendship goes down.

Moody included statistical controls for activities, sports, academic tracking, and other school-structural conditions that tend to desegregate (or segregate) students within the school. The rule still holds true: more diversity translates into more division among students. Those increased opportunities to interact are also, effectively, increased opportunities to reject each other. And that is what's happening.

As a result, junior-high and high-school children in diverse schools experience two completely contrasting social cues on a daily basis. The first cue is inspiring-that many students have a friend of another race. The second cue is tragic-that far more kids just like to hang with their own. It's this second dynamic that becomes more and more visible as overall school diversity goes up. As a child circulates through school, she sees more groups that her race disqualifies her from, more lunchroom tables she can't sit at, and more implicit lines that are taboo to cross. This is unmissable even if she, personally, has friends of other races. "Even in multiracial schools, once young people leave the classroom, very little interracial discussion takes place because a desire to associate with one's own ethnic group often discourages interaction between groups," wrote Brendesha Tynes of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

All told, the odds of a white high-schooler in America having a best friend of another race is only 8 percent. Those odds barely improve for the second-best friend, or the third-best, or the fifth. For blacks, the odds aren't much better: 85 percent of black kids' best friends are also black. Cross-race friends also tend to share a single activity, rather than multiple activities; as a result, these friendships are more likely to be lost over time, as children transition from middle school to high school.

I can't help but wonder-would the track record of desegregation be so mixed if parents reinforced it, rather than remaining silent? It is tempting to believe that because their generation is so diverse, today's children grow up knowing how to get along with people of every race. But numerous studies suggest that this is more of a fantasy than a fact.

Is it really so difficult to talk with children about race when they're very young? What jumped out at Phyllis Katz, in her study of 200 black and white children, was that parents are very comfortable talking to their children about gender, and they work very hard to counterprogram against boy-girl stereotypes. That ought to be our model for talking about race. The same way we remind our daughters, "Mommies can be doctors just like daddies," we ought to be telling all children that doctors can be any skin color. It's not complicated what to say. It's only a matter of how often we reinforce it.

Shushing children when they make an improper remark is an instinctive reflex, but often the wrong move. Prone to categorization, children's brains can't help but attempt to generalize rules from the examples they see. It's embarrassing when a child blurts out, "Only brown people can have breakfast at school," or "You can't play basketball; you're white, so you have to play baseball." But shushing them only sends the message that this topic is unspeakable, which makes race more loaded, and more intimidating.

To be effective, researchers have found, conversations about race have to be explicit, in unmistakable terms that children understand. A friend of mine repeatedly told her 5-year-old son, "Remember, everybody's equal." She thought she was getting the message across. Finally, after seven months of this, her boy asked, "Mommy, what's 'equal' mean?"

Bigler ran a study in which children read brief biographies of famous African-Americans. For instance, in a biography of Jackie Robinson, they read that he was the first African-American in the major leagues. But only half read about how he'd previously been relegated to the Negro Leagues, and how he suffered taunts from white fans. Those facts-in five brief sentences were omitted in the version given to the other children.

After the two-week history class, the children were surveyed on their racial attitudes. White children who got the full story about historical discrimination had significantly better attitudes toward blacks than those who got the neutered version. Explicitness works. "It also made them feel some guilt," Bigler adds. "It knocked down their glorified view of white people." They couldn't justify in-group superiority.

Minority parents are more likely to help their children develop a racial identity from a young age. April Harris-Britt, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that all minority parents at some point tell their children that discrimination is out there, but they shouldn't let it stop them. Is this good for them? Harris-Britt found that some preparation for bias was beneficial, and it was necessary-94 percent of African-American eighth graders reported to Harris-Britt that they'd felt discriminated against in the prior three months.

But if children heard these preparation-for-bias warnings often (rather than just occasionally), they were significantly less likely to connect their successes to effort, and much more likely to blame their failures on their teachers-whom they saw as biased against them.

Harris-Britt warns that frequent predictions of future discrimination ironically become as destructive as experiences of actual discrimination: "If you overfocus on those types of events, you give the children the message that the world is going to be hostile-you're just not valued and that's just the way the world is."

Preparation for bias is not, however, the only way minorities talk to their children about race. The other broad category of conversation, in Harris-Britt's analysis, is ethnic pride. From a very young age, minority children are coached to be proud of their ethnic history. She found that this was exceedingly good for children's self-confidence; in one study, black children who'd heard messages of ethnic pride were more engaged in school and more likely to attribute their success to their effort and ability.

That leads to the question that everyone wonders but rarely dares to ask. If "black pride" is good for African-American children, where does that leave white children? It's horrifying to imagine kids being "proud to be white." Yet many scholars argue that's exactly what children's brains are already computing. Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth, and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence. So a pride message would not just be abhorrent-it'd be redundant.

Over the course of our research, we heard many stories of how people-from parents to teachers-were struggling to talk about race with their children. For some, the conversations came up after a child had made an embarrassing comment in public. A number had the issue thrust on them, because of an interracial marriage or an international adoption. Still others were just introducing children into a diverse environment, wondering when and if the timing was right.

But the story that most affected us came from a small town in rural Ohio. Two first-grade teachers, Joy Bowman and Angela Johnson, had agreed to let a professor from Ohio State University, Jeane Copenhaver-Johnson, observe their classrooms for the year. Of the 33 children, about two thirds were white, while the others were black or of mixed-race descent.

It being December, the teachers had decided to read to their classes 'Twas the Night B'fore Christmas, Melodye Rosales's retelling of the Clement C. Moore classic. As the teachers began reading, the kids were excited by the book's depiction of a family waiting for Santa to come. A few children, however, quietly fidgeted. They seemed puzzled that this storybook was different: in this one, it was a black family all snug in their beds.

Then there was the famed clatter on the roof. The children leaned in to get their first view of Santa and the sleigh as Johnson turned the page-

And they saw that Santa was black.

"He's black!" gasped a white little girl.

A white boy exclaimed, "I thought he was white!"

Immediately, the children began to chatter about the stunning development. At the ripe old ages of 6 and 7, the children had no doubt that there was a Real Santa. Of that they were absolutely sure. But suddenly there was this huge question mark. Could Santa be black? And if so, what did that mean?

While some of the black children were delighted with the idea that Santa could be black, others were unsure. A couple of the white children rejected this idea out of hand: a black Santa couldn't be real.

But even the little girl the most adamant that the Real Santa must be white came around to accept the possibility that a black Santa could fill in for White Santa if he was hurt. And she still gleefully yelled along with the Black Santa's final "Merry Christmas to All! Y'all Sleep Tight."

Other children offered the idea that perhaps Santa was "mixed with black and white"-something in the middle, like an Indian. One boy went with a two-Santa hypothesis: White Santa and Black Santa must be friends who take turns visiting children. When a teacher made the apparently huge mistake of saying that she'd never seen Santa, the children all quickly corrected her: everyone had seen Santa at the mall. Not that that clarified the situation any.

The debate raged for a week, in anticipation of a school party. The kids all knew Real Santa was the guest of honor.

Then Santa arrived at the party-and he was black. Just like in the picture book.

Some white children said that this black Santa was too thin: that meant that the Real Santa was the fat white one at Kmart. But one of the white girls retorted that she had met the man and was convinced. Santa was brown.

Most of the black children were exultant, since this proved that Santa was black. But one of them, Brent, still doubted-even though he really wanted a black Santa to be true. So he bravely confronted Santa.

"There ain't no black Santas!" Brent insisted.

"Lookit here." Santa pulled up a pant leg.

A thrilled Brent was sold. "This is a black Santa!" he yelled. "He's got black skin and his black boots are like the white Santa's boots."

A black-Santa storybook wasn't enough to crush every stereotype. When Johnson later asked the kids to draw Santa, even the black kids who were excited about a black Santa still depicted him with skin as snowy white as his beard.

But the shock of the Santa storybook was the catalyst for the first graders to have a yearlong dialogue about race issues. The teachers began regularly incorporating books that dealt directly with issues of racism into their reading.

And when the children were reading a book on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights movement, both a black and a white child noticed that white people were nowhere to be found in the story. Troubled, they decided to find out just where in history both peoples were.

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Even Babies Discriminate: A NurtureShock Excerpt.

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At the Children's Research Lab at the University of Texas, a database is kept on thousands of families in the Austin area who have volunteered to be available for scholarly research. In 2006 Birgitte Vittrup recruited from the database about a hundred families, all of whom were Caucasian with a child 5 to 7 years old.

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Words matter, and language matters. Not so long ago, Wolfeboro made national news when the police chief called President Obama an "N-word."

Today, Ta-Nehisi Coates breaks down
"Words That Don't Belong To You" in this video: Straight Talk about the N-Word

Questions to consider in your reflection:

What are some DKDKs (something you didn’t know you didn’t know)?

What are some things that stuck out to you about this video?

What are some things you think our community needs to understand about the N-word?

Do you respond when people use the N word? How?

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Ta-Nehisi Coates on words that don't belong to everyone | We Were Eight Years In Power Book Tour

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What is intersectionality, and why does it matter?

Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both. In this moving talk, she calls on us to bear witness to this reality and speak up for victims of prejudice.

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Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality

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Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both.

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Day 10: White Supremacy and Christianity

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Day 10: White Supremacy and Christianity

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Elements of racist ideology have long been present in white Christianity in the United States. Too often, some Americans have used their faith as a veil for racist and white supremacist beliefs and actions. Can we now try to turn the tide and look to churches to get involved in the fight for racial equality?

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When a young Southern Baptist pastor named Alan Cross arrived in Montgomery, Ala., in January 2000, he knew it was where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had his first church and where Rosa Parks helped launched the famous bus boycott, but he didn't know some other details of the city's role in civil rights history.

The more he learned, the more troubled he became by one event in particular: the savage attack in May 1961 on a busload of Black and white Freedom Riders who had traveled defiantly together to Montgomery in a challenge to segregation. Over the next 15 years, Cross, who is white, would regularly take people to the old Greyhound depot in Montgomery to highlight what happened that spring day.

"They pull in right here, on the side," Cross said, standing in front of the depot. "And it was quiet when they got here. But then once they start getting off the bus, around 500 people come out - men, women and children. Men were holding the Freedom Riders back, and the women were hitting them with their purses and holding their children up to claw their faces." Some of the men carried lead pipes and baseball bats. Two of the Freedom Riders, the civil rights activist John Lewis and a white ally, James Zwerg, were beaten unconscious.

Though he had grown up in Mississippi and was familiar with the history of racial conflict in the South, Cross was horrified by the story of the 1961 attack on the Freedom Riders. Montgomery was known as a city of churches. Fresh out of seminary, Cross had come there to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

"Why didn't white Christians show up?" he recalled wondering.

To his dismay, Cross learned that many of the people in the white mob were regular churchgoers. In the years that followed, he made it part of his ministry to educate his fellow Christians about the attack and prompt them to reflect on its meaning.

"You think about the South being Christian, but this wasn't Christianity," Cross said. "So what happened here in the white church? How did we get to that point?" It's a question he explored in his 2014 book, When Heaven and Earth Collide: Racism, Southern Evangelicals, and the Better Way of Jesus.

The answer to the question lies partly in U.S. history, beginning in the days of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, but not ending there. Elements of racist ideology have long been present in white Christianity in the United States.
Racism from the pulpit
Less than three weeks after the 1961 attack on the Freedom Riders, Montgomery's most prominent pastor, Henry Lyon Jr., gave a fiery speech before the local white Citizens' Council, denouncing the civil rights protesters and the cause for which they were beaten - from a "Christian" perspective.

"Ladies and gentlemen, for 15 years I have had the privilege of being pastor of a white Baptist church in this city," Lyon said. "If we stand 100 years from now, it will still be a white church. I am a believer in a separation of the races, and I am none the less a Christian." The crowd applauded.

"If you want to get in a fight with the one that started separation of the races, then you come face to face with your God," he declared. "The difference in color, the difference in our body, our minds, our life, our mission upon the face of this earth, is God given."

Lyon saw himself as a devout Bible believer, and he was far from an extremist in the Southern Baptist world. A former president of the Alabama Baptist Convention, his Montgomery church had more than 3,000 members.

How respected people of God could openly promote racist views was a question that would trouble many Southerners in the years that followed. Among them was a young woman growing up in East Texas in the 1970s, Carolyn Renée Dupont. The girl's grandmother took her regularly to church, made her listen to sermons on the radio and gave her a quarter for every Bible verse she memorized. But the grandmother believed just as deeply in the superiority of the white race.

"I asked her about that once," Dupont recalled, "and she said, 'I just don't believe Blacks should be treated the same as whites.' " Dupont, now a historian at Eastern Kentucky University, said the experience with her grandmother spurred her to focus her research on the racial views of Southern white evangelicals. "I wanted to understand what seemed like a central riddle about the South," she said. "The part of the country that was the most fervent about religious faith was also the one that practiced white supremacy most enthusiastically." It was the same question that bothered Cross as a young pastor in Montgomery.
Slavery and the Bible
At an earlier point in American history, some Christian theologians went so far as to argue that the enslavement of human beings was justifiable from a biblical point of view. James Henley Thornwell, a Harvard-educated scholar who committed huge sections of the Bible to memory, regularly defended slavery and promoted white supremacy from his pulpit at the First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, S.C., where he was the senior pastor in the years leading up to the Civil War.

"As long as that [African] race, in its comparative degradation, co-exists side by side with the white," Thornwell declared in a famous 1861 sermon, "bondage is its normal condition." Thornwell was a slave owner, and in his public pronouncements he told fellow Christians they need not feel guilty about enslaving other human beings.

"The relation of master and slave stands on the same foot with the other relations of life," Thornwell insisted. "In itself, it is not inconsistent with the will of God. It is not sinful." The Christian Scriptures, Thornwell said, "not only fail to condemn; they as distinctly sanction slavery as any other social condition of man."

Among the New Testament verses Thornwell could cite was the Apostle Paul's letter to the Ephesians where he writes, "Slaves, obey your human masters, with fear and trembling and sincerity of heart." (Biblical scholars now discount the relevance of the passage to a consideration of chattel slavery.)

Thornwell's reassurance was immensely important to all those who had a stake in the existing economic and political system in the South. In justifying slavery, he was speaking not just as a theologian but as a Southern patriot. In the First Presbyterian cemetery, Thornwell's name appears prominently on a monument to church members who served the Confederate cause in the Civil War.

"Slavery, in the minds of many, was necessary for the South to thrive," said Bobby Donaldson, director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina. "So Thornwell used his pulpit to defend the South against charges by the North, by abolitionists. ... He provided the intellectual defenses that many slaveholders needed."

Thornwell's First Presbyterian congregation included slave owners and businessmen and other members of the political and economic elite in Columbia, and as their pastor he represented their interests. A belief in white supremacy was a foundational part of Southern culture, which is one reason some otherwise devout Christians have failed to challenge it.
The Southern way
Lyon's opening prayer before the white Citizens' Council meeting in Montgomery included words starkly reminiscent of the Civil War era. "We stand on the sacred soil of Alabama in the cradle of the Confederacy of our beloved Southland," he said. "Help us to realize with all of the fervency of our heart and mind that every inch of ground we stand on tonight is sacred and honorable."

A fear that their regional culture was at risk lay behind much of the opposition to the civil rights movement among Southern Christians. Cross, the Montgomery pastor who was dismayed by what he learned of the attack on the Freedom Riders, ultimately decided that the best explanation for the involvement of Christians was that they were acting on the basis of their perceived self-interest.

"People try to protect their way of life," he said. "You know, 'What's best for me and my family?' You even begin to use God as a means to an end. It makes a lot of sense to people, and they're, like, 'Well, that's what everybody does.' "

A "don't-rock-the-boat" philosophy can have a powerful appeal among people who are unnerved by the prospect of social change, and church leaders may feel powerless to counter it.

In 1965, Lyon's more moderate son, Henry Lyon III, was called to lead an all-white Baptist church in Selma, Ala. He arrived in the city two months after the "Bloody Sunday" confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, when more than 2,000 civil rights marchers were savagely attacked by Alabama state troopers and local law officers. The younger Lyon, who died in 2018, never adopted his father's bigoted rhetoric, and his wife, Sara Jane Lyon, said he was willing to open his church to African Americans. During the 21 years Lyon was the church's pastor, however, his congregation never accepted Black members, apparently because he did not feel free to press the issue.

"Selma wasn't ready for it," Sara Jane Lyon told NPR in an interview. "He knew it would accomplish nothing if he upset everybody and pushed, you know, to integrate the church."

Churches operate within a cultural context. By challenging local customs and perspectives, pastors may alienate the white economic and political players who serve as their deacons, elders, Sunday School teachers and financial supporters.

In his sermons, Sara Jane Lyon recalled, her husband would tell his congregation, "I have not come here to change your heart. There's no way I can do that. ... Only the Lord can change your heart." Asked whether her husband ever discussed racial justice as a pastor, she said, "That was not his style of preaching. He didn't get up and talk about local issues. He preached the Word of God."
The church and the status quo
After leaving Selma, the Lyons relocated to Montgomery and joined the First Baptist Church there. With about 5,000 members, the church has a central place in civic life. The congregation is almost entirely white, but it's not because of a deliberate policy. The pastor, Jay Wolf, said he welcomes everyone.

"When I came to know the Lord, I became colorblind," Wolf said. When some visitors asked Wolf how many African Americans attended his church, he said he had "no idea."

"I don't know how many white members we have," Wolf told NPR. "Like, does it make any difference? I just know that we have people, crafted in the image of God. I am completely resistant to this idea of breaking things down on a demographic basis. We are the body of Christ, and we need Jesus, and that's all I need to know."

On the other side of Montgomery, where African Americans are concentrated, Pastor Terrence Jones also preaches about needing Jesus, though with a message attuned to a multiracial congregation. The son of a Black Southern Baptist preacher, Jones said he thinks the Christian church is partly to blame for America "dropping the ball," in his words, on race issues.

"The message of Jesus is a unifying message," Jones said. "According to Ephesians 2, he tears down 'every dividing wall of hostility' through his death on the cross. I think we've done a poor job of showing the world that, because we've been so segregated."

Jones argues that Christians need to focus on racism far more seriously.

"When people get shot, when our president says something racially charged, people get pushed into their corners, and they don't wrestle with what does this mean for me as a minority, what does this mean for me as a white person, but also, what does this mean for me as a follower of Jesus?"

At the time of the civil rights movement, King argued that church leaders needed to take a broad view of their mission and accept responsibility for addressing social inequity. In his 1963 Letter From a Birmingham Jail, written in longhand from his jail cell, King lamented the failure of "white churchmen" to stand up for racial justice when it meant challenging the local power structure.

"So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound," King wrote. "So often it is an arch-defender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent - and often even vocal - sanction of things as they are."
A theology of inaction
Some white Christian leaders have even provided moral and theological reasoning for their reluctance to challenge the existing system. Evangelicals in particular generally prioritize an individual's own salvation experience over social concerns. The primary mission of the church in this view is to win souls for Christ. Working for racial justice, in contrast, may be seen as a "political" issue.

"In that configuration, immorality only lives in the individual person," said Dupont, the religion historian who grew up in Texas. "There's no conception of systemic injustice and systemic sin."

Civil rights activists who cited the Bible in support of their cause were often dismissed as "a bunch of theological liberals," Dupont said. "And then it becomes an argument about who really believes the Bible. If Christianity is really about individual salvation, and the mission of the church is to win the lost, then [it is said that] these people who are telling us we need to get involved in the civil rights movement are just trying to lead us astray."

The rejection of a "social gospel" remains popular among those conservative evangelicals today who see advocating for Black Lives Matter or immigrant rights as political activities. It is an argument with roots extending back to the theology of Thornwell and like-minded religion scholars of the 19th century.

"What, then, is the Church?" Thornwell asked in his 1851 Report on Slavery. "It is not, as we fear too many regard it, a moral institute of universal good whose business it is to wage war upon every form of human ill, whether social, civil, political or moral."

Such pronouncements have made Thornwell popular among "orthodox" Christian theologians who rebel against liberal interpretations of the church's mission in the modern world. Once his pronouncements on slavery and race are disregarded, Thornwell's theological views still resonate.

One of the buildings on the grounds of his former church in South Carolina is Thornwell Hall. Until it closed due to concerns over the coronavirus, the building was used for children's education. The First Presbyterian ministerial staff has not been overly concerned that by honoring Thornwell, it may be offending potential African American members.

"As far as I know, it has not kept people from our doors," said Gabe Fluhrer, an associate pastor at the church.

Fluhrer has studied Thornwell's writings, many of which are highly sophisticated, and he is dismayed that the theologian's views on slavery and race have made it more difficult for people to appreciate his broader biblical insight.

"If it were an impediment [to someone]," Fluhrer said, "I would love to speak to that person and say, 'Look, we need to condemn what is wrong with him, and we need to celebrate what is good.' He got a lot right on the Scriptures and everything wrong when it comes to race."

Getting everything wrong with regard to race, however, can be an unforgivable failing for people whose life experience is shaped by racism.

For many years, African American worshippers were relegated to the First Presbyterian balcony. Church authorities later permitted them to have a church a few blocks away where they could worship separately under the supervision of the First Presbyterian elders. It became known as Ladson Presbyterian Church, after one of the church's early pastors.

The church has only a few dozen active members these days, but the congregation is close, and the Sunday services are intimate and joyful gatherings. There is no longer any connection to the original church.

"I don't know anyone who goes to First Presbyterian," said Rosena Lucas, 88, a longtime Ladson member. "I've never had any interest [in attending]."

Nor has Hemphill Pride, an elder in the Ladson congregation. "I see that church as a stranger, really," he said. For Pride and other Ladson members, the Thornwell connection still taints the parent church.

"It's an affront to me," Pride said. "[To have] buildings named after people who interpreted the Bible in that manner is disrespectful to all Black people."

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White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots In U.S. Christianity

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When a young Southern Baptist pastor named Alan Cross arrived in Montgomery, Alabama in January 2000, he knew it was where Martin Luther King, Jr. had his first church and where Rosa Parks launched her famous bus boycott, but he didn't know some other details of the city's role in civil rights history.

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Week 2 Bonus: The Fusion of Faith, Politics, and Poverty

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Week 2 Bonus: The Fusion of Faith, Politics, and Poverty

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“I worry,” Barber said, “about the way that faith is cynically used by some to serve hate, fear, racism, and greed.” His message harked back to the politics of King in 1968 and to a kind of liberation theology: “Pay people what they deserve. Share your food with the hungry. Do this and then your nation shall be called a repairer of the breach.”

Read and reflect on Jelani Cobb's profile of William Barber, pastor and leader of the Moral Monday Movement

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After the success of the Moral Monday protests, the pastor is attempting to revive Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s final-and most radical-campaign.

At first glance, the crowds of people congregating on a block of Mulberry Street, a stretch of squat brick buildings near downtown Memphis, on the morning of April 4th, might have been there for a variety of reasons. The street venders selling T-shirts and posters and the jumbotron set up near a parking lot suggested the start of a music festival; delegations of men and women dressed in their union best pointed to a labor rally. But the plaintive notes of gospel music drifting from speakers and the black bunting draped over a balcony of the building at the center of the activities indicated a more sombre occasion. The space behind the bunting had begun as an overlook, became a crime scene, and is now a historic site. The hundreds of people, most but by no means all of them black, were gathering at the Lorraine Motel and the National Civil Rights Museum, to mark the moment when, fifty years earlier, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated as he stood on the balcony outside Room 306. The past five years have been a season of semicentennials: 2013, 2014, and 2015 brought anniversaries of the triumphs of the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. This year recalls losses: King's death and, with it, the hopes of a signal phase of the civil-rights struggle.

Speeches, some of them from associates of King's, went on all day. James Lawson, who, at eighty-nine, is nearly as dynamic as he was when he helped organize the Freedom Rides of 1961, spoke about the landmark strike of black sanitation workers, called in Memphis in early 1968 to protest unsafe work conditions and unequal pay. It was Lawson who had invited King to Memphis, to lend his support. (A sanitation worker at the commemoration who had travelled with a group from New York City told me that it was important to reclaim King's connections to organized labor.) Jesse Jackson, who was with King when he was shot, movingly recounted the final moments of his life. Gina Belafonte, the daughter of King's close friend Harry Belafonte, runs Sankofa, an organization that connects the arts with activism, and she spoke about the imperatives of culture in the service of social change. But the day was warm, and, by the afternoon, the crowd was beginning to grow restless. As with any rite that is repeated at regular intervals, even for an event so consequential, the speeches began to seem rote. The comparisons between the past and the present and the inevitable declarations that we still have "so far to go," which tend to reinforce how creative and distinctive those monumental events of the past were, sometimes raised the dispiriting question of whether anything being done in the present would warrant such celebration in the future.

All this added to the anticipation surrounding one of the final speakers of the day. The Reverend Dr. William Barber, a pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church, in Goldsboro, North Carolina, has become, in the past few years, an indispensable figure in the civil-rights landscape, and, perhaps, the individual most capable of crafting a broad-based political counterpoint to the divisiveness of Trumpism. Charismatic, tireless, eloquent, and yet resistant to an excessive nostalgia for the glory days of the movement, he has presence. At around five o'clock, he came out on the balcony. A tall, heavyset, handsome man with the kind of face that people describe as being "of indeterminate age"-he is fifty-four-Barber was dressed in a black suit, a magenta shirt with a clergyman's collar, and a white clerical stole that read, "Jesus Was a Poor Man." He has an ursine bearing, and moves methodically, which gave the applause a moment to build.

Allotted just five minutes to speak, Barber began by addressing not King's victories but the burdens that he bore. "The weight of these years, by the time he got to Memphis, to stand with black men who were organizing a garbage strike, were heavy," Barber said. "By the time he got to Memphis, he had racists, moderates, politicians, a President, and even jealous criticism from black leaders, who used his position against the Vietnam War as an excuse to diminish his status in the eyes of liberal white America, while raising their own. And then the bullet rang. And his body fell." But what was more important than mourning King's suffering, Barber said, was honoring the work that he undertook in the last months of his life: confronting racism, to be sure, but also militarism and poverty.

Barber speaks in a resonant baritone, with precise phrasing, but he is a true thespian of the pulpit: his eyes widen in mock surprise or squint in faux confusion at an act of outrage or injustice. Sometimes, after making a point, he whirls around, looking over his shoulder as if to see whether anyone has overheard him. From the balcony, he boomed, "We don't need a commemoration, we need a reconsecration." He had blown past the five-minute mark, but the crowd was with him. He warned, "The Bible says woe unto those who love the tombs of the prophets." The duty of the living, he said, is not simply to recall the martyrs of the movement but to continue their work. "We've got to hold up the banner until every person has health care, we've got to hold it up until every child is lifted in love, we've got to hold it up until every job is a living-wage job, until every person in poverty has guaranteed subsistence." He finished to loud and sustained applause. Shortly afterward, at a minute past six, the time that King was shot, an enormous bell in the motel courtyard rang thirty-nine times-once for each year of King's life-and the crowd on Mulberry Street began to disperse.

Barber had offered the most concrete answer that day to the question King asked in the title of his last book, " Where Do We Go from Here?," and he wasn't speaking rhetorically. For the past three years, Barber and the Reverend Liz Theoharis, a co-director of the Kairos Center, at Union Theological Seminary, in New York, who stood next to him as he spoke in Memphis, have led an effort to revive King's most radical project: the 1968 Poor People's Campaign. At the commemoration, Jesse Jackson spoke about how King, after shepherding the movement to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, had begun to wonder if he had achieved enough. Despite the pivotal new laws, he knew that the structures of racism, inequality, and injustice had hardly crumbled. So he proposed to broaden the movement's targets from the race-specific concerns of fighting Jim Crow to an assault on the plight of the impoverished across racial lines.

The Poor People's Campaign demanded full employment, a guaranteed basic income, and access to capital for small and minority businesses. King's decision to support the Memphis strike was a way of recognizing labor struggles as part of the movement. The campaign called on people across the country to travel to Washington, D.C., where, for six weeks over the summer, protesters occupied tents on the National Mall, in a camp called Resurrection City. The idea had roots in both the 1963 March on Washington and the 1932 Bonus Army marches of First World War veterans who, left destitute by the Great Depression, set up a camp in the capital and insisted that their pensions be paid early. The centerpiece of the 1968 campaign was a mule-cart procession of people from Marks, Mississippi, the poorest town in the poorest county of the poorest state in the country.

Barber and Theoharis met in 2013, at the opening of the Kairos Center, where he was one of the speakers. (The center advocates a grassroots approach to ending poverty, in which poor people are the key elements of leadership.) At the time, he was launching his Moral Monday movement in North Carolina, enlisting a broad-based alliance of Christians, Muslims, Jews, nonbelievers, blacks, Latinos, poor whites, feminists, environmentalists, and others to protest the conservative agenda of the state legislature. Theoharis, an ordained Presbyterian minister, had spent twenty-five years doing organizing and social-justice work among domestic workers and Native Americans, and advocating for the rights of the homeless. The new project is called the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. This time, the demands include federal and state living-wage laws, equity in education, an end to mass incarceration, a single-payer health-care system, and the protection of the right to vote.

Beginning on Mother's Day and continuing until June 23rd-the last full day of the 1968 campaign-thousands of people in some forty states are expected to commit acts of civil disobedience and protest against policies enacted at the federal and, especially, the state level, that have disproportionately affected poor people. "If you have bad voting laws in your state," Barber told me, "that's not done in Congress, that's something done at the local level." The movement is largely intended to be an independent undertaking of community groups, but it is aided by Theoharis's indefatigable organizing efforts and Barber's ability to project his charisma from the pulpit and the TV screen-he is a regular presence on CNN and, in particular, MSNBC.

On the left, Barber tends to inspire unsolicited testimonials. Last winter, I found myself seated in front of Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, on a train from New York to Boston. We started talking, and I mentioned that I was writing a story about Barber. She said that she had participated in an event with him years earlier, and had followed his work since. She was impressed by his intelligence and his commitment. "He's the real thing," she said. A few weeks later, at a restaurant in Cambridge, Cornel West used the same words when he saw that I had a copy of Barber's book " The Third Reconstruction," which is partly a memoir of his activism and partly an elucidation of his ideas for the movement that he is attempting to build. "That brother is the real thing," West told me. Theoharis has also heard the phrase applied to Barber. "He has really given his life and all that is in it to the struggle," she said. "And I don't think that happens every time. I don't think that, in this society, that actually is heralded, or valued, or upheld as what you're supposed to do. But he embodies this."

His work has been made more difficult by the fact that he suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, an arthritic condition that causes him chronic pain, and forces him to lean forward when he stands, as if he were poring over a book, or speaking to a child. Last year, on an icy night in Boston, I watched as he arrived in an S.U.V. at Trinity Church, on Copley Square, where he was scheduled to speak. He had been resting, fully reclined, in the passenger seat, but, in a ritual that came to be familiar to me, he hoisted himself up, swung his legs out the door, shifted his weight onto a cane, stood, and slowly made his way across the pavement and up the church steps. I asked him how he copes with his condition, given the schedule that he keeps. He chuckled, and told me that once, when he was visiting an encampment of homeless people, a woman offered him her chair, one of her few possessions. He was moved by the gesture. "I first had to put my own struggle in perspective," he said. "I had to turn my ankylosing into a testimony, in this sense: every time I'm fighting for health care, I'm reminded I have it. How many people are there that have this disease but don't have health care? It gives you a sense of deep-not just sympathy but empathy, right?" He reminded me that Harriet Tubman suffered from epilepsy, and that Franklin Roosevelt commanded the country for thirteen years, through the Depression and global war, despite having been stricken with polio-and that all the heroes of the Bible had some physical or mental challenge. As Barber sees it, the challenges that he confronts are shared by many who are called to serve; it would be indecent to complain.

Barber's career has veered between the political and the religious, but the two paths often intersect: he argues politics from a theological perspective, while his sermons are informed by the lessons of the streets. When he mentions "the good book," he is as likely to be referring to Howard Zinn's progressive primer " A People's History of the United States " as he is to the one that contains the Old and New Testaments. He learned both traditions at home.

Barber was born on August 30, 1963, in Indianapolis. His mother, Eleanor, a government clerk, had gone into labor forty-eight hours earlier, on the day of the March on Washington, he likes to point out. His father, for whom he was named, was an ordained minister in the predominantly white Disciples of Christ denomination, who held degrees in physics and social work as well as in theology. Like millions of African-Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, Barber's father had left the South-North Carolina, in his case-as part of the Great Migration to Northern and Midwestern cities. He met Eleanor in Indiana, and they settled there.

Despite having achieved a middle-class stability that was infinitely more difficult to maintain in the South, in 1968, the couple heeded the call of E. V. Wilkins, a high-school principal and family friend who asked them to help him with a school-integration movement that he was attempting to build in Roper, a small town in the eastern part of North Carolina, near where Barber's father had grown up. When Barber was in second grade, his parents enrolled him as one of the first black students in the local elementary school. He told me jokingly, "My first foray into activist work was not of my choice." It was a family undertaking: his mother worked in the high-school office, and his father taught science. Eleanor, who is now eighty-five, still works at the school.

In " The Third Reconstruction," Barber writes that his father could have secured a prestigious position as the pastor of a large urban church, but that coming home to Roper "was a vow of poverty" for him. He was respected in clerical circles-when he wasn't teaching, he travelled the state as an itinerant preacher-but he was such an uncompromising and fervent critic of racism that some black congregations were hesitant to host him. As a child, Barber accompanied his father on his travels. He learned that the concerns of religion could hardly be distinct from those of earthly matters, like racial injustice. He remembers visiting a friend of his father's, a bishop, who had run afoul of some local whites, and praying together in the man's yard that he might be kept safe. As night fell, the friend went inside and placed shotguns by the windows. "What's that for?" Barber asked. His father answered, "That's an extra precaution in case the prayers don't work."

In 1978, at the age of fifteen, Barber was elected president of the local N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. Three years later, he enrolled in North Carolina Central University, a historically black institution in Durham. In his senior year, he met a first-year nursing student, Rebecca McLean, when she joined a march he had organized to support Jesse Jackson's 1984 Presidential bid. They married three years later and had five children; she works as a psychiatric nurse. Barber is hesitant to talk about his family, because death threats are still an occupational hazard for civil-rights leaders. "I believe he is doing what the Church as a whole, all of us, are called to do," Rebecca Barber told me. "And that is do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God." That sense of abiding purpose, she said, has allowed her not to dwell on the threats, which, in recent years, have grown in number.

Initially, Barber resisted entering the clergy; he wanted to be a civil-rights lawyer. "I had developed a distaste for the Church," he told me. "I always believed in God, but I was struggling with the Church piece of it." He chose Central in part because there was no religious-course requirement. But in his senior year he had a crisis of conscience over the question of what he could do with his life versus what he was called to do with it. In March of 1985, he discussed his dilemma with his father, who urged him to distinguish between the failings of the Church and the perfection of God. Three weeks later, Barber preached his first sermon, on the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan, he noted, was not concerned about how to get into Heaven, the focus of too much of religion, in his opinion. Instead, "he chose to go down into the ditch, he chose to go down to where people were hurting." After graduating, Barber enrolled at Duke University, to earn a master's degree in divinity. His father died in 1988, but Barber still often mentions him when talking about his understanding of Christianity.

At Duke, Barber studied with C. Eric Lincoln, the acclaimed scholar of the black church whose work explored the ways that race had shaped American Christianity-rendering the religion, for example, entirely capable of reconciling fidelity to its creed with slavery and racism. He also read the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose concept of Christian realism led Barber toward a practical theology, a way of faith that is rooted in the struggles of common people and seeks justice and mercy against unfavorable odds. His studies gave him an intellectual scaffolding that was no less important than what he had learned from his father about the moral and practical obligations of faith. Later, he met the theologians Paul Tillich and James Cone, whose thinking also became a major influence on him. His approach to faith, however, put him at odds with the Moral Majority version of evangelicalism that was ascendant in the nineteen-eighties. He told me on the phone one evening that those Christians "say so much about areas where the Bible says very little"-abortion, homosexuality-"and speak so little about the issues where the Bible says so much," like poverty, empathy, and justice.

Meanwhile, Barber's belief in the possibility of an alliance of poor people across racial lines was beginning to take shape. The idea may seem radical, particularly in the era of Donald Trump, but it isn't novel; it had a long history even when King proposed it. A number of such alliances formed during Reconstruction, in a grand, if short-lived, experiment in inclusive populism. In North Carolina, the Fusion movement came together to protest the Democratic Party's monetary policy, which hurt both black and white small farmers, and for a time it created one of the most progressive governments in the state's history. In 1894, a Fusion-Republican alliance won every state office up for election, and it sent George Henry White, a black Republican, to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1896. It all came to an end just two years later, with the Wilmington race riots, in which an estimated two thousand white men attacked black residents, burned black businesses, and unseated Fusionist officials, replacing them with white Democrats, in what was essentially a coup d'état. The movement of resurgent white nationalists, unironically referred to as "redemption," had triumphed in North Carolina. Nevertheless, the inspiration of the Fusionists has stayed with Barber throughout his career.

After Duke, Barber was hired as the chair of the North Carolina State Human Relations Commission, in Durham. He travelled around the state investigating instances of discrimination in housing and employment. He was committed to the work, but, in the summer of 1993, when he was thirty, Greenleaf Christian Church, in Goldsboro, part of the Disciples of Christ denomination, asked him to be its pastor, and he decided to accept the offer. A month later, he awoke unable to move. Ankylosing spondylitis causes joints and vertebrae in the spine to fuse; Barber's neck, hips, and the base of his spine had essentially frozen in place. He had played football in high school, and the pain and stiffness in his back that signalled the onset of the disease had been misdiagnosed as a bad disk. There is no cure for ankylosing spondylitis, but therapy and medication can alleviate some of its symptoms.

He spent nearly three months in the hospital, and began an intensive, painful process of regaining mobility. He sank into a depression, and encouraged Greenleaf to find an able-bodied pastor, a request that the church rejected. With the assistance of a walker, he was eventually able to take a few tentative steps. He continued to preach at Greenleaf, mastering a technique of swinging the walker behind him in the pulpit and bracing himself against it. One morning in 2005, he managed to walk to the bathroom unassisted. Later that day, he bought a white wooden cane for the blind, which he painted black. He still uses it; battered and weathered, it is a testament to his twelve years of trial and endurance.

In Goldsboro, a city of some thirty thousand, he threw himself into local issues, securing funding to build a community day-care center and housing for low-income families and seniors. He had remained active with the N.A.A.C.P., and in 2005 he was elected president of the North Carolina State Conference, which had a history of front-line activism and outsized personalities. Ella Baker, whose work was key to the successes of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had organized branches of the N.A.A.C.P. in North Carolina in the nineteen-forties. Barber remembers his father speaking about Baker's work whenever the topic of political organizing came up. "She was a hero in my family," he said. Robert F. Williams, the president of the Union County branch, was known for his defense of two young boys falsely accused of rape in the infamous 1958 "kissing case." The next year, he urged blacks to take up arms in self-defense, a suggestion that alarmed not only the chief of police, Jesse Helms, Sr., the father of the future Republican United States senator, but also Roy Wilkins, the organization's staid, pacifist national president, who suspended him for six months. In 1961, facing a false kidnapping charge, he and his wife fled the country for several years, first to Cuba and then to China; the charges were eventually dropped. He became a legendary figure, and was widely credited with anticipating Malcolm X's statements about the right to self-defense. "Some choose to only focus on Williams's decision to have armed guards," Barber told me, but that overshadowed his contributions, such as his willingness to defend the poorest African-Americans, even those whom other blacks considered "not high enough on the social ladder."

Barber pushed to return the state conference to its dynamic roots. He steered it into a battle in Wake County, where a school board had gutted guidelines promoting racial diversity in classrooms. The organization set about organizing protests and mobilizing voters. The following year, every member of the board who had tried to resegregate the schools was voted out. Barber also built a coalition of social-justice organizations, N.A.A.C.P. chapters, and youth groups from around the state called Historic Thousands on Jones Street, named for the street where the North Carolina General Assembly meets. The idea was to influence legislators' priorities around fourteen key issues, including criminal justice, health care, immigrants' rights, and voting rights.

Unlike most of the South, which reliably gives Republican candidates big majorities, North Carolina is a purple state. But when Barack Obama managed a slim win there in the 2008 Presidential election-becoming the first Democrat to carry the state since Jimmy Carter-conservatives worried that North Carolina could become a beachhead for Democrats and progressives in the region. Two years later, after the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision allowed a massive infusion of campaign cash from the retail heir James Arthur Pope-the Raleigh News & Observer once called Pope "the Knight of the Right"--Republicans took control of both houses of the legislature, for the first time in more than a century. They immediately redrew voting districts, eliminated the earned-income tax credit, introduced a bill that would allow residents to carry firearms in public parks and restaurants, cut funding to prekindergarten education, and engineered a voter-I.D. bill that would have made it disproportionately difficult for African-Americans to vote. (In 2016, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the voter-I.D. law, saying that it targeted black voters "with almost surgical precision," and earlier this year it declared the redistricting map unconstitutional.)

In 2012, a Republican, Pat McCrory, was elected governor, displacing Beverly Purdue, a Democrat. The McCrory-era legislature passed restrictions on abortion, loosened environmental regulations, and refused Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, in a state where twenty per cent of the residents lacked health insurance. McCrory also signed a law preventing transgender individuals from using the bathroom that conforms to their gender identity. Conservatives in the state exulted in their ability to fulfill their agenda-and to raise the funds to do so-but there was a boomerang effect: they encouraged a diverse group of dissenters to recognize a common cause.

On April 29, 2013, a Monday, Barber led a group of some seventy-five people, including members of the Historic Thousands coalition, to the state legislature, to protest what Barber has said was the legislature's attempt to persecute minorities and the disadvantaged. As he once put it, "We said if they were going to crucify the poor, the sick, the children, the unemployed, the immigrants, the L.G.B.T., and the women, and then on top of that crucify voting rights, then every crucifixion, as Billy Kyles"-a Tennessee civil-rights leader-"would say, needs a witness." The protesters disrupted the legislature's deliberations and confronted Thom Tillis, the Republican speaker of the House. Police arrested Barber and sixteen others. This was the start of Moral Mondays.

The group returned the following week, and nearly twice as many people were arrested. By the end of the term, fourteen weeks later, more than a thousand protesters had been arrested. The Moral Monday demonstrations continued for four years, with tens of thousands of participants. The protests are largely credited with helping Roy Cooper, a Democrat, narrowly defeat McCrory in the 2016 gubernatorial race.

Barber has a particular disdain for politicians who use racial rhetoric and voter suppression in order to win elections, but whose agenda is broadly damaging to poor whites as well as blacks. "They get elected using racial gerrymandering, then enact policies that affect everybody," he said. He sees the current political polarization as a result of a deception that has driven a good deal of American politics since at least the 1968 Presidential election, when Richard Nixon exploited the resentment of white Southerners in an attempt to draw them into a Republican coalition. The so-called Southern Strategy was, in many respects, the antithesis of King's campaign. "Poverty has been so racialized," Barber told me, "that most people don't even know that, in raw numbers, the majority of poor people are white."

Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children's Defense Fund, which was an outgrowth of the original Poor People's Campaign, also sees a cyclical history of racial division at play. The country "sold poor white men on their skin and denied them basic opportunities," she said. "Their resentment flares up every half century. And you have to constantly fight it back." Demagogic politicians, economic malaise, and racism, she told me, often lead people to "vote against their own interests." The duelling populism of Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign-inclusiveness versus tribalism-was another replay of this conflict. Sanders told me that he thinks Barber "is doing some of the most important work in the country." More precisely, he and Barber share the same theory of social change: "What he understands is that real change never takes place from the top on down," Sanders said. "It is always from the bottom on up, and that's what he is trying to do and what he understands and what he preaches."

I spoke to Barber by phone one night and asked if the prospect of rekindling a Fusion-style alliance is, at this moment, far-fetched. He responded, as he often does, with a story. He met Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, an evangelical minister, twenty years ago. Wilson-Hartgrove had once been a Senate page for Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, who ran for President in 1948 on a platform of segregation, despite having fathered a child with a black domestic worker employed in his family's home. But, in 1998, Wilson-Hartgrove heard Barber speak at an event organized by the state's Human Relations Commission, in Raleigh, and invited him to visit his all-white Southern Baptist church, in Stokes County. The area was known as a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. Barber visited anyway, and the two men developed a friendship that pushed Wilson-Hartgrove to question the racial assumptions he had grown up with, and the ways that they were connected to conservative theology. Eventually, he collaborated with Barber on "The Third Reconstruction." In the afterword to the book, he wrote, "I can trust a man who embraces his enemy and then trusts him to tell his story." Later that night, Barber texted me images from recent Poor People's Campaign rallies in Appalachia, with hundreds of people, most of them white, in the audience.

Moral Mondays brought Barber to the attention of both progressives and Democratic Party officials-the model of large-scale protests against legislative assaults on civil rights was followed in Georgia, Alabama, and Missouri-but it was not until the summer of 2016, when he spoke in a prime-time slot at the Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, that he became a nationally recognizable figure. He touched on now familiar themes: the common ground of the disenfranchised and the attenuated brand of morality that has been marketed by religious conservatives. "I worry," Barber said, "about the way that faith is cynically used by some to serve hate, fear, racism, and greed." His message harked back to the politics of King in 1968 and to a kind of liberation theology: "Pay people what they deserve. Share your food with the hungry. Do this and then your nation shall be called a repairer of the breach." This last phrase was a reference to the Book of Isaiah and an admonition to leaders who abuse their authority and deprive the poor. (The reference was strategic: since 2015, Barber has also led an organization called Repairers of the Breach, which seeks to reclaim the notion of morality for progressive activism.) He concluded with an extended riff on the heartlessness of Republican policies and those who would "harden the heart" of American democracy, and called on the assembled Democrats to be "the moral defibrillators of our time," a phrase that brought them to their feet. "We must shock this nation with the power of love, we must shock this nation with the power of mercy," he said. "We can't give up on the heart of our democracy, not now, not ever!" The speech was so rousing and so well received that a headline on an article by Janell Ross in the Washington Post read, "THE REV. WILLIAM BARBER DROPPED THE MIC."

The activist contingent in the N.A.A.C.P. hoped that Barber would become the organization's national president, but, instead, the following year, he stepped down from the North Carolina conference (he is still on the national board of directors). There doesn't seem to have been a great deal of acrimony surrounding the departure, although Barber's independent streak and his growing national profile-he had not consulted with the organization before he spoke in Philadelphia-had apparently provoked some discord in the upper ranks. Jotaka Eaddy, who served as a senior adviser to several presidents of the N.A.A.C.P., including Ben Jealous, told me that Barber's departure was "in alignment with his world view." He left, she said, "to create space for someone else to lead, and he focussed on where he was being naturally pulled." Barber told me, "I left after twelve years-that's four years longer than the President of the United States serves." He turned to his work with Repairers of the Breach and to the idea of rebuilding King's coalition.

Barber had already begun talking with Liz Theoharis about creating a national platform to address the intersecting effects of poverty. They then started a Moral Revival tour, which eventually led to a series of discussions including people such as Roz Pelles, the executive director of Repairers of the Breach; Traci Blackmon, the executive minister of justice for the United Church of Christ, and a pastor of a church in Florissant, Missouri; Alan McSurely, an attorney and organizer now based in North Carolina, who had worked with the original Poor People's Campaign; and the civil-rights historian Timothy Tyson, who wrote a biography of Robert F. Williams. McSurely, who is eighty-one, had advised Barber on the Moral Monday movement, and serves on the steering committee for the new project. This working group set the agenda, and Barber and Theoharis began travelling across the country, speaking and leading workshops on organizing and civil-disobedience training. Barber has created a structure that allows him to oversee Greenleaf and the Repairers of the Breach despite his constant travels. He begins each day on conference calls with the officers of the Repairers and then with the leadership of the church. "I don't believe a pastor should be doing everything," he told me. "I believe in power-sharing."

Barber won't discuss the particulars of any of the actions planned for the campaign, since a number of them will involve civil disobedience, but, he told me, "I can say we intend to nonviolently confront our government and its policies and we will refuse to give up our constitutional right to protest." The campaign has attracted the support of organizations such as the Service Employees International Union, the Fight for $15, and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, but Barber considers the grassroots network the crucial part of what the group has accomplished. "Our movement is a national call for moral revival," he told me. "Sometimes people will only think of something as national because you have the presence of national organizations. Our focus has been to go to the people first, in the states, on the ground, and build a network of coördinating committees." The campaign approached the larger community organizations only after it had support from local people affected by issues of poverty.

After King's death, the 1968 Poor People's Campaign foundered, dogged by federal surveillance and the infiltration efforts of J. Edgar Hoover. It also strained under the logistical demands of delivering thousands of people who, by definition, lacked resources to take care of themselves, to the nation's capital. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, on June 5th, deprived the campaign of one of its most important allies. The number of people in Resurrection City dwindled from three thousand to about five hundred. On June 24th, the police forcibly removed the last occupiers, and later that day, the mayor, fearing a repeat of the unrest in the capital that followed King's death, called in the National Guard (thirty-six years earlier, the Army had been called in to evict the Bonus Marchers). The Poor People's Campaign was over before it had achieved any of its objectives. The movement's most ambitious undertaking became its most conspicuous failure.

The Moral Monday movement captured the imagination of activists across the country, and achieved tangible results in North Carolina, but it remains to be seen whether its tactics can succeed nationwide. Marian Wright Edelman is sanguine about the prospects of the new initiative. Barber, whom she described as "brilliant," is in a position to help finish the work that was begun fifty years ago, she told me. When I asked Barber how he hoped to translate protest into progress, he said, "The civil disobedience is just one part of the plan." A second phase of the campaign will focus on voter registration, building a broader network, and creating a detailed list of policy demands, which will be released late in the summer. "We surely want to influence the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 Presidential election," Theoharis told me. But they do not plan to endorse candidates or to cast their lot with either of the major political parties. They want to change the political conversation around poverty, to create a climate in which it is impossible for any candidate or party to continue ignoring the subject. In this they have as much in common with the Occupy Movement as with the original Poor People's Campaign. Barber and Theoharis seem to see history as a guide, not a script.

Three weeks after the commemoration in Memphis, Barber spoke at the Performing Arts Center in Montgomery, Alabama, for the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a monument to the more than forty-four hundred African-Americans who were lynched between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the modern civil-rights movement. At the site, a project of the Equal Justice Initiative, led by Bryan Stevenson, hundreds of metal markers list the locations of lynchings and the names of the people who died there. The impact is traumatic, and not simply in a historical sense. Barber told me, "We should be traumatized by the idea that something like this can be seen as normal, and think about the wrongs we've become accustomed to today."

He had spent the previous two days discussing the Poor People's Campaign with Apache activists in Arizona and with representatives of the U.F.C.W. in Las Vegas. But, despite the long journey, in Montgomery, before an audience of about a thousand, he delivered the best speech I have heard him give. It was a sprawling oration, citing the historian Nell Painter, the Constitution, the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the lyrics to "Strange Fruit," and the speech that King delivered in Montgomery, in 1965, at the end of the march from Selma. That speech, which Barber encouraged the audience to listen to in its entirety, contains King's recitation of the history of populism and the ways that racism disadvantaged both black and white poor people-the points that Barber has been reiterating across the country. (Segregation, King said, was "a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War.")

Barber touched on his usual themes of inequality and the mistaken priorities of the Church, but the audience erupted in applause when he turned to the monument itself, declaring that "Jesus was lynched-an innocent victim of mob hysteria." He again charged his listeners with avoiding the hypocrisy of commemorating the victims of the past while failing to build a movement to address the present. We must pay homage, he said, "to all those who continued to fight, even after they saw the bodies swinging from trees. But there are all kinds of things swinging in the air today"-hunger, police violence, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths each year linked to poverty-related causes. He was interrupted six times by standing ovations, and the crowd was on its feet and applauding long after he'd stopped speaking.

As he walked off the stage, I detected, just for a moment, a rare note of fatigue. Barber is, it occurred to me, relentless, not tireless; determined, not indefatigable. He is driven by a fugitive hope that an ancestral breach might finally be cemented. Backstage, organizers praised him for the speech, but he didn't linger. He had a nine-hour drive ahead of him, to North Carolina, where he would tend to his church and, after a brief respite, head out on the road again. ♦

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William Barber Takes on Poverty and Race in the Age of Trump

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After the success of the Moral Monday protests, the pastor is attempting to revive Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s final-and most radical-campaign. At first glance, the crowds of people congregating on a block of Mulberry Street, a stretch of squat brick buildings near downtown Memphis, on the morning of April 4th, might have been there for a variety of reasons.