Call for mass rally and protests in Raleigh (5/7)

Forward together, not one step back!

In an email to supporters on Friday, the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, our partner in the H K on J coalition, called for a "Mass Rally and Protest Outside NC General Assembly" on Tuesday, May 7th at 7:00 PM.

The escalation of peaceful protests on Tuesday comes as advocates for workers, voters, civil rights, students, and the environment grow increasingly frustrated at the arrogant and extreme actions taken by our state legislature during the first three months of its 2013 session and are turning to civil disobedience.

Read our Mid-Session 2013 Legislative Update.

On Monday, police arrested 17 activists - including clergy, students and academics, and a woman in a wheelchair - for protesting the Republican-led legislative agenda outside the state senate chamber doors.

"The policies pursued in these chambers will devastate hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians who are already suffering," said NC NAACP president Rev. Dr. William Barber, explaining why people are now willing to be arrested. "The leadership of this Republican "super-majority" are deaf to the cries of those whom Jesus called 'the least of these.'"

We are calling together a coalition of goodwill, a nonviolent volunteer army of love, to oppose this legislature's heartless, ideologically driven agenda. We call on all people of goodwill to join us, that we might build the bridges of understanding, not the walls of division. We call on all residents of North Carolina who believe in the common good to pray and partner with us as we use the tools of protest and the tactics of nonviolent moral suasion to illuminate for the nation the shameful acts taking place here. We are not alone. We shall speak and we shall act. We will become "the trumpet of conscience" and "the beloved community" that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called upon us to be, echoing the God of our mothers and fathers in the faith. Now is the time. Here is the place. We are the people. And we will be heard. -- NC NAACP, 4/29/13