REV. BARBER & THE TRUTH AND HOPE TOUR OF POVERTY IN NORTH CAROLINA APRIL 30, 2012
REV. BARBER & THE TRUTH AND HOPE TOUR OF POVERTY IN NORTH CAROLINA APRIL 30, 2012 Hello Salisbury, Rowan County, we thank God for the privilege of being here. We re so thankful for the brilliance and the leadership of Professor Gene Nichol of the Poverty Center, the tenacity and the legal expertise of attorney Melinda Lawrence with the Justice Center, the broad and coalition understanding of Deborah Tyler-Horton with AARP and the friendship and the constant probing and pushing by Dr. Jarvis Hall with the Center for Social Change at North Carolina Central University. To Bob Zellner who keeps us connected as one of the elders to the spirit of the past even in the present, for sometimes past is indeed prologue and to all who hear, to Curtis Gatewood who is building alliances around the state, to Rob Stephens who works with the media, Jeff Shaw, to everybody that came on this bus, to my good friend and president in the family, Dr. Norman and the president of the branch of the NAACP here, let s give them a hand. And all the members, will the members stand? All the members of the branch here, amen. [clapping] The Truth and Hope Tour of Poverty in North Carolina was a coalition effort to put a face on poverty in North Carolina. At stops throughout the state, people in poverty had a chance to tell their story. The following transcript is Rev. Barber s speech introducing the tour at Moore s Chapel AME Zion Church in Salisbury, North Carolina. And to one of the ladies that transformed my life, through her preaching and her praying and laying on of hands, she is indeed a living legend in her own regard, and that is our sister and prophetess in our midst, Carrie Bolton, amen, and we thank God for her. I did not know I would see her tonight, but in seeing her I am reminded of a night that she said some words that helped me, that literally shook my theological framework and helped me be able to understand the need to connect the gospel well, not really connect because it is already connected but to proclaim a gospel that remembers that at the center of that gospel is deep love for those on the margins, for those who have often been written off of the front page of this world and rendered to the back page and sometimes erased totally. That night at United Holy Church, there was this woman with these two daughters, and she tended every so often to scream as she preached, but the longer you listened to her you recognized it was not some scream of desperation or some scream of insanity, it literally was the cry of the spirit because of her deep heart for people. She walked us through a text that night about a man in the Bible whom the community had decided to chain in a graveyard. It s in the Gospel of Mark. 1
Whatever was wrong with this man, the community decided to remove him from their consideration, to no longer pay attention to him, to chain him literally in the place of death and get him out of the way. I d heard that text preached many a time, but Dr. Bolton raised the question that night that has been helping to frame my political and social insights ever since. She said, I don t know if the man was insane before they chained him in the graveyard, but I am sure, and then she said aren t you? that once the community decided that he was better off in a graveyard, in a place of death than a place of hope and life, he was surely driven insane. And then she began to ask us, as young preachers, what are we doing or not doing in our society that participates in driving people insane? When they see the amounts of wealth and greed and extreme poverty existing in the same space we call America, does that not participate in driving people insane? When politicians get elected and once they get elected, they get free public health care, simply because they ve been elected by the people, but once elected by the people to sit in the people s house, they then stand against the people having the same health insurance that they only have by virtue of the people putting them in their position? No wonder some folk are literally driven insane with depression and hurt. When we see more money put into prisons on the back side of life than invested in schools on the front side of life, should we wonder what s wrong with our children in the poorest communities that get the most underfunded, resegregated, unequal education, should we wonder what s wrong with them? The fact is, doesn t Dr. Bolton s question haunt us? Have we participated in driving our society insane? Isn t there something insane about saying things with your pen we the people, common good saying them with your pen, but then in practice rather than welcoming all into the we, we begin to other people and suggest that they are not a part of that? Isn t that kind of insane, to write in North Carolina s Constitution that all government is for the good of the whole, that people have a right to equal protection under the law, to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and the enjoyment of the fruit of their own labor? We write that, we put our hands on Bibles and we swear in the presence of people and the presence of God. And we think we re sane. Public policy leaders think they re sane when we swear for the good of the whole, we swear about we the people, we swear about life, liberty and pursuit of happiness and enjoyment of your fruit, and then we allow 1.6 million people in this state to live below the poverty line the same that existed in the 1960s; 600,000 children, 200 and some thousand black, 200 and some thousand white, 100 and some thousand Latino. And we think we are sane when we swear to do differently but then we deliberately write them off. And we engage in what we call attention violence, the kind of violence where you don t hit someone with your fist, but you hit them with constant dismissal, constant denial and you so damage their personhood because the way you ignore them literally causes them to feel they are less than human, that the world could go on without them, that the country could exist without them, that they don t matter. Somehow, all of these lofty words about we the people and common good and good of the whole, doesn t include them. And so this Truth and Hope Poverty, and we really want to hear from you, is about this deep recognition that Gene Nichol keeps talking about, that you can t, you gotta put a face on numbers. That maybe the only thing that can heal us of this insanity, or what Reinhold Niebuhr called man s inhumanity to man or woman s inhumanity to man is for something to happen that makes us see each other. There s a blind spot in our conscious, Otto Scharmer, the economist at MIT, told me. And the purpose of this tour 2
called the putting a face on poverty truth and hope tour is to first, tell the truth and reveal the truth because those of us who are participants of the Christian faith or the Jewish faith understand that where there is no truth, there will be no freedom to aspire to anything different. If you buy the myth that it has to be this way, if you accept what Walter Wink calls the stories of the empire as being greater than the truth of the eternal that says that all people matter, if you buy into the lie, then you can t be free to imagine a world, imagine a state, imagine a country that s anything different. Standing in this church, Gene and Melinda, I m reminded of this call to see truth. You know we walk in powerful traditions the past is prologue it was 2600 years ago when Isaiah said, if you want God to bless you, if you want to be repairers of the breaches, pay people what they deserve, open up your homes and bring the poor in, lift people up and then you ll be a repairer. And then he went on to say, woe unto those who pass unjust laws that negatively impact the poor. That s 2600 years ago. And then 2000 years ago, Jesus, not talking to individuals, but talking to a nation, says when I was hungry, did you feed me? And feed does not suggest pull out a biscuit on Christmas. In Hebrew, that word feed means to transform the system that is in fact causing people to be hungry. And he says because with all of your pomp and circumstance about God and religion and values, if you don t feed the poor, visit the prison, what you have not done unto them, you have not done the same thing unto God. We re in a river, Gene, we re in a powerful river. It was Pastor where is the pastor of this church: Pastor, God bless you for allowing us to be here tonight. [clapping] Because was it not Frederick Douglass that July 4 th, I think 1863, he dared to tell America a truth that at first she did not want to hear, but later on it was her salvation. He said, your July celebration is fraud and bombast and hypocritical until you do right by the sons and daughters of slavery. I m reminded of that standing in this church tonight. And so, standing in that powerful tradition, the Truth and Hope Tour has been about showing the truth, whether it s today standing in Mt. Airy, the woman who had two heart attacks, and yet a system says she s not disabled. Or a middle-aged white woman named Amy whose mama is named Mamie, who said that she s renting a trailer for $450 a month that can barely be lived in. Or whether, when we were standing in Navassa, North Carolina, on a place that corporations had dripped poison into the soil that contaminated the water table so much that one lady held my hand and said, there were 16 of us, there are only two left. The other 14 all died from cancer placed here by corporate greed. And Gene and others can tell you many more stories. We ve said we had to put the truth out here. 1950, 39.5 million people living in poverty, 22 percent of this nation, right after the war. 1960, we started at least saying the word poor, we started talking about a war on poverty and poverty went down to 22 million. 1980, we begin to erase the language of poverty from the public discourse. We started talking about a dawn in America, but that dawning and that new day in America included a trickle down economic philosophy that said if you bless those up here somehow they ll bless those down there, and before those years were over, poverty was back up to 35 million. By 2005, it was over 40 million and then the bottom fell out in 2008 and here we are. Here we are, in a place where poverty and pain is as exacerbated and as extreme as it has ever been since the Great Depression. And only if we tell the truth, only if we see it, only if we dare to say North Carolina, you are the state of the long-leaf pine, and yes, that pine points to the sky, but beneath that pine, 3
there s another North Carolina that if we refuse to see it, we do it at our own peril. There s another side of Salisbury, there s another side of Rowan County. It s not the side the political candidates will come and see. It s not the place where they will hold a political forum, but there s another side, and we ignore those other sides at our own peril. But the hope is, as I close, if we dare to look at and if we raise our voices like a trumpet and tell the truth until the truth cannot be ignored, and if we document it in such a way that we force the eyes of this state and this nation open, if we refuse to accept the lie that things have to be this way, if we, like Dr. Norman does or people individually do to this society say you need some glasses, don t you work with eyes? [audience comment: I work with teeth], you work with teeth? Well, you know what I m talking about, that you need some glasses. But maybe, maybe we do need some teeth from the standpoint that we need to be tough enough to grab on to this thing and not be afraid of it and recognize that we cannot ignore this, but at our own peril. So just maybe, if we do this, just maybe if we do this, maybe if we can see the truth, maybe if we can tell the truth, maybe if we can show the truth, maybe then we can be creative in our public policy and our private policy. Maybe we can move from a so-called profit motive to a prosperity motive for every member of the community. Maybe we can do it. I believe we can, Gene; I believe we can, Melinda. I believe that truth sets us free to hope and dream and build and believe and organize and coalesce in ways that we cannot do until we dare to see what is and then believe in what might be. That s why we re here tonight. Thank you so much for allowing us to come. 4