Raising the NAACP'S voice, Anne Blythe, Staff Writer
N&O, Aug 13, 2006. -excerpts-
The Rev. William J. Barber II has a colossal physical presence. People take notice when the 42-year-old preacher lumbers into a room, hunched over his walking stick, a righteousness weighing on his enormous shoulders. Now, midway through his first year as president of the state NAACP chapter, Barber is gaining a reputation for having a mighty big voice, too. --cut--
Irv Joyner, a law professor at N.C. Central University, remembers seeing Barber following in his father's footsteps, noting even then signs of a budding leader.
"I admired his understanding of the issues we were discussing," Joyner said. "He has charisma. He's an organizer. I really see him becoming more visible on the national scene."
Barber was not always certain the ministry was his life ambition.
"For me, high school was a combination of trying to navigate through the reality of being a preacher's child and sometimes being a little rebellious about that, and sometimes struggling with the notion that to be academically excellent was to be non-black," Barber said.
But he got over that as he headed from Plymouth to N.C.Central University in 1981.
At NCCU, Barber started out studying political science and public administration, with an eye toward law school. But by his junior year, he had preached his first sermon and was hooked.
Barber did graduate work at Duke Divinity School. His dissertation was on churches, theology and community development -- a sign of the life he would build for himself.
After his first pastoral job in Martinsville, Va., Barber did a brief stint as campus minister at NCCU before moving to Goldsboro and Greenleaf. -cut--
DURING HIS PRESIDENCY: He located NAACP offices to Durham, departing from the tradition of keeping them in the town where the chapter president lives.
** Recently sighted in Raleigh, hunching over the Governor.
http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/470477.html
"Raising the NAACP'S voice"
Well, the last time I checked the NAACP's North Carolina site, it was still prominently featuring a link to a defense of the AV and her false accusations.
"When religion is used to divide and destroy, that is not what Christ wanted," Barber said in measured words. "Prophetic religion says there's something beyond personal piety. There's something called public morality."
Imagine : a church meeting in which the Aryan nations and the White Power movement share the rostrum with the ACLU and the Democratic and Republican state chairmen, and the keynote address is given by a neo-Nazi leader. Imagine that all present shout, dance, and sing, and hold hands and call one another "brother" and "sister", based upon the random accident of their skin coloration.
Imagine: a district attorney goes beserk and violates every ethic of his profession to railroad three innocent black students on a charge of rape; he continues his persecution with fanatical devotion,
even after DNA results provide proof in the most absolute sense of their innocence. The white community continues to support him and demands only white jurors for the trial; the Klan marches through the town threatening the defendants' lives; the Klan leader holds a private meeting with the DA
(the details of which are not revealed to the public); white student leaders demand the defendants be convicted anyway "because of what has gone on before", and the need to "send a message"; and the ministerial council of white churches offer their pulpits to the Klan leader and other white cult leaders (some of whom call openly for the complete extermination of blacks).
Impossible?
But try reversing those colors, and then see where the NAACP has been and what it has done.
"Barber incites people with his rousing appeals for action, often reciting Scripture or invoking the words of Martin Luther King Jr., the old family favorite."
What words, these?
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
"A right delayed is a right denied."
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."
.
"The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict."
"The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice."
"The time is always right to do what is right."
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important."