William Barber: Every time we have had massive change, whether it’s been Abolition, where Black and White abolitionists came together; the Labor movement; the fight for Civil Rights; whether it was to fight for Women’s Suffrage, everywhere down through the history of the United States, if you look clearly, there’s always a Moral Fusion movement. So, it may be imperfect, but always it still is the greatest fear of extremists.

Alex Lovit: The United States has a lot of social issues to address these days. One of the most overlooked and most disgraceful is how many Americans live in poverty. I say “disgraceful” because it doesn’t have to be this way. Unfortunately, extremist policies funnel money to corporations and interest groups at the expense of everyday people. And it’s widely known that these policies disproportionately harm people of color. But my guest today says that that framing is precisely what’s making the problem so hard to fix. And he has a surprising solution.

You’re listening to The Context. It’s a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about the past, present, and future of democracy. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is the Reverand Dr. William J. Barber the Second. He’s the cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign, the president of Repairers of the Breach, and a senior fellow here at the Kettering Foundation.

I wanted to speak with him about his most recent book: “White Poverty.” That book made a big impression on all of us here at Kettering. When our president and CEO Sharon Davies read it, she got copies for the team. Sharon reads a lot of books, but she thought this one was that important. It’s full of counterintuitive advice for how to build a democracy that works for everyone.

Reverand Dr. William J. Barber, welcome to the podcast.

William Barber: I’m glad to be with you today.

Alex Lovit: I want to talk about your most recent book, which is entitled “White Poverty: How Exposing Myths about Race and Class can Reconstruct American Democracy.”

Racism and poverty are both problems that you’ve thought a lot about. And as you know better than anyone, they’re connected problems. So, there’s a lot of poor White people in the United States, but disproportionately, people in poverty are people of color. Why did you think it was important to write this book about White poverty?

William Barber: Actually, you just helped me in the way in which you framed the issue of poverty, because what the book actually does is say that’s actually how we shouldn’t frame poverty. And I appreciate you doing that. The normal way we talk about poverty is that poverty is a Black and Brown issue. And the book says we have to deal with these myths about race and class, so we can reconstruct the conversations and the function of our democracy.

Here’s what we know now. And this is why it’s important. White poverty is often dismissed, pushed aside. Black poverty, Brown poverty is magnified. And the book talks about it as a way of marginalizing the issue of poverty and making it more something that’s just a Black problem, and only Black folk care about it; and then for the extremists, they push further and suggest that poverty is more an issue of your personal morality than it is of systems.

When you actually look at the numbers, however, in 2018 when I became cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival—and even before with Repairers of the Breach—I believe in doing serious studies where you do activism. You don’t want to be loud and wrong.

So, we asked a group of scholars to give us a look, a detailed look at five areas: systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial of healthcare, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism.

When they came back with the numbers on poverty, many of us had heard most of our lives that poverty was about 30-some million people that were in poverty, according to the government measure. But the best economists said that’s not the way to really measure poverty and low-wealth and low-wages. You need to use what’s called a supplemental measure. And it looks at all the people who would be at the government level of poverty if there was not some kind of assistance.

The numbers came back, my friend, and said there were 140 million poor and low-wage people in America in 2018, and it’s still about that today. Fifty-one percent of our children, 43 percent of all of the adults. And then we said, “Well, what a minute; what do these numbers look like in terms of race?” And the researchers said, “Well, 60 percent of Black people are poor and/or low-wage, low-wealth. Thirty percent of White people are poor and/or low-wage.”

But then we asked the next question: “No, no, give us the actual numbers.” And the numbers turned out—of 60 percent of Black people, poor and low-wage, that’s 26 million people. But 30 percent of White people poor and low-wage, that’s 66 million people.

So, in actuality, when we look at percentage of one’s race, Black people are more in poverty and low-wages, because 60 percent of Black people are poor and/or low-wage, 26 million people. But when we look at it in terms of raw numbers, there are 40 million more poor and low-wage White brothers and sisters. And the largest group are White women.

And so, I said, “We have to expose this, because this is being used—by not telling these numbers, it creates divides among poor and low-wage people that actually ought to be allies. And it’s a myth.” And so, we had to expose the myth that poverty is not a Black problem primarily, and a Brown problem; it is an American problem.

Alex Lovit: So you’re saying that the way that this issue is often talked about prevents poor people from, you know, various backgrounds, from recognizing their common interests—you know, when you say 43 percent of the American adults are poor or low-wage, that’s a pretty powerful potential political coalition.

William Barber: Mm-hmm.

Alex Lovit: Is it an intentional strategy to keep that group divided? And if so, who’s doing it?

William Barber: Well, I think history tells us it is. And there’s a moral strategy to unify that group. I’m a Christian, and Jesus’ first sermon was about preaching good news to the poor. In Greek, the word is patokos. That means “those who have been made poor because of economic exploitation.” And his last sermon was telling the nations that the nation would fail and be thrust into a kind of hell, if you will, if it did not do right by the least of these—the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the immigrant.

And one of the things that our book does is—along with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, who’s my coeditor—we give the answer up front, and we say the answer to this is what we call Moral Fusion politics, when people come together because they start recognizing that the extremists in the country are those who are extremely greedy and extremely committed to racism and classism, and those things; they are attacking all of us.

So, the same people that tend to vote against voting rights also vote against living wage, also vote against healthcare, also vote against the gay community, also vote against public education funding, also vote more for the war money, and also stay with religious nationalism. And if they are cynical enough to be together, we ought to be smart enough to come together.

This book “White Poverty,” and exposing these myths—the myth that poverty is only a Black issue, the myth that only Black people care about change, and the myth that pale skin in itself is a place from which you cannot escape. In essence, what we’re saying is that some strategists suggest if you have pale skin or White skin, you can’t even forge with anyone else.

This book is an attempt with statistics, an attempt with faces and real experiences, to expose that. We start with the solution at the beginning, intentionally. And we lay out in the book what the solution is. And it is not a nuanced solution. Every time we have had massive change, whether it’s been Abolition, where Black and White abolitionists came together; whether it’s been the Labor movement, whether it’s been the fight for Civil Rights; whether it was the fight for Women’s Suffrage when Sojourner Truth and others came together with White women; everywhere down through the history of the United States, if you look clearly, there’s always a Moral Fusion movement. So it may be imperfect, but always it still is the greatest fear of extremists.

I have seen this fusion at work. It’s growing. Extremists think that what they’re doing now is going to push this kind of coalition back and is going to demoralize people. But they don’t really know history. And as a preacher, I want to say that the scriptures are replete with instances, and history is replete with instances where when you push people down so far, there is a reaction to that where they come back and they stand up in a greater way than you ever expected. I believe that’s what’s going to happen in America.

That’s what I’m hoping to happen. That’s what I want to work on happening, because we must deal with this injustice, this immoral injustice of poverty and low-wages that really has no place in this democracy, and in the midst of so much wealth in this country.

But specifically as it relates to this issue of dividing the poor, there are two sources that we ought to look at. One is, there’s a book called “A Time of Illusion.” And it was a reporter examining the Southern Strategy in the 1960s that was developed by the Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Kevin Phillips, and Pat Buchanan, and a guy by the name of Kent.

And in their talking about what they wanted to do, this is what they said. They said, “We must find a way to deliberately divide Black and White people, particularly in the South, so that from Maryland all the way over to Arizona, Nevada,” they said, “We must create a South and Southeastern coalition that is anti the gains of the Civil Rights movement, the health movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement. And we must do something called ‘positive polarization.’ And we must use this economic piece to drive a wedge. And what we must basically do is try to suggest that all the poverty problems and all the welfare is going toward, quote-unquote ‘Black folk, Brown folk.’ And if they weren’t getting that, then White poor folk would be faring better.” So you get White poor, no-wage folk to blame Black and Brown people for their problems.

And they said, “We don’t need to do it for everybody. We just need to get a strong group that believes this doctrine, and we will separate –” they said, “And if we do this, we can split the country in half, and then we can build power in the division. And if anybody ever calls us out on it, catches us, we’ll just lie and say we didn’t do it.” So, yes, there’s been intentional work with the Southern Strategy.

But Dr. King, in 1965, gives us another footnote. At the end of the Selma to Montgomery March, when he stands on the steps of the Alabama State House, and he is celebrating that they’ve made it from Selma to Montgomery, he then decides to be a historian; and to 25,000 people, he starts going through the history of the first reconstruction from 1865 until about 1880s, 1890s. And he says, when he looks at that period of history, when Black and White poor people came together—many of them in the South figured out that the plantation owners  had used them against one another—they formed these fusion coalitions called the Reconstruction movement. And they took over state houses, and they passed progressive laws.

And he said that the Redemption movement that wanted to take the country back as far as it could into racism and separation, deliberately once again introduced the vision, introduced segregation, introduced Jim Crow laws for the purpose of power.

And then he closes with this statement. He says, “If you look at this track through American history, every time Black and White people are poised to build a beloved community, those that will care about all people—those who believe in racism, segregation—introduce the vision, he said, the greatest fear of the racist oligarchy in this country is for the masses of Black people and the masses of poor White people to come together and form a voting block that can fundamentally shift the economic architecture of the nation.

And that’s why, in his final days working with the women’s welfare group, he was pulling together this multiracial poor people’s campaign that said there were three evils that we had to address simultaneously.

So yes—and thank you for the question, because oftentimes we don’t slow down long enough to hear this history. And we know that that’s still at work today. You see it in the media. Right now, most of the time if the media does a commentary on poverty in America, almost always they’ll go get a Black woman on welfare, or they’ll show a Black [woman].

Imagine if all of that media in this country was to say, “We’re going to do a month pointing on poverty, and we’re going to start with this headline: Eight hundred people die every day from poverty and low-wages in this country.” And then they show what the face of that looks like. It would shock the heart of this country. But instead of doing that, too often what we continue to do is marginalize and talk about poverty in a way that undermines the ability to build a coalition. And what we’re trying to do is take those myths away.

Alex Lovit: So you’re talking there about the history of fusion politics in the United States in the 1870s in the 1960s. This country is a little more diverse. It has different populations now than it did then. Does fusion politics look different today than it did in the past?

William Barber: In some ways. But the principle is the same in the sense that in the 1860s to 1890s, it primarily was Black and White fusion coalitions in the South. For instance, in my state of North Carolina, Black and White fusionists came together.

By 1868 they had rewritten the state constitution. And they changed the preamble of the constitution to basically say, “We hold these truths that all persons –” not all men—”all persons are created equal, endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty, the enjoyment of the fruit of their own labor, and the pursuit of happiness.” And “the enjoyment of the fruit of their own labor” was a principle against slavery, because you don’t enjoy the fruit of your own labor if you’re a slave.

They outlaws slavery. But they also instituted voting rights. They also made public education a constitutional right, which is not even in the federal constitution today. And of course, they came under attack by the 1870s. It was fusion coalitions in the Congress that put in place the 15th Amendment and the 14th Amendment. Because by 1868 and 1870 there were some Blacks and Whites in the Congress.

And the 14th Amendment basically saved America, because what it says is all persons—not all citizens—all persons have a right to equal protection under the law. And it says that if you were born here, you are a citizen. Because if it hadn’t said that, a lot of slaves would not be citizens because their parents were born in Africa, and taken from Africa. And there was vicious backlash. I mean, the Redemption movement was violent.

And by 1898 in North Carolina, they even had a coup d’etat two days after the election. Brought a Gatling gun into Wilmington and killed nearly 2 to 3 percent of the city. Many Black people. And ran White people out of town. And took legitimate people out of office that had just won through fusion coalition.

In the 1960s, you start to have Black and White—particularly when you look at Freedom Summer, you look at the marches—think about it—the March on Washington. Too often we talk about it as though it was Martin King’s march, but it actually was the Civil Rights movement and the Labor movement. And they had an agenda. And at that march they wanted the Civil Rights Act of ‘64, but they also wanted a living wage to be raised by 75 percent, indexed with inflation. And if it had been, it would be over $18 today. They wanted more money for public education. They wanted more focus on labor rights.

And it was a coalition of Black and White, Brown and Jew and gentile—if you look at that picture of the March on Washington, it is not a picture of just, quote-unquote, “Black folk.”

Now, today we do have a more diverse society. And so when I say “fusion,” we’re talking about Black, White, and Latino, and Asian, and indigenous; and gay, and straight, and trans; and Jew, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist; people of faith, people not of faith; vote from the North, vote from the South. But what holds us together is a moral imagination and a moral agenda.

When we built the moral movement in North Carolina, and actually caused an extremist government to only have one term, beat extremists who put voting laws on the books that the court said were surgical racism, and turned back some of their other attempts to hurt people, we brought all of those together and said, “Listen, the same people attacking over here are attacking here. We may have our silos of work, but there are times our silos must forge and come together.” So, how do we do that?

We take our deepest religious principles: love, justice, mercy, truth, grace—and our deepest constitutional principles—because everybody is not a person of faith—establishing justice, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and ensuring domestic tranquility—equal protection under the law—and we lay those principles on top of every piece of public policy, and examine it based on that; and if it doesn’t meet up, come up to that, then we challenge it regardless of color or class. We say, “This policy is a violation of our deepest moral imagination,” and thereby we create a fusion coalition that’s not left or right, or democrat or republican. It is really more about what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s human and what’s inhuman.

Alex Lovit: I want to ask how we get from where we are in our current politics to there. So, if you’re talking about fusion across lines of political identity, across lines of religion, gender, race, level of education; those are all factors that are fairly predictive of people’s political behavior and how they vote.

Class is not very predictive of political identity. Income level is not very predictive of how people will vote. So, in 2024, according to exit polls, democrats had a slight lead among voters that had incomes less than $30,000 as household incomes, or more than $100,000 of household incomes. And republications won the income brackets in between those. You know, how do we get from where we are now to more class-solidarity politics?

William Barber: Well, it’s race and class. I don’t think you can ever separate them. Because any class movement that doesn’t take race seriously will implode on itself. And any race movement that doesn’t take class seriously is not going to build the kind of multiracial coalition you need. King knew that. We have to know that today.

Coretta Scott King knew that. For instance, she described violence. She said at the Solidary March—June 19th, 1968—”We must start talking about public policies from the framework of violence.” And she said, “Violence is denying a person a living wage, whether they’re White, Black, or Brown or whatever. It’s undercutting public education. It’s denying people healthcare.” And then she said, “Violence is also an apathetic attitude that refuses to address these other issues of violence.”

I think first of all we have to know that this coalition is already in our midst. And one of the things that I’m overly excited about is the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. We started in 2018 with hardly anybody. We have now over—coordinating committees in over 40 states in the country.

Secondly, poor and low-wage people that make $50,000 or less in a family a four—that’s the measurement we use—I think some of the exit polls said that Trump this year got about 2 percent higher in that voting blocks. But in the past, a person running for president got 22 percent if they were democrat and they were focused on issues that are impacting poor and low-wage people.

So, part of the struggle we have for democrats and with progressives, they’re going to have to decide if they really are going to be the party of poor and low-wage and working people. And what I mean by that is, in 2021-22, the United States Senate had a chance to vote to pass a minimum living wage of $15 an hour and guarantee union rights. All the republicans and eight democrats joined together and said “no” to 52 million people.

That one vote would’ve lifted 43 percent of African-Americans out of poverty and low-wages, and it would’ve lifted millions of White brothers and sisters out of poverty and low-wages. That kind of voting—and for democrats to stand against poor and low-wage people—undercuts their ability to really speak to poor and low-wage folk with clarity. And even though they can say, “Well, we’ve done this, this, and this,” most people are looking at, “What have you done lately?”

We did a study entitled “Waking the Sleeping Giant,” looking at the voters that exist who are poor and low-wage. And this is what we found. We had a scholar from Columbia University and others to join us. That there are 87 million poor and low-wage voters in this country, using our definition, using supplemental measurements.

In the elections in 2020, about 57 million of them voted. About 30 million didn’t. In every battleground state in this country—that we call “battleground,” because we really don’t know what’s a true battleground state, because about 35 to 40 percent of the electorate doesn’t even vote—but what we looked at was, in so-called battleground states like North Carolina, Florida even, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan; poor and low-wage voters represented anywhere from 43 to 46 percent of the electorate. That’s a $50,000 endeavor.

In that demographic, the number one reason infrequent voters said they’d not voted is nobody talks to them directly, whether it’s up in the mountains of Appalachia, or whether it’s in the delta of Mississippi. Wherever it is, the number one reason was, “No one talks to us.”

In 2018, Beshear in Kentucky took that seriously, this coalition possibility. And he went to Appalachia. He didn’t—as running for governor. He didn’t just stay in Louisville and Lexington. He went to east Kentucky. And when Beshear ran, about four of the counties that had, quote-unquote, been “red” counties, flipped. And Beshear unseated a republican incumbent in Kentucky. Twice now. But he did not run just as a democrat. He said, “If I get elected, I’m going to raise the minimum wage. I’m going to address healthcare. I’m going to strengthen unions,” and those kinds of things.

So quickly, my point is, how do we get there? Number one, we have to go to these communities and bring communities together. Number two, politicians—particularly if they’re serious about the health of this democracy—as Celinda Lake has said, “Any politician that ignores the biggest group that can expand the electorate”—which is poor and low-wage folk—”is committing political suicide.”

Thirdly, we’ve got to change our conversations politically. We have had, since 2020, 15 to 20 debates. Not one of those debates has focused 30 minutes on 43 percent of the country living in poverty, 800 people dying a day from poverty. That kind of neglect in our debate and political discourse—when we don’t talk about Portia, who I talk about in the book, who died in a high school parking lot because the policies of North Carolina’s republicans blocked healthcare—Medicaid expansion caused a hospital to close. And as a poor person, she died in her husband’s arm waiting on a helicopter to come an hour and a half away, when just a month earlier she had a hospital five minutes away.

If we don’t put these faces and their problems in our political dialog and in front of the American people, the way in which we’re doing our politics actually undermines our ability to unify, which is fourthly why you must have a moment that decides to do it.

And then fifthly, faith leaders must engage. If we don’t start seeing this as a human issue and a moral issue—to have 51 percent of your children and poor and low-wage in the wealthiest nation in the world in the 21st century as a moral failing—of the 25 wealthiest nations, we’re the only one that still does not offer healthcare as a part of your humanity. We still offer it only as a part of your job. That has to change.

Alex Lovit: So you’re talking there about the need for a movement that goes beyond traditional politics. And I want to ask you about that—

William Barber: Did you say—did you say “traditional politics”? I like to call it “[consultative] politics,” because actually, as I said, just think about politics. The goal of a politician is to get 51 percent of the vote. You want to get more than that, but you win at 51 percent.

So, on a practical level, who would be a politician and know that you got 40 percent of an electorate in this group, but you don’t talk to them, you don’t develop a message clear to them, and you don’t speak to them in a consistent way? If you know that 70 percent of Americans want a raise in the minimum wage, and we haven’t raised the minimum wage since 2009, which is 16 years now—2009—it’s $7.25, and $2.13 for people that work in restaurants and hotel and food industries. Politically, that makes no sense.

So, what we’re really asking is what Dr. King asked. Dr. King said to America, “I’m not asking you to do anything new; I’m asking you to be true to what you said on paper.” And you cannot say on paper that you are for the establishment of justice and promoting the general welfare of all people, and then have 43 percent of your country living in poverty and low wages. That’s not even traditional politics. That’s immoral politics.

Alex Lovit: Yeah. Well, but thinking about how this problem of poverty intersects with problems of democracy—

William Barber: Oh sure.

Alex Lovit:—you know, you’ve spent a lot of time in North Carolina. You know, that’s a state that has seen extreme jerrymandering, has seen limitations on voting access, curbs on protest. Can you talk a little bit more about how the fight for the government to address poverty intersects with the fight for more democracy?

William Barber: Oh yes. In fact, as I said, the Southern Strategy was to do all of that, particularly from Maryland all the way over to Nevada, the southeast, to divide and to conquer. Because what we know is, one of the ways you judge your strength in power is the energy and the effort that your political adversary has to go through to try to stop you.

So, in North Carolina, in 2010, we saw the legislature put in place a racist redistricting plan to stack, pack, and bleach Black voters. Now, they weren’t just trying to block Black people from getting in office; they wanted to block even the ability for Black and White people join together and elect candidates, Black or White, of their own choice.

So, for instance, they would take a district that was, say, 59 percent Black and make it 80 percent Black. And they tried to use the Voting Rights Act to justify it, say, “Well, the Voting Rights Act says we have to guarantee Black [people], so we’re going to guarantee you by putting 80 percent of Black folk,” when you didn’t need by 55 percent to win.

We saw that trickery. We told the Department of Justice at that time. When Holder led it. “Do not let this plan go through. It’s racist. It’s bad. It’s bad for all of North Carolinians.” Because when you create racist redistricting, when you suppress the vote, you don’t just hurt Black people; you suppress people getting elected who will look at politics through a more progressive lens.

Extremists love low-vote turnouts. And they love jerrymandering. So, we saw that in 2010. And in 2012, more people voted for progressives, at large—well, more people voted in certain places. But because they had so jerrymandered the districts, we ended up for the first time in history with a super majority tea party group of extremists. I don’t call them republicans. My granddaddy was a Lincoln republican, so I don’t refer to ‘em as republicans. I refer to them as extremists.

And they elected the governor, and they got a super majority in both houses so they could override any veto. And from January forward, they attacked everybody. They went after women. They went after gay people. They went after Latinos. They went after immigrants. They went after unemployed people. They blocked living wages. They blocked healthcare, Medicaid expansion.

And by April, right before Easter, they passed a bill—we call it the “Monster Voter Suppression Bill.” And in that bill, they changed 40 laws, voting laws. They wanted to put in place a radical voter ID program that North Carolina had never needed. Because the republicans and the democrats in North Carolina years ago agreed that all we needed was signature attestation. You go to the poll, you sign your name. If you lie, you get a five-year felony. And there’s no fraud. We’d never found any fraud in that process.

That’s when we started Moral Monday. We didn’t have the votes, but we had a moral voice. And what amazed them was it wasn’t a Black movement. Sixty-five percent of the people that got arrested for non-violent direct action were White. People were coming in from Appalachia and from eastern North Carolina, because what we did was we showed how the same folk suppressing democracy were suppressing your wages. The same folk suppressing democracy were suppressing women’s rights. The same folks suppressing democracy were suppressing healthcare.

And we also showed that when you do racist voter suppression, you also hurt women. You hurt working people. So, when we filed our suit within 30 minutes of them passing this bill, we had plaintiffs of every race. They weren’t expecting that. They thought we were going to come to the table with just a Black group of plaintiffs.

And we won. Our movement pushed and registered people to the point that the sitting governor, who was a little Trump, if you will, at that time, he became so low in the polls that he couldn’t get elected a second term. Because the movement of poor and low-wealth people—and Black people, and White people, and Brown, and all—and North Carolinians in general—came together.

And I believe we, especially now, have to continue to build out that kind of movement at the state level. Because so much damage is done in these state legislatures that never gets picked up. It’s not just the Congress. The state legislature can block healthcare. The state legislature can deny raising the minimum wage. The state legislature can block money for education. And the state legislature is where voting laws are put in place.

And so, we have to have movements that challenge these realities. But we can never again talk about voting rights separate from other things. That’s the point I’m making about Moral Fusion. When you separate it out into silos, then we fight in silos. But extremists fight together.

So, you get Black people over here fighting for voting rights, when in fact the voter suppression laws that we have on the books today are impacting 50 million Americans—not just Black Americans—but in addition to that, the voter suppression allows people to get into office who then vote against gay people, vote against public education, vote against healthcare. So, you have to understand the connection is not separate.

Alex Lovit: Well, thinking about this movement-building, a lot of people when they think about politics, they think about elections, they think about, you know, running a campaign, maybe some campaign ads every two or four years.

And I think a lot of the work that you do, and a lot of the work you talk about is broader than that every year. It’s not just election years. Can you talk about the importance of protest and organizing and movement-building, and the impact that that can have on our political system, not just during the election season?

William Barber: Well, if you’re serious about a democracy, there are some things you have to do all the time. You have to have litigation. You have to have mobilization. You have to have legislation. We actually have—and I hope that you can put it up with this podcast where people can go to it—we call it the Fourteen Points to Moral Fusion Organizing. The first one, for instance, is you have to do it indigenously. You can’t build a movement with helicopter leadership. So one of the things I focus on is not me going into every state. I don’t go into states and lead movements. I go into states and train people to lead their own movements.

One of the things we’re working on now is how we can train 10 to 15 thousand people in about 12 states over the next two years that truly focus on what it is to build a moral movement. Because you want to build from the bottom up. Every massive change we’ve ever seen in this country came from the bottom up.

And then, another principle—I won’t go through all of them—you have to utilize the media. You have to build your own sort of media. You have to put a face on the issue.

When we have our gatherings, for instance, politicians can’t speak, democrat or republican. Because our focus are the people who are impacted. So, you might have a person from California, from Texas, from Appalachia, from Mississippi, from North Carolina, from Binghamton, New York and the Bronx standing together. The stage looks like the society that we want to see.

And then, you have to have a massive voter registration and mobilization, because—here’s what we know. Let’s not overdramatize or create more fear than is necessary in this moment.

Now, we have some bad stuff going on in [extremism], what we see Trump doing, the executive orders. But remember, they’re executive orders; they’re not laws. So, they can be overturned by the next president, and even can be overturned by the Congress if in ‘26 the Congress shifts.

But [when I had people who] said, “This is the worst we’ve ever seen stock”—don’t say that because you’re talking about a country where people had to fight against slavery. They couldn’t come together. They—women that didn’t even have the right to vote. Poor White men that couldn’t vote. So, let’s stop that kind of drama and look at this thing honestly.

We have an election where the person that won for president didn’t even win 50 percent of the vote. We have 40 percent of the electorate that hasn’t even voted. We have 30 million poor and low-wage people who—the only reason they don’t vote is because they say nobody talks to them. We’re not talking about grand percentages that are needed.

In North Carolina, for instance, the number of poor and low-wage voters that didn’t vote is somewhere near a million. Trump only won by 183,000. In some states, the margin of victory was less than 2 percent, 3 percent. The first time Trump won, he won by something like less than 80,000 votes in three states, where millions of people who are already registered didn’t vote. There’s not one state in this country where if 20 percent of poor and low-wage voters that have not voted were organized around an agenda to vote, and the politicians seriously talked to them, that they could not overcome any margin of victory in an at-large election in that state.

So, what we need to do is not say, “Oh my God, there’s nothing we can do. The country’s gone –” it is quite bad. Every executive order I saw the president do in the first two days, bad attempts to roll back things. When recently we saw the inauguration, you had politicians and the billionaires inside, and all the people outside—I said, “That’s really what they’re trying to do, keep all the people outside, and the money folk and the politicians are inside”—greed.

We may not understand everything yet. I think we’ve got to do some serious analysis of what’s happening, what is a trigger, and what’s the real goal of these extremists; and what’s the damage going to be. I think we have to take every piece of policy and executive order they do and examine it. How does it impact poor and low-wage people particularly? And then get that message out so folks can understand that while people may claim they care about working people and say they love you, that’s not exactly what they’re doing in policy.

But having said all of that, what I know is something that they knew in South Africa. In South Africa, they used to say: Only a dying mule kicks the hardest. And we are in a crisis of civilization and a crisis of democracy. Because in a few years, Black and Brown people will be in the majority—first time in the Western hemisphere that people of color, many who were slaves or immigrants in a country, will rise to become the majority.

And with progressive White people, it’s almost going to be impossible for extremists to get elected. And I think people who are extremists are looking at that, and they’re reacting to that. That’s their fear. Their fear is the multiracial coalition that’s going to happen. What they want to do is break the government and extract all the money before that happens. What we have to do is say, “We’re not going to wait for it to happen. We’re going to organize it to happen, and happen sooner.”

Alex Lovit: Reverand Dr. Barber, inspiring words. Thank you for joining me on The Context.

William Barber: Thank you, my friend.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of th Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake, Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, Darla Minnich, Maxine Thomas, and Bettina Wright. We’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy.

In the meantime, visit our website Kettering.org to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at thecontext@kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts, or just tell a friend about us. I’m Alex Lovit. I’m a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.

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