Press Release: NC NAACP President’s Statement Announcing "The Truth and Hope Putting a Face on Poverty in North Carolina Tour"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 3, 2012   For More Information:           Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, President, 919-394-8137                                               Mrs. Amina Turner, Executive Director, 919-682-4700   Beware of Policies that Hurt the Poor Statement by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, President of the NC NAACP   Read at the Announcement of  "The Truth and Hope Putting a Face on Poverty in North Carolina Tour" First Baptist Church – Raleigh, NC January 3, 2012   Good morning. I’m glad to be joined this morning by, Prof. Gene Nichol, Director of the NC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, Atty. Melinda Lawrence, Director of the NC Justice Center, Dr. Jarvis Hall, Director of the Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change, clergy and local advocates.  This morning, on behalf of the 120 adult and college and youth units of the NAACP and the more than 125 coalition partners of the Historic Thousands On Jones Street Peoples Assembly Coalition, we are here to announce and explain the urgency and rationale for the Truth and Hope Putting a Face on Poverty in North Carolina Tour. The highest values of the Judeo-Christian faith are simple and pure.   Beware of policies that hurt the poor: The Old Testament calls out:   Woe to those who make unjust laws, To those who issue oppressive decrees, To deprive the poor of their rights And withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, Making widows their prey And robbing the fatherless. -Isaiah 10: 1-2   And the New Testament responds clearly:   The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. -Luke 4:18               The Good News is the news of systemic transformation for those who have been made poor by the breaches and brokenness of our society’s structure.   The North Carolina Constitution echoes these millennia-old moral codes in the Declaration of Rights: "All political power is vested in and derived from the people; all government of right originates from the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted solely for the good of the whole."              Our ancestors enshrined these ancient Judeo-Christian values in our State Constitution’s fundamental instruction for what should be the ideal and character of our state: You must govern for the good of the whole.  Since these values represent the first principles of our state and they provide the over-arching vision of the work of public morality, we must ask ourselves:  Are decisions made by those who would govern us made for the good of the whole, or for the good of a select few?   We are engaging this tour in order to shine the light of truth on poverty and despair in North Carolina. We believe our leaders in government, media, business, churches, and schools believe in the North Carolina Constitution’s call for a focus on the ‘good of the whole.’  We believe if we act in accordance with this requirement and ideal, we set in motion a tidal wave of hope. The truth is, government and the private sector have not adequately addressed the historical and structural causes of the deep poverty in North Carolina. The truth is, long before the Great Depression and the recent Great Recession, thousands of God’s children of all colors lived on the edge of survival. The truth is, the recent economic and ecological tornadoes just made this structural poverty worse. This tour will not solve the problem but will expose it, force us to see the faces, the people, and the real conditions behind the statistics, which hopefully will move us to engage the hard, necessary, and righteous work of addressing it.             Many commentators say this year in North Carolina will feature a strong focus on politics, the private sector and the projections and directions of our nation and our state. The question we shall raise over the next few weeks is this:  Where will the problem of systemic poverty and structural poverty be in the political discourse this year?  Will we merely read the dreadful statistics?   Or will we see the faces of the children and their families?  If we see the faces, will we work to find creative ways to address the challenge?  Will any candidates talk about it?  Will anyone make it a key part of their political campaigning?               Dr. Jarvis Hall, Director of the Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change, will document how issues of poverty, inequality and economic justice have been relatively absent from the public discourse in North Carolina, with some notable exceptions such as the Historic Thousands on Jones Street Movement begun in 2007. The issue of poverty cannot be swept away as moral failing of poor people.   Nor can it be seen as simply the problem of minorities.  Nor can it be pushed aside as a problem of those who do not work.               The fact is, when we look honestly at the reality of entrenched and systemic poverty, we find a problem in our public morality.  We find a problem that crosses the lines of race and geography.   We find a problem where people can work, and work, and work some more, and still never make a living wage.               Individual charity alone will not address this problem.  The moral requirement of our Constitution, the moral underpinnings of the Biblical truths require more than a call to private charity.  They require a call to structural change and systemic reorientation.               This Tour of Truth and Hope will take activists, academics, media, and economists, to the places of poverty.  We will go where we can hear from those who live in poverty and those who fight and struggle against it every day; people who cannot come to the North Carolina General Assembly on Jones Street; people who may never have an opportunity to sit at the table of public policy or in the boardrooms of private businesses; people who have been essentially silenced in our public and political dialogue.               We talk about the wealthy.  We talk about the middle class.  But there is an eerie silence regarding the poor.                This problem of poverty we wish to look at honestly did not just begin in 2008, when the Republicans were in the White House.  Nor did it just begin after the Democrats were in the White House in 2009.  No. Over 44 year ago, Dr. King along with others, begged us to look at it honestly.  He said America needed a stimulus plan 44 years ago! Dr. King’s stimulus plan called for a "bottom-up" approach, not a "banker-down" approach. Dr. Martin Luther King said 40 years ago when you ignore the poor, one day the whole system will collapse and implode.   Wall Street cannot drive a society simply based on personal profit. Capitalism cannot be driven crazy by greed.  If we ignore the poor, if we ignore those on the bottom, increasing those at the bottom there will eventually be an implosion!               In fact we have been talking about this whole economic crisis all wrong. It’s not just a recent phenomenon. The fact is we’ve had a Silent Depression that has caught up with us. One political economist at the University of Maryland said,   What we’re really beginning to experience is a process of slow decay, punctuated by a recurring economic crisis, one in which reforms achieve sporadic gains. But the long term trends of growing inequality, economic dislocation, failing democratic accountability, deepening poverty, ecological degradation, greater invasions of liberty and growing imprisonment especially of minorities, continues to slowly and quietly challenge the belief in the capacities and moral integrity of the overall system and its governing elite.               MIT Professor Otto Scharmer said, "There is a blind spot in American economic theory today . . . Our refusal to have an economic theory that looks and sees that we are all integrated, we all really need each other." We can’t live in isolation. We must repair the breach in God’s family.  There has to be a coming together.               We must speak truthfully and consistently about systemic poverty. There were people in crisis before the major media and commentators even announced the crisis!  That’s a problem!  We are engaged now in the attention-violence against the people who were in crisis before the crisis was even made public.               When some discovered we were in crisis in 2008, the poverty rate in North Carolina was already 14.8%.                There were 40 million poor people without health care before the crisis got public attention. There were 50-100 million people under-insured. There were millions and millions of people out of work.  Almost 20% of African-Americans were jobless BEFORE the crisis was public. Millions of poor White, Black, Native American, and Latino children! This was the Silent Depression that wasn’t really reported until the Wall Street Crisis got its attention.  And even now if we don’t keep the focus we will begin to talk about recovery of some and begin to dismiss the glaring reality of those pockets of poverty that never really experience recovery. Right now more families across the state are falling into poverty and facing hardship. Last year, North Carolina’s poverty rate-17.5 percent-was the highest it has been since 1981.  Poverty in North Carolina grew by 22 percent over the course of this Great Recession. The median household income in North Carolina dropped 12.3% since 2007. During the Great Recession, approximately 300,000 jobs were lost in North Carolina while the state’s workforce continued to grow. As of November 2011, the jobs deficit in North Carolina stood at more than half of a million.   The number of children in Poverty (2010) in North Carolina is shameful:   Latino Children–130743 White Children–214487 African American Children–207421 American Indian Children-11239   These are not just Black children, White children, Latino children, or Native American children. They are OUR children and we must see their faces and work to change their reality.               So we will begin the tour in the Northeast, the tidewater quadrant of North Carolina, the area which had the most plantations, the most slaves, and the most people of color in the State, who until the mid 1960′s were not permitted to vote and had no representation in Washington or Raleigh until the 1970′s. The systemic poverty in certain counties we will visit has roots reaching back to the economic disenfranchisement of slavery and Jim Crow.  It has roots that reach back to economic decisions that excluded certain counties in terms of infrastructure and industry development. These are counties where family farming has almost become impossible and unaffordable.  Where the history of low wages is tragic and devastating. Where underfunding of public education has been a constant failure to comply with the promises of our state constitution. Where natural disasters constantly hit and hurt the people of this region’s stability. We will go first to the East where the latest available data on poverty by race shows that African-Americans and Latinos are 3 times more likely to experience poverty in these communities than Whites.    The average five year poverty rate from 2006-2010 are:     African-American Latino White Beaufort County 30.9% 51.4% 8.9% Edgecombe County 29.3% 35.9% 10.4% Halifax County 33.5% 30.0% 10.5% Hertford County 30.9% 40.6% 13.3% Pasquotank County 27.3% 40.3% 10.4% Washington County 39.6% 25.4% 8.5%                         This problem is complex. It has many faces that we must dare to see if we’re going to dream and have a hopeful vision to do better.  Maybe then we can develop a Marshall-type plan for North Carolina. Maybe we can talk about how to use the green economy and science and technology and long term strategic economic and educational investment to change current realities. We can get serious about living wages and jobs with rights that lift our families up and out of poverty. We will understand that our state has to lift those at the bottom if we want the whole state to prosper. We will make the poor visible and lift the silence that surrounds this region. We will challenge those who make unjust laws and those who issue oppressive decrees. We will protest those who deprive the poor of their rights. We will shine the light of truth on our sisters and brothers of all races and creeds and we will never turn back. And when we do these things, we as the people of North Carolina can do better, be better, and live better.   ###   Exposing the issue of poverty will again be at the center of the 6th Annual Historic Thousands on Jones Street People’s Assembly in Raleigh on Saturday, February 11, 2012. In  2005 the NC NAACP began building a multi-racial, multi-issue alliance of progressive organizations called the Historic Thousands on Jones Street People’s Assembly Coalition. HKonJ now has 125 member organizations. The Coalition works throughout the year through Local Peoples Assemblies, but in February the 125 partners assemble on Jones Street in front of the NC General Assembly. On February 11, 2012, the HKonJ People’s Assembly Coalition will gather outside the North Carolina General Assembly to say: "We The People Shall Not Be Moved:  Forward Together, Not One Step Back!"  The "Truth and Hope Putting a Face on Poverty in North Carolina Tour" builds on the groundwork laid by 68 years of the NC NAACP’s efforts to eliminate racism and poverty and six years of movement building by the Historic Thousands on Jones Street People’s Assembly Coalition.   Following the HKonJ People’s Assembly, we will continue the Tour through Southeastern and Western North Carolina, and even the Triangle, to reveal the many faces and voices of poverty in our state.