Media Advisory: Times and Locations Announced for Truth and Hope Tour, Putting a Face on Poverty in Southeastern NC

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE February 27, 2012   For More Information:       Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, President, 919-394-8137                                            Atty. Jennifer Marsh, Acting Director, 919-682-4700   For Media Assistance:       Rob Stephens, Office Manager, 336-577-9335   Second Leg of Truth and Hope Tour, Putting a Face on Poverty in Southeastern NC: Dates and Locations   WHAT: Truth & Hope Tour, Putting a Face on Poverty in North Carolina WHEN: Friday, March 2 and Saturday March 3, 2012 WHO: North Carolina NAACP, UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, NC Justice Center, Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change at North Carolina Central University, and AARP of NC WHERE: Greenville, Goldsboro, Sampson/Duplin Counties, Wilmington, Brunswick County, Robeson County and Fayetteville   DURHAM – On Friday, March 2nd, the North Carolina NAACP, NC Justice Center, UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, the Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change at North Carolina Central University and AARP of NC will kick off the second leg of the "Truth and Hope Tour of Poverty in North Carolina," a state-wide tour of rural counties and inner city neighborhoods where North Carolinians struggle to find work, decent housing, transportation, and sufficient food for their families.   "Our second leg of the Tour of Truth and Hope will take activists, academics, media and economists to places of poverty in Southeast North Carolina. This problem of structural and systemic poverty is complex," said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, NC NAACP President. "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 and model a progressive agenda for the nation. Individual charity alone will not address this problem.  The moral requirement of our Constitution and 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."   Departing from Raleigh on March 2nd, a bus full of activists, reporters, foundation leaders, students and scholars will travel through the southeast quadrant of the state, engaging in town hall meetings, sessions with local leaders, and tours of neighborhoods directly affected by poverty. For more information, please read the statement below by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II announcing the 2nd Leg of the Truth and Hope Tour.    ###     Friday, March 2   7:00 am                    BUS DEPARTURE – Media Welcome for Kick Off First Baptist Church 101 S Wilmington Street Raleigh, NC                                     9:00-10:30 am          PITT COUNTY                                                  Lucille W. Gorham Intergenerational Community Center                                                 1100 Ward Street                                                 Greenville, NC 27834                                                                                                               11:45 am -1:30 pm   WAYNE COUNTY                                                 Community Crisis Center                                                 607 S Slocumb Street                                                  Goldsboro, NC 27530-5815                                                 4:00 – 6:00 pm            DUPLIN/SAMPSON COUNTY                                                    Juniper Community Center                                                 226 Juniper Road                                                 Faison, NC 28341     Saturday March 3   9:00- 10:30 am            NEW HANOVER COUNTY                                                  Macedonia Missionary Baptist church                                                  3701 Princess Place Wilmington, NC                                                     10:50 – 11:20 am        BRUNSWICK COUNTY                                                 Navassa, NC                                                 Site of 600 Acres of intentionally contaminated land   1:30 – 3:00 pm            ROBESON COUNTY                                                 Red Springs Community Building                                                 122 Cross Street   Red Springs, NC     5:00 – 6:30 pm            CUMBERLAND COUNTY                                                 TBA     ###   WE HAVE A SPECIAL INTEREST IN THE POOR: Announcing the 2nd Leg of the Truth and Hope Tour     Statement by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, President of NC NAACP FEBRUARY 22, 2012   Today we announce the Second Leg of the Truth and Hope Tour, Putting a Face on Poverty in North Carolina.  We will continue to raise the question, every way we can:  Where will the problem of systemic and structural poverty be in the political discourse this year?  Will we just read the dreadful statistics?   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? We talk about the wealthy. We talk about the middle class. But there is an eerie silence regarding the poor, and we intend to change that.    Last night I was in Wilmington, listening to practitioners who work among the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the jobless. I heard about certified nursing assistants living in homeless shelters.  And then I heard about a homeless shelter that was kept from opening its doors because of public political pressure. I heard of gross actions of environmental racism in a town that poisoned 600 acres of land. I heard about families who still use outdoor toilets, because they can’t afford to hook on to water and sewer systems.  I heard about restricted covenants signed in 1938 by the McCall family that still impact economic development today.  The only way these race and class based acts toward the poor ever get public exposure is to shine the light of truth on them.               The Judeo-Christian faiths are built on a strong foundation. 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.   And the New Testament responds clearly:   The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.             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 Good News is these ancient Judeo-Christian values are enshrined in our State Constitution: You must govern for the good of the whole.  These values represent the first principles of our state.  They provide the over-arching vision of the work of our Government.  We must, therefore, always ask: Are decisions made by those who would govern us made for the good of the whole?   Or are they being made for the good of a small set of special interests?   The NAACP has had a special interest for 102 years.  We are interested in the poor.    Individual charity alone will not address this problem.  The moral requirement of our Constitution and 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.  Our second leg of the Tour of Truth and Hope will take activists, academics, media and economists to places of poverty in Southeast North Carolina.  (Our first leg has created a surge of media and political discussion about the entrenched poverty in the Northeast quadrant.)  We realize that the media, and the politicians, do not pay much attention to those who live in poverty.  People who cannot come to the 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.   This problem of poverty did not just begin in 2008, when the Republicans were in the White House.  Nor did it just begin when the Democrats were in the White House in 2009.  No. Over 44 year ago, Dr. King 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. Wall Street cannot drive a society based on Justice. Capitalism cannot be driven crazy by greed.  If we ignore the poor, if we ignore those on the bottom, there will eventually be an implosion!   In fact we have been talking about this whole economic crisis wrong. The fact is, we’ve had a Silent Depression that has caught up with us. A political economist at the University of Maryland said, "What we’re really beginning to experience," in a article called America Beyond Capitalism, "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."   Dr. Martin Luther King said 40 years ago when you ignore the poor, one day the whole system will collapse and implode.  So on this Ash Wednesday we are reminded of the summons of Joel 2: "Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!"   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 children!  More than 52% of African-Americans who qualified for stable, low-rate loans, were illegally steered to predatory sub-prime loans before CNN discovered the crisis. 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 the 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.   We will tour the Cape Fear River Valley during our Second Leg.  Pitt, Wayne, Sampson/Duplin, Pender New Hanover, Brunswick, Robeson and Cumberland Counties.  This is the southern half of the North Carolina Black Belt, where my ancestors helped liberate themselves from slavery, fighting with Abraham Galloway’s Colored Brigades. And then, instead of getting 40 acres and a mule, got tricked into signing sharecropping contracts that immediately re-enslaved them.  But tens of thousands of free men and free women joined Mr. Lincoln’s Republican Party, moved to the larger cities in the area we are touring, and built grassroots fusion movements with white farmers and small land-owners and businessmen in Wilmington, and Fayetteville and Goldsboro, and other growing urban areas.  For a brief period in the 1890′s, they won both houses of the General Assembly, the Governorship, both US Senate seats and many county court houses.   The former slave owners and their corporate allies, frightened by this initial effort to heal the breach, implemented a plan of homegrown terrorism in Wilmington, and other parts of southeastern NC.  Murdering scores of Black men on the streets of Wilmington, the largest city in the State, in November 1898, they engineered the only coup d’état in the United States. Thousands of African Americans and their white allies were traumatized by this divide and conquer tactics of the extremist and racist right-wing.  People were rousted from their beds, and were helped to get out of town and try to re-establish their lives in the poorest counties in the Southeast.  Hoke County is the home of the Leandro case, picked because 20 years ago it was one of the poorest counties in the State and still is. Native Americans and their African American brothers and cousins in Robeson County had a majority, but white folk created four school systems, to divide and conquer there.  And then we will end this leg of the tour Fayetteville, where military investment has never fully enforced Title VI’s mandate to dismantle racism.   So we need to get behind the data.  The data needs to be disaggregated with historical analysis, with rural-urban analysis, with Black, Native American, Latin American and European American analysis.  How were the poor people of the area divided?  How were they conquered?  Especially since the present Speaker in the People’s House called on his constituents to develop a divide and conquer politics in North Carolina.   We will not put up with being divided.  We are a special interest group.  We have a special interest in God’s Human Race.  We have seen it divided.  We are Repairers of the Breach.  All God’s Children are Precious.  They are all Special.  And we have a special interest in them.  We are fresh off bringing over ten thousand diverse peoples to Raleigh ten days ago.  We are fresh off talking with national media about the First Leg of our Truth and Hope Tour.            This problem, of structural, systemic poverty, 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 and model a progressive agenda for the nation.   We will make the poor visible and lift the silence that surrounds this region.  We will challenge those who make unjust laws, those who issue oppressive decrees.  We will protest those who deprive the poor of their rights.  And we will never turn back.  We will shine the light of truth on our sisters and brothers of all races and creeds, who have been the victims of those who issue their oppressive decrees.    Forward Together, Not One Step Back. ###   Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.

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MEDIA RELEASE: First leg of Truth & Hope Tour of Poverty in North Carolina concludes with a call to hear the voices of the poor

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 21, 2012

For More Information:       Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, President, 919-394-8137

                                           Mrs. Amina Turner, Executive Director, 919-682-4700

First leg of Truth & Hope Tour of Poverty in North Carolina concludes with a call to hear the voices of the poor: 

Putting faces on poverty is a necessary first step to solving the chronic problems that face communities across the state

ROCKY MOUNT – Seeing the faces of poverty in North Carolina can and should have a profound impact on lawmakers, say advocates for the poor who have just completed the first leg of a state-wide tour of the state’s communities. 

The first leg of the "Truth and Hope Tour of Poverty in North Carolina," a state-wide tour of rural counties and inner city neighborhoods where North Carolinians struggle to find work, decent housing, transportation, and sufficient food for their families, concluded today with a stop in Rocky Mount. The bus tour also stopped in Winton and Scotland Neck Friday.

The North Carolina NAACP, NC Justice Center, UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity and the Institute For Civic Engagement and Social Change at North Carolina Central University departed from Raleigh on Jan. 19 with a bus full of activists, reporters, foundation leaders, and scholars. The group visited six communities during this leg of the trip.

"We met and talked with parents who can’t afford healthy food for their children, homeless men without a place to sleep, and a host of people who struggle to meet even the most basic needs," said Rev. Dr. William Barber II, President of the North Carolina NAACP. "No one can look at these faces and not agree that we must begin the long, hard, necessary and righteous work of changing this harsh reality for the good of the whole in our state and nation."

Traveling through the northeast portion of the state, the group met with hundreds of local people struggling with poverty, joblessness and homelessness.   

Among those people: a pastor with elderly parishioners who must rely on cat food to survive; several of the 1,000 or so homeless men in Elizabeth City who must try to find one of the city’s fewer than 30 shelter beds; and tornado victims still struggling to put their lives back together after the loss of their homes and all their possessions.

"Poverty is a wound on the human heart, and we found people throughout the trip who wanted to share their pain," said Gene Nichol, director of the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. "We wanted this tour to be less about shocking economic statistics, and more about the words of those most directly affected."

Underinvestment plagues rural North Carolina, the tour found. Some towns had to fight for decades even to get adequate sewer and clean water infrastructure for their communities. In Washington County, Truth & Hope tour participants heard about the dozens of lost teacher jobs and the people who start lining up at the food bank at 8 p.m. for the morning food delivery at 9 a.m. They stay all night.   

Rural communities and communities of color have been hit particularly hard by the economic crisis. Organizers say the tour is a way to listen as well as a means to highlight the concerns of North Carolinians most affected by poverty and economic injustice.   

"If we’re serious about a North Carolina with real opportunity and prosperity for all, we have to address the legacies of neglect, isolation and racial discrimination that has a continual effect on our state’s communities of color," said Melinda Lawrence, executive director of the NC Justice Center. "It’s long past time we stopped the chronic underinvestment in rural communities and communities of color across North Carolina."   

These areas of North Carolina, tour participants said, face chronic underinvestment. Hope for the future must come from renewed attention to these historically isolated communities.

"The folk we met are hardworking, resilient, hopeful people," said Barber. "It’s no sin to be poor. But it is sin to ignore our brothers and sisters who are in poverty, and to make economic decisions that continue to keep them poor."

The multiracial tour group called on state leaders, including both lawmakers and business owners, to act against poverty, defend voting rights and place a strong emphasis on economic justice. Truth and Hope participants also urged people from around the state to March on Raleigh this Feb. 11 at the Historic Thousands on Jones Street (HKonJ) People’s Assembly.

A video trailer of the tour, which contains footage from listening sessions, can be found here.

The tour stops for this first leg of the trip included Washington, Roper, Elizabeth City, Winton, Scotland Neck and Rocky Mount.

The second leg of the Truth and Hope tour will visit southeastern North Carolina, and will begin shortly after this year’s HKonJ.

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Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.

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