Making Mondays Moral
If you’re in or anywhere near Raleigh, N.C., the North Carolina State AFL-CIO urges you to join Moral Monday on June 24 to let Republican state legislators know what you think of their assault on working families.
Moral Mondays began in late April and have been growing, standing up to the legislature’s unemployment benefit cuts, higher taxes for the poor and working families, rejecting federal funds for Medicaid expansion and attacks on public schools and voting rights.
Monday’s rally will take place at 5 p.m. on Halifax Mall in Raleigh and the state AFL-CIO is making a special push to see that union activists are well represented in the crowd.
At a Friday press conference, state AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer MaryBe McMillan said:
It is critical that workers voices are heard. The list of injustices against workers is long, gutting protections in the state personnel act, endangering teacher tenure, denying dues deductions to municipal employees.
At the June 17 Moral Monday rally, 1,400 people protested and 84 were arrested during peaceful civil disobedience, bringing the Moral Monday arrest total to more than 480.
An op-ed in the Fayetteville Observer described the Moral Monday ralliers this way:
They are…a group you might look to if you wished to find a moral position, to sort out right from wrong. They are the religious leaders of our state representing most denominations, historians, medical doctors, teachers, political activists, professors, businessmen and women, mothers, grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers. They are all races and ages. Some are poor, some millionaires.
And they are there because they are outraged by the radical agenda of Republican leadership.
The man behind the Moral Monday movement is the Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP. Read more about him here and more about Moral Mondays here .
