When a White Republican Teen Invited a Black Pastor to Preach in His Hometown

Beck: What was it like for you to reconnect as adults, since Jonathan was very young the first time you met?

Wilson-Hartgrove: Reverend Barber became the president of the North Carolina NAACP, and in that role, he began building a fusion coalition. Basically, he was proposing a way of changing political life in North Carolina based on what I had seen in his willingness to befriend me. He was saying that Black folks and white folks and brown folks, poor folks, have a lot more in common than we’ve been led to believe, and that we needed to work together to build coalitions that could take control of the state government.

Read: Many white Americans don’t have minority friends

Reverend Barber: In late 2006 we brought together organizations that dealt with education, economic issues, LGBTQ issues, labor issues, and environmental issues, and antiwar activists. We came up with a 14-point agenda, and had a massive people’s assembly to endorse this agenda. Jonathan was there. In a sense, we re-met for real back in the street, building this coalition. We did win the next year—on same-day registration and early voting extension.

Wilson-Hartgrove: The next election came around, and North Carolina voted for Barack Obama—and that broke the Solid South. That really began to change the dynamics, and that’s when we started seeing pushback.

Reverend Barber: Our coalition later became Moral Mondays [a series of protests at the North Carolina state legislature beginning in 2013].

Wilson-Hartgrove: Extremists took control of the legislature and the governor’s office. Then they attempted, in the 2013 legislative session, to completely remake the government. They reformed the tax code; there was a huge voter-suppression measure. They attacked unemployment.

And here was a people’s movement that had been organizing, that had expanded voting rights, and it wasn’t represented by the people who were in office. So we decided that we had to do civil disobedience.

Reverend Barber: Jonathan was in the second group of arrestees for Moral Mondays.

It was a fusion group [again]; it wasn’t just Black folk. I was holding the hand of a white Jewish lady, and I heard one of the white legislators say to another guy, “I thought the NAACP was coming. Where are all these white people coming from?” People began to see interconnections. They said, “Wait a minute—these same people that are going after voting rights, they cut money for education, which is hurting us in these mountain areas.” And so forth and so on.

Wilson-Hartgrove: You couldn’t dismiss it as one group, or as radicals who were angry. It was hundreds and then thousands of people showing up and taking direct action to challenge the legislature. Really a classic southern revival.