FIELD TRIP

Well, I did in fact go to the NAACP demonstration yesterday evening.  It says a good deal about how quiet a life I lead that this brief outing was the highpoint of my week.  The Reverend William Barber is the head of the North Carolina NAACP.  For quite some time now he has been organizing weekly protests in front of the State Capitol in Raleigh that he calls Moral Mondays.  Yesterday's protest had as its focus the effort of the Republican Governor, Pat McCrory, to contest and if possible overturn his defeat by Roy Cooper, a former state Attorney General.  As I have often remarked, I don't much like taking part in demonstrations, but since the election I have felt the need to bestir myself and get involved in ways other than voting, giving money, signing petitions, and writing for this blog.

Since I do not know downtown Raleigh and had no idea whether I could find parking, I spent a good deal of time online and on the phone finding out how to get to the demonstration by public transportation.  Eventually, what I did was to drive to the airport [RDU], park my car, and take the Number 100 bus to the Capitol.

This does not exactly qualify as a heroic trek, but I will confess that I felt a bit adventurous as I sat on the bus passing NCSU [North Carolina State University] watching for my stop.  When I arrived at the Capitol, a crowd was listening to some musicians and a singer warming up the group.  The Raleigh News and Observor says "several hundred" people were assembled, but it looked a bit bigger to me.  Here is a picture I took.

Exactly at 6 p.m., The Rev started speaking.  Barber is a larger than life size man [he is said to book two seats when he flies], with a nice command of the rhetorical style of Southern Black preachers made familiar to us White Northerners by Martin Luther King and others.  I worked my way into the middle of the crowd, surrounded by White folks who looked as though they had wandered over from the UNC campus and a goodly number, but not a majority, of Black folks.

So long as I was in the middle of the crowd, the event felt big and important, but when I walked several hundred yards from the group to catch my bus back to the airport, the sounds were gobbled up by the night and it seemed small and insignificant in the big public space in front of the Capitol.

One old guy taking part in one evening demonstration in one state capitol.  Not much to write home about but multiply that several million times and who knows, maybe we can take back our country.  Lordie, I hope so.