The Hightower Report: North Carolina's Moral Freedom Summer

The Moral Monday Movement is on the move again!

This feisty coalition, based in North Carolina, is an inspiring model of workaday people coming together to reclaim their rights from far-right-wing politicians and plutocrats running amok. Led by the NAACP, tens of thousands of North Carolinians have joined the Moral Monday civil disobedience protests at the state capitol for more than a year. They've outed the extremist governor and legislators who have cut taxes for corporations and the rich, while raising taxes on low-income people; cut funds for public education and jobless benefits; and gutted environmental protections and women's health funding.

Now, the coalition is going after those political kleptocrats in their districts. The movement has recruited, trained, and sent forth across the state 34 young community organizers with the intention of registering 50,000 new voters this summer. The central rallying cry for this mobilization is for the people to rise up against the atrocious voter-suppression legislation passed last year. That law is flagrantly anti-democratic, shutting elderly people, minorities, students, low-wage workers, and other non-Republican voters out of their polling places.

The effort to restore ballot rights for all in North Carolina is being called Moral Freedom Summer, which connects it directly to the historic Freedom Summer of 1964. In that heroic campaign, activists struggling to secure the vote for African-Americans suffered horrific beatings, firebombings, and a shocking triple murder. Fifty years later, after the Tar Heel State's top officials shamed themselves by eradicating fundamental rights gained by the blood of those activists, the people are on the move again. To keep up with them and offer help, go to www.naacpnc.org.