We reported over the summer that Episcopal churches in North Carolina had joined in a protest movement around voting rights, education funding, and equal access to healthcare. “Moral Mondays” as the protests were called, united people from every walk of life and every faith tradition, around shared values of justice and equality.
This past week, the Moral Mondays movement passed another milestone. More than 80,000 people gathered to March in downtown Raleigh, making it the largest protest in the South since the protests against segregation.
Organizers of the march made five demands:
• Secure pro-labor, anti-poverty policies that insure economic sustainability.
• Provide well-funded, quality public education for all.
• Promote health care for all, including affordable access, the expansion of Medicaid,
women’s health and environmental justice in every community.
• Address the continuing disparities in the criminal justice system on the basis of race and class.
• Defend and expand voting rights, women’s rights, immigrants’ rights, LGBT rights and the fundamental principle of equality under the law for all people.
Over the summer, the Episcopal diocesan bishop, Michael Curry and the bishop suffragan, Anne Hodges-Copple, signed on to an open letter asking for similar changes to be made. The letter can be read in full here.
Local Episcopal congregations were active in the Moral Mondays movement, and several were arrested in acts of civil disobedience.
More on the most recent record-breaking protest can be found here.