Rev. Barber got hot during his Martin Luther King Day address at Tennessee State University. About 19 minutes into his sermon, he ripped Vice President Pence for equating King’s agenda with Trump’s and called out G.O.P. politicians, including Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, who was sitting directly behind him. Barber took off his coat then, signifying he was warmed up. A couple minutes later, he amped up his truth attacks again. (Click on 28:40 below if your time is tight.)
Barber mused on soi disant Christian pols who disdain universal health care, channeling Richard Pryor’s white doofus voice as he teased them. He wailed on fools for the wall who seemed to have forgotten their ancestors weren’t America’s First Peoples. Barber’s preaching depends in part on the quality of his voice and his platform presence. His stevedore arms and broad back seem to underscore his difference from more genteel Democratic contenders–distancing him even from someone like Sherrod Brown. Barber’s toughness makes Brown’s millennial make-over of a blue-collar friendly pol seem pretty Ivy League. Not that Barber needs to posture or roar to flesh out his words. His December obituary for Mother Rosanell Eaton (see below) works on the page. It’s a short tribute but it’s packed with knowledge and feeling, like Mother Rosanell’s life.
As an early snow covered her hometown of Louisburg, N.C. on Sunday, December 9th, I learned that voting rights champion Rosanell Eaton has died at her home. She was 97 years old.
For more than seven decades, Mother Rosanell fought the voter suppression tactics of reactionary extremists in North Carolina, even facing down the KKK which tried to intimidate her by burning crosses on her yard. News of her transition to eternal life came as attacks on voting rights and the integrity of elections in North Carolina are once again national news. As I watched the snow fall on this place where Mother Rosanell struggled to be recognized as a full citizen for nearly a century, I thought of a line from the prophet Isaiah: “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Is 1:8).
Mother Rosanell’s lifelong witness exposed the sin of racism and voter suppression that stains America as a nation still today. At 21 years old, she passed a literacy test in Franklin County. She was forced to quote from memory the Preamble of the Constitution by white men who probably couldn’t quote it themselves and by racist laws that contradicted the words she said: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Meeting this unjust requirement, Ms. Rosanell became one of the first black women in our state to overcome Jim Crow’s impediments to the franchise since Reconstruction.
Five and a half years ago, when the NC General Assembly engaged in extremism on steroids, we began Moral Monday protests. Mother Rosanell went to jail on one occasion with a crowd of more than 5000 witnessing. She led over 150 North Carolinians of every race, creed, color, class and sexuality into the General Assembly to protest the Republican-led voter suppression, refusal to expand healthcare, refusal to raise living wages, and attacks on women and immigrants. When officers told her and others to stop praying and protesting ,she said, “I can’t stop,” and submitted to arrest. I made the mistake of worrying about her and saying, “Mother, you don’t have to do civil disobedience,” to which she replied, “I know what I have to do, and I have to do this. I fought back then and I have to fight today.”
Mother understood what Dr. William Turner has said of the life of faith: that, as a Christian, no matter what you call your salvific experience — saved, born again, blood-washed, changed, spirit-filled — it must produce a quarrel with the world, a quarrel with hate, a quarrel with injustice, a quarrel with greed. If it doesn’t, then the claim to be a person of faith is terribly suspect.
After Ms Rosanell’s arrest, when she was 92, Donita Judge, Caitlin Swain and Penda Hair of Forward Justice vetted her, and I had the privilege of asking Mother Rosanell to be the lead plaintiff in our North Carolina NAACP’s challenge to the state’s Republican extremist 2013 voter suppression bill, which attempted to use the myth of widespread voter fraud to restrict voting rights and roll back early voting same day registration 16–17 year old preregistration and to implement a photo ID requirement that would suppress votes of black and brown people, women, students and the poor.
This case came after the Supreme Court’s 5–4 Shelby decision opened the door for legislatures with a history of voter suppression to change voting laws without federal preclearance. Though we first lost the case in district court, Mother Rosanell told me, “Dr., we will win. Just keep appealing. They think I’m gonna die before this case is over, but I’m not dying. I’m going to see it through.”
Ms. Rosanell stood tall as the matriarch of our struggle, following the case all the way to the Supreme Court, where the law was struck down as a 4–4 vote upheld the 4th District Court’s ruling that Ms. Rosanell was right. The law had targeted African-Americans with “almost surgical precision.”
Though exposed for their surgical racism, the architects and defenders of voter suppression in North Carolina did not repent after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Attorney Thomas Farr, who led Governor Pat McCrory’s defense of the law, was nominated by the current president to serve on the federal bench in North Carolina’s Eastern District, which includes Mother Rosanell’s home in Franklin County. In the week before mother went home to be with God, Farr, who has questioned her on the stand and tried to discredit her testimony, was denied that seat on the federal bench by a single vote.
Still, the struggle she waged her entire life continues. If we want to honor Mother Rosanell, we must imitate her and keep the movement going. I still see her standing on the statehouse lawn, before thousands as she did in 2013, in her white suit and white hat. Shining like the bright snow, sharing her story of struggle for voting rights and then declaring that she was “fed up and fired up.” Thousands joined her chant on the lawn that day, just as we must take up her struggle now.
Whenever we see the politics of hate trying to suppress policies of love we must be fed up and fired up. Whenever we see the sick, the hungry and the immigrant being denied, we must be fed up and fired up. Whenever we see systematic racism and voter suppression being implemented, all of us — regardless of race — who say we love God and love right, must like Mother Rosanell be fed up and fired up to do the work of love, justice and equality.
Like Mother, we must work all the days of our lives until change comes. We must be led by the Spirit until change comes. We must be fed up and fired up like Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosanell Eaton. Until change comes.
Though our sins are like scarlet, they must be made white as the snow.
Mother Rosanell was baptized in the spirit of struggle and gave her whole self to the fight for justice and human equality until she died. The America Mother Rosanell worked for has never yet been, but she nevertheless believed in its possibility until her dying day. She never gave up the faith, never gave up the struggle, never gave up being dissatisfied with wrong. She was fed up and fired up until her time was up, and now she has gone up to be with the Lord. To honor her we too must stand up, speak up and vote up until our time is up. And then, like Mother Rosanell, our living shall not be in vain.