Rev. William Barber said:
No sooner had we laid out a plan to take the dream home to North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts than I got a call from Tim Tyson, my cellmate from the Wake County struggle. Tim said he had heard from some folks in the western part of the state who wanted us to bring Moral Mondays to the mountains. They didn’t want to wait a month to host a Take the Dream Home rally. They wanted to know if I would come to Mitchell County that next Sunday evening, then lead a Moral Monday on the public square in Asheville the following day.
I remembered from my time as chair of the Human Relations Commission that Mitchell County was one of the places I’d been told to never drive at night. Back in the 1920s, after a black man was accused of rape in that part of the state, they had put all the black folks on one train and shipped them out of Mitchell County. I believe in fusion politics, but this sounded like a suicide mission. I told Tim we had a plan for the next month and we needed to stick with it.
Not long after I’d hung up the phone, Tim’s daddy, the Reverend Vernon Tyson, called me. The Reverend Tyson is about 80 years old and a stalwart supporter of the movement. He started talking in a way that only an old Southern gentleman can. “Reverend Barber, I heard you don’t want to go to Mitchell County, and I understand. But I’ve been preaching this gospel a long time, brother. I preached it in Methodist churches that I knew were run by the Klan. I know how hard it can be, Reverend Barber, so I called to let you know I’m coming with you to Mitchell County.” Since he was coming with me, I knew I’d have to go. With two generations of Tysons, a couple of other folks from the movement, and our new NAACP field secretary, Laurel Ashton, we set out to test fusion politics in a county that’s 99 percent white and 89 percent Republican.
When we got to the church it was packed full of white folk. The Reverend Tyson, a well-known elder minister in North Carolina, introduced me, and I got up and told the story of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, from that first HKonJ up to the present. I talked for nearly an hour, and the people just sat there, listening. When I was finished, one woman stood up and said, “Reverend Barber, we want you to know that we’ve been coming down to Moral Mondays and watching what was going on in Raleigh. We’re old Eisenhower Republicans, and we know the Tea Party doesn’t represent us. But we needed to make sure this whole ‘Moral Monday’ business wasn’t just a scheme of the Democratic Party.”
She sat down and another man stood up. “I’m the former chair of the Republican Party in this county,” he said, “but I came tonight to tell you that I’ve just resigned. Our party has been taken over by extremists. It doesn’t represent me anymore.”
Then another stood up and said, “Reverend Barber, though we don’t have any black people, we’ve decided to start a branch of the NAACP here in Mitchell County.”
I almost fell out of my seat. In the most unlikely of places, white people were coming together to establish a local branch of America’s oldest antiracist organization. Caught up in the moment, one man in the congregation stood to his feet and said, “Reverend Barber, will you lead us down the road to the home of the man who heads the Tea Party? Let’s march to his house and show him that we’re not going to take it anymore.”
I said, “Brother, let me tell you something black folk learned a long time ago: we don’t march at night.” I invited them to join us the next day in downtown Asheville, and we all held hands to sing “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds.”
