Nelda Holder   Photo: Urban News
Nelda Holder
Photo: Urban News
By Nelda Holder

During the 2013 session of the N.C. General Assembly, 13 Moral Monday protest rallies took place outside the N.C. Legislative Building, organized by the NC NAACP.

Thousands attended the rallies on the outdoor lawn, focusing on legislative action they claimed would negatively affect the people of the state in areas of education, health care, unemployment, voting rights, women’s rights, racial justice, and other social issues.

Well over 900 individuals, including some 68 from Western North Carolina, were arrested because they ventured inside the Statehouse to carry their messages to the doors of the legislative chambers. The movement’s impact is continuing locally.

Raleigh might be straight down I-40 from Western North Carolina, but this area’s Moral Monday arrestees took many personal routes to get there. And for Rev. Lisa Bovee-Kemper, the journey began when she was a very young.

Her parents taught her to sing the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” when she was “probably still in diapers,” she said. But because of her recent Moral Monday experience, she now has a much deeper understanding of the song and the civil rights process.

Rev. Lisa Bovee-Kemper, assistant minister at the Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Asheville.
Rev. Lisa Bovee-Kemper, assistant minister at the Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Asheville.

Bovee-Kemper, assistant minister at the Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Asheville, was arrested on June 5 as part of the largest weekly contingent (151 arrests) to be accused of criminal trespass inside the N.C. Statehouse. In acts of civil disobedience, Bovee-Kemper and her companions refused to leave the second floor of the Statehouse upon order of the Statehouse Chief of Police. The non-violent protestors were handcuffed and taken to the Wake County Detention Center, where they were processed and released.

“I’ve always had an abstract understanding about what it meant to sing that song. But when we were lined up two by two (to walk into the Statehouse) and somebody started singing it, I felt it in a different way,” Bovee-Kemper admitted.

“I’m always conscious of standing on the shoulders of people who came before me … in many different ways—as an activist, and as a minister, and as a woman.” But things felt very different in that moment when she heard the song. “There was something really powerful—and heartbreaking—about knowing that I was going to go in there and get arrested and nobody was going to set a dog on me … and that I was going to be in the jail and was going to get out. And that is a very different reality. So it’s been a really interesting experience,” she declared.

As a minister, Rev. Bovee-Kemper was led to the action of civil disobedience through a process of discernment. In her faith, that has meant careful consideration of “what it’s about—coming to it from a very spiritually grounded place and identifying it as part of what I’m called to do as a minister,” she explained.

And in keeping with that belief, she—along with the majority of the arrestees—refused to take the offer of a plea deal that would have exchanged 25 hours of community service and $180 in court costs for a dismissal of the charges against her.

“I still don’t think I did anything wrong,” she said straightforwardly. “I will take this as far as it needs to go.”

As it turns out, that determination moves in various directions. Not only is Bovee-Kemper prepared to proceed to trial, but she has spent time and energy since her arrest making sure the causes she went to Raleigh to support will be vigorously pursued in WNC. She joined a number of area activists, some of them also arrestees, in planning the well-attended Mountain Moral Monday that took place August 5. The rally packed the plaza in front of Asheville City Hall with a crowd estimated at 6,500-10,000 people.

The Rev. William Barber II, president of the state NAACP since 2005 and leader of the Moral Monday phenomenon, journeyed to Asheville to speak. (Barber, who has now become a national figure, was just named by Moyers & Company as one of 19 young activists changing America, and on November 6 he received the Paul Wellstone Citizenship Leadership Award in Washington, D.C.)

“There was a follow-up meeting (after Mountain Moral Monday) to say, ‘OK, what are we going to do with all this energy?’” said Bovee-Kemper. “And we convened an interim steering committee to research the ‘HKonJ,’” she said, referring to the Historic Thousands on Jones Street People’s Assembly Coalition.

That coalition, which actually began in 2006, pulled together organizers, political scientists, religious leaders, lawyers and other activists to begin holding an annual HKonJ People’s Assembly on Jones Street (the location of the General Assembly) each February in support of comprehensive reform bills directed towards their agenda.

Over the years, the group has supported legislation such as the Racial Justice Act (repealed this year), same day voter registration, an increase in the minimum wage, and the eugenics compensation program.

“It’s a coalition of organizations that are all working on different things but towards the same basic premise, which is that we have a better community, a more just, sustainable and equitable community,” said Bovee-Kemper. “We feel like there’s not enough space and time for everybody’s issues, and what Moral Monday does is articulate that everybody’s issues are everybody’s issues. When we’re stuck in the hierarchy of oppressions, we forget that it’s all connected.”

Rev. Curtis Gatewood, the HKonJ coalition coordinator—and the first person to be arrested in Moral Monday civil disobedience—met with the committee at St. James AME a couple of weeks ago, according to Bovee-Kemper, “and we’re basically moving forward with creating a Buncombe and Henderson People’s Assembly. It makes a lot of sense because it’s an existing structure.”

Seven principles will guide the coalition (see People’s Assembly Values), and the group will next begin reaching out for broad buy-in from a cross-section of Henderson and Buncombe County nonprofit groups. “And we’re very interested in faith communities; that’s a very important piece of Moral Monday,” the minister stressed.

A first public event is in the works for December 12, and voter education and registration will likely be the focus of the initial mobilization. “Everybody agrees that’s where we need to go.”

The initial group of WNC People’s Assembly planners, in addition to Bovee-Kemper, has included Julie Mayfield, director of the Western Carolina Alliance; Vicki Meath, director of Just Economics of Western North Carolina; Carmen Ramos-Kennedy, advisory board of the Campaign for Southern Equality; Isaac Coleman, founding member, Living Wage Campaign and board member, Clean Water for North Carolina; Elder John Hayes, president of the Asheville Branch NAACP; Jesse Junior, local activist and FM radio host; and Elaine Lite, publisher of Critter magazine.