NC Voter Mobilization Tour Visits Asheville
Join Bishop William J. Barber II during his 100 Days of Voter Mobilization tour.
As North Carolinians head to the polls for the midterm elections, they’re faced with fewer early-voting locations, shorter early-voting hours and an even more gerrymandered electoral map than in 2024. All of this makes it even more important for people to make it to the polls.
To explain the urgency of this election, national religious, moral and civil rights leader and Repairers of the Breach President Bishop William J. Barber II brings his 100 Days of Voter Mobilization tour to Asheville at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026, with a rally at Land of the Sky United Church of Christ, 15 Overbrook Place. The rally will feature remarks from Bishop Barber and Repairers of the Breach Director for Religious Affairs, Dr. Hanna Broome.
100 Days, 1000 Marches
Barber, a former president of the NC NAACP, led the Moral Monday Movement in Raleigh in 2013, which brought crowds of thousands to the state capitol to protest policies that hurt working people. In 2018, Barber revived the Poor People’s Campaign, begun in 1968 by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shortly before his assassination.
“As working families struggle with increasing gas and food prices, we need to understand that the policies that place people into poverty are causing us pain, and that the people who make those bad policies need to be sent home.” says Leslie Boyd, a tri-chair of the NC Poor People’s Campaign. “Our vote is our voice for change, and we all need to use it. We need to make a plan to vote and then carry it out.”
Friday’s rally and the tour are both part of Bishop Barber’s Love Forward Together voter mobilization initiative designed to mobilize 5 million low-wage infrequent voters, particularly in the South and battleground states, utilizing peer-to-peer text messaging, grassroots phone banking, door-to-door canvassing and more in addition to the marches to the polls.
In addition to recruiting more than 40 different organizations to partner in the project, the initiative has already helped organize more than 320 marches to the polls to take place on the first day of early voting and beyond. That total continues to grow daily.
A march to the polls is being organized for Oct. 22, 2026, in Asheville, with participants walking to the Wesley Grant Center, 285 Livingston St., the only early-voting site located near downtown Asheville. Details will be announced at the October 1 rally.
The Asheville rally is part of the 100 Days of Voter Mobilization tour following events in Fayetteville, Elizabeth City, Wilson, Winston-Salem, and Durham. Get involved at breachrepairers.org/get-involved/live.
