YouSaid · the spoken record

William Barber

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2021-04-01

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2021-04-01

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1. “And he asked me if I would serve as one of the youngest directors of the Human Relations Commission in North Carolina. And I started in 1993.”

   2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Actually, when I finished, I set out in 88 because after he died, I was just, it was really hard for me because he was my... And then my grandmother died two weeks later. So my two best friends in the whole world died within them. Days. And so I sat out and went and I actually spent the summer working with the upward bound. And then I worked some with the guy who was running for Governor Jordan, who was his name. He was running On a Democratic ticket and some people said, you need to learn this or not. So I learned the inside of the structure about state campaign. I went back in 89 and finished my work studying. I did some independent study on Paul Tillock. Then I went to, I pastored in Martinsville, Virginia. In 89, I became the senior pastor there. And then I came back to North Carolina and Governor James B. Hunt. Southern governor”

   2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “A week later, I got a call and my grandmother said that he had died. Interestingly enough, and this is not a makeup, I was studying that week the story of Elijah and Elisha. fail and We bared him on Father's Day. In June of 1988, buried him on Father's Day. Sure it is.”

   2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “And he stayed awake that whole sermon. I kept looking at him and he was there awake. He's there awake. He was awake. He was awake. And then afterwards we left and we were walking down the halls of the high school that my mother had integrated, that he had integrated. And he touched me on the hand and said, son, I think you're going to be all right. And I said, what? He said, that was pretty good. I think you're going to be all right. We went home. And when I got ready to leave that night, my grandmother and mother and everybody, he came to the door and just stared at me. I said, Dad, are you okay? He said, I'm okay. I said, are you going anywhere? He said, someday. Never talked to him again.”

   2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “And whenever I would preach sermons, no matter how people would stand and clap, he would sit there. And when we get in the car and get home, he said, go get your Bible. Let me show you something. Go get thesaurus. You didn't exeget this piece properly. You didn't do Can he just clap one time, please? And it wasn't until two weeks before he died. I was preached the back a lot service, as I said at my high school. And my father by then had had a stroke. And he had worked back from it, but he still had the effects of it. And so he had sleep apnea. He would just kind of go off to sleep sometimes, you know. When I was preaching, I don't know how he could still hear because he could still tell me everything I said, but anyway.”

   2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Good Samaritan. The title was Sometimes You got the Way Up is Down. That was a paraphrase of it. And he sat there and watched me. And then I preached my bacalot service in my third year of seminary. Because let me look back. When I preached that trial sermon, there were some people that came up to me that day at the end and said, good gracious young man, you sure can preach. And one of them said, now our church and my father said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't even say that to him. And when I were riding home, he said, number one, don't you listen to anybody to tell you you're ready to pastor anything? He said number two I will from this point be your toughest critic.”

   2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “I didn't tell you what he said. Come home. And when I came home, he said, get in the car. And we drove down the coastline of North Carolina, Nag's head, and talked for two, three hundred miles about life, about ministry, about the decision I had to make, whether I was going to do stuff from the outside or from the inside, understanding the difference between God and God's people. The church as a pure, as an ideal concept versus the church practical. I decided to accept the call, the ministry, which he then immediately challenged me that had to be a call to get trained, a call to do serious work because it was nothing for neophyte. It's not just about speaking. You're not a glorified MC. You're not just an orator. On his birthday, March 21st, that weekend of 1984, I did what we call a trial sermon in my home church.”

   2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Said, I'm going to go to North Carolina Central. I'm going to do three. At that time, they had, you could go three years and your senior year, you could go your first year of law school. After that, you got your undergrad student and then done. And I did. And then my senior year, I got tracked down by what my grandmama called the Holy Ghost. And I couldn't go left or right. I kept having these epiphanies and theological struggles. And I called one day in 83 and said to my dad, something's going on. He said, come home.”

   2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Number one is there are 500 years of ministry, David, on just my father's side. 300 on my mother's side. Number two, my father was extraordinarily progressive for his time. Now, he didn't call it progressive, and he called it Christianity. This is just Orthodox Christianity. You're supposed to care for the poor, the least of these, and stand up for justice and righteousness. But there were a lot of people, even in the quote-unquote black church, that would tell him, we don't want to have all that in our churches. And so he often butted heads with the leadership. And I saw that. And I thought it was pure hypocrisy. I don't want to have anything to do with it. I didn't want to go to a school that even had a course in religion. So North Carolina Central didn't, but they had a law school.”

   2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Not the power to say yes. And if you're going to be in this, you need to understand that about some people. And that's why you must have any moral movement you involved in must understand the morality of the power of the vote. The morality of organizing. Not just it's a good idea. You must understand the intersections between voting and economics. You can't ever forget it because he said nobody will want power as much as that man does. if it was just about holding an office”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “I remember the preachers went in and they were pushing on something. And Jesse Ham said, now you boys, and I kind of flinched and they pushed a little bit. And then we left. I said, dad, this man just, he said, I know what he did. But I wanted you to see his way of thinking. I said, what is that? He said, in his mindset, he's not trying to get 100% of the vote help. He just wants 51%. All he cares about. And all he wants is just power. And really the power to say no.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “was involved not only in desegregation of schools, he was involved in the early labor fights. Now, they didn't have unions at the warehouse, what we call the pulp meal plan, but there was a situation there where black workers were making less than white workers, and he got involved in that work. He helped a lot of rural farmers, white and black. He worked for the community action program that was started under the Johnson administration. It was a part of the great society. He also early on worked on some police brutality issues. But yeah, my father was always on the move traveling, engaging.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Yeah, my dad was a general evangelist of the church. I traveled them everywhere, some 30-some states in my early life. He was always going somewhere. And he took me with him, I thank God. He told people my son's not welcome, then neither am I. He was very intentional about learning through both in terms of academics, but also through osmosis and also through interaction.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “This isn't the 50s. Yeah, now my uncle was a little different than my dad in terms of nonviolence. He simply got up, he saw it. He went to the gun rack. He took out his rifle. He grabbed his flashlight, threw me, told him to come in, gave me the 12-great shotgun. Already loaded, said, go to the back door. And if anybody comes through, you know what you got to do. And I'm thinking, I'm 13, 14 years old. world is this and sure enough i got the back there i heard and then i heard him say and the next one will not be over your head then i heard all these cars i don't know whether it was the young clan or whatnot and then after the commotion stopped he hollered and said billy I said, yes. He said, come on. He came back. He took the gun from me, put it back on the rack, put his gun back on the rack. He said, you want some tea?”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Now, I also remember during that time, Dave, my uncle, who's deceased now, he came back to Eastern North Carolina. He had married a German, a white woman who was German. She had a son. And I remember one day. Sitting in the, we were looking at Fred Saffer. I know we'll forget it, the laughing son, and we're sitting in the place. And all of a sudden, we saw this fire. And his son, his stepson, who was white, had had an encounter with some white boys in the school. And he beat up a couple of them because he's really big. And that night somebody decided to come burn across because... Way back up. Now, this is like 70s and 80s.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Enormous. Yeah. I mean, just be student government president. I could walk downtown people with just clap. They come up and say, you know, glad might seem small in some people's minds, but in a rural community, this is huge. And, you know, and they would always say, don't mess up in school. Us, you know, so my grades, if I made my teachers, would say, You gotta do better than this because you are. And sometimes I rebelled some of that, you know, because it was always these heavy, heavy, heavy expectations.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Exactly. Exactly. And I can remember there was a lot of talk about that, you know, in the community. And I never will forget when I won. Evie Wilkins' brother, T.A. Wilkins. I was a bus driver as well. And that evening went to the parking lot to get my bus, he came on, he was the supervisor. And he made me step off the bus. And he said, I'm just, I have a problem with you. And what is wrong with him? And he was just getting on me. You got to do better. You got to do better. And then all the lights on the buses came on because it was mostly African-American drivers. And he said, if you're going to be our student government president. He said, yeah. But his point was. This is not just a little school thing. They saw this in the context of it being a major event. community.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “And it was crazy, the response to that. No, and she ended up having that role taken from her. In 1980, my senior year, I ran for student government president at Plymouth High School. That was the formerly all-white high school. My mother helped integrate. And Juan, but here's the thing they should know. In 1980, I was the first student government president to serve the whole year because up until then they elected one black and one white”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Know it was so by the time we get to late 60s, 1970s, the way they did it in Washington County, it was the younger kids. Now, the hard stuff happened actually at the high school. They were having fights and battles and all kinds of things there. We didn't experience as much of it. There was some sense of isolation, you know, because I said I'd been around when I went to union. Everybody was there, mom, daddy, and all. But I don't remember a lot of trauma. I actually had more trauma. This is the strange thing. When I finally got to high school in the 1980s, 1979. In the late 70s, early 80s Two things. One of my classmates, I was a thesbian, and one of my classmates, Wanda Roll, lead role in South Pacific. She was black and that meant that in that role she would have to kiss one time the white lead actor.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “To get them ready. I'm not even 60 years old. And I went to segregate a kindergarten and first grade. My mother, who just retired from the same school system after 52 years of service went from being a secretary in an integrated situation in Indiana to a secretary in an segregated school. My father became a science teacher in the segregated school. And then when I went to the second grade, I moved to the desegregated school. And my mother became the first black secretary, principal secretary at the formerly all-white high school.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “the county they still were breaking the law you know there was attempts in north carolina to create a situation where if you didn't want to go to say integrated schools your tax dollars could follow your child you know body and um My father said yes. I'll come back. The call was we need you to come back and start meeting and working with teachers, white and black clandestine.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “My father was a pastor. He had worked some at the Flanner House by this time. He had what would be equivalent of two master's degrees, which was abnormal among black preachers at the time. My mother was working in government. He was on an upper with the Christian church disciples of Christ, which by the way, David is actually predominantly white disciples of Christ. He gets a call from E.V. Wilkins. EV Wilkins was a power broker in the eastern part of North Carolina among black Democrats. And he was the principal of the all-black union school. And he sent word to my father that around 1964, 65, that 10 years after Brown versus Board of Education, they still had not desegregated.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “And then another month later, two months later, almost, Kennedy is dead, a president is dead. And I came to terms with the fact that I was carried in her womb and born into America in a time when there was so much death and so much hurt. And then the next year, you know, Swana Chaining Goodman so far. And I don't know how that could have affected me somehow or another, but I've always taken that as being significant. I ask myself, My mother, we've talked about she's 86 years old, mama. What were you thinking about? 15 days after you have a child being a wife of a preacher and folk down south are blowing children up in sunday school and then you and daddy decide to go south My parents did the reverse.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Mega Evans was shot the same night that Kennedy talked about putting forth a civil rights bill. That's the same year that the March in Washington happens. And then 17 days, 15 days after my birthday. Racists in this country were blowing up children in Sunday school”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “That's right. But you think about, but also I am. For years, David, I had a deep problem, not problem, but sensitivity and crying. I just cry anytime, anywhere, any place, anytime. And I had some conversation with a friend of mine and some broken psychology. And we started talking about the time in which my mother was carrying me and being in a family where the father was deeply concerned about justice issues. You know, that was the year George Wallace stood up in February segregation yesterday. Today and tomorrow. My mother was carrying me then. That's the year that the South Carolina state massacres happened. My mother was carrying me then. That's the year that”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “It was a huge two days after the march on Washington. Now, the story that they tell is that I've always been a little bit rambunctious. Difficult. So my mother said she went in to labor on the 28th and I said, wait a minute. All this march on watching this stuff is all about and what happens. And after that, I decided it was time for me to come into the world and came. That's the way they tell her.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “And my mother worked in government. She trained at a business school, the Lane Business College of Black School, and was trained by one of the top pianists in the state. And then I was born in my father was pastoring, and I was born August 30th, 1963.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Quote, David, first of all, let me thank you. Journey is an interesting word, how we get to where we are in life. My father was born in eastern North Carolina, but raised in Camden, New Jersey, just outside of Philly. And his daddy died at eight years old in the middle of the depression. My grandma used to tell me how she was offered money for him on the black market. But as a single black woman said no, came back to the South, raised him and his brother, and then two other children. And my father went in the Navy in the middle of World War II. went to Warrington, Georgia, then went to Indianapolis, Indiana, met my mother. And my father was there studying ministry at Christian Theological Seminary in Butler University. Both my parents served in the civil air patrol. A lot of people don't even remember the civil apertrol.”

    2021-04-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 436 — Rev. Dr. William Barber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source