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This evening in Wilson, North Carolina, Repairers of the Breach joined Forward Justice and a coalition of partners in Eastern North Carolina to launch a mass voter mobilization effort dedicated to rallying an historic turnout in the 2026 midterms. Donald Trump ordered his MAGA minions in the North Carolina General Assembly to rob power from people who reject their extreme agenda. Those of us from Eastern North Carolina refuse to accept this robbery. Our people struggled too long and fought to hard for us to accept this illegal gerrymander. We’ve pledged every nonviolent means at our disposal to overcome power grab and turn it against those who thought they could cheat to maintain control of our government.
MAGA extremists cannot win on their agenda, so they have decided they need to steal seats in the US Congress. So just like he did after he lost the 2020 Presidential election, Trump is making calls. Only this time, North Carolina Republicans jumped to do his bidding.
House Speaker Destin Hall was very clear about his intentions to draw another Republican seat at the request of the President. Here’s what he said: “President Trump earned a clear mandate from the voters of North Carolina and the rest of the country, and we intend to defend it by drawing an additional Republican Congressional seat.”
If they had a mandate from voters, why would they need to draw additional seats to win the next election?
The truth is that they want the power of the first Congressional District because Black voters make up approximately 40% of the district, and the growing Latino communities make up more than 7%. That means that Black and white and Latino together can elect Congress persons from this district who care about the things that most Americans want - things like living wages, universal access to healthcare, diverse, fully-funded public education, affordable housing, and a pathway to citizenship for our immigrant neighbors.
They want this district because we have elected representatives for decades who will not bow to any would-be king. This district has long been at the center of the Black political experience in North Carolina. It includes counties where Black residents fought for the right to vote, to work with dignity and to be represented. As state representative Rodney Pierce has made clear [ [link removed] ]:
Halifax and Northampton were among the 40 NC counties that were subject to federal “preclearance” under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Halifax was the only county in the state that, because of its record of discrimination, was barred from relief from federal literacy imperatives (Alston v. Butts, 1964).
These discriminatory laws and practices kept citizens from voting, holding office, and controlling their own destinies. They turned to the courts — and won.
In Johnson v. Halifax County (1984) and Ellis v. Vance County (1987), lawsuits filed under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act forced changes in election methods that finally allowed Black candidates to be elected to county commissions. Lassiter v. Northampton County v. Northampton County Board of Elections (1959) and Bazemore v. Bertie County Board of Elections (1961) challenged the use of literacy tests to disenfranchise Black voters. Other lawsuits across the region — including NAACP v. Roanoke Rapids, Hines v. Mayor and Town Council of Ahoskie, and Wilkins v. Washington County Commissioners— successfully challenged similar discriminatory practices.
This region was also at the heart of Black political power during Reconstruction. Known as the “Black Second,” the First District and its predecessor elected some of the first Black members of Congress: John Hyman of Warren County, James O’Hara of Halifax County, Henry Cheatham of Vance County and George Henry White — the last Black member of Congress from the South until 1972.
After nearly a century without Black representation, North Carolina elected Eva Clayton to Congress in 1992.
The proposed map shifts the district to include counties represented by two Republican state senators — Norman Sanderson and Bobby Hanig, the latter of whom has already announced his candidacy. In 1961, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that some of the counties they represent — Bertie, Camden, Currituck, Gates, Halifax, Northampton, and Warren — had the most discriminatory literacy tests in the state.
This is not a race-neutral process. Of the state’s eight majority Black counties, all lie in the 1st District. These changes fracture Black communities of interest and weaken the ability of Black voters to elect candidates of their choice. And they come at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could further erode Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, Pierce v. North Carolina State Board of Elections, a federal case is now before the Fourth Circuit that challenges the state’s 2023 legislative maps on similar grounds.
It’s been a long struggle, and there’s a whole lot of people who gave blood, sweat, and tears to win representation from this district.
Harriet Jacobs escaped from slavery in Edenton and hid in an attic before escaping to freedom to became an abolitionist. Mary Anne Starkey was a Union spy who worked with Abraham Galloway and brought Abraham Lincoln’s representative who came looking for troops to win the Civil War up to her Starkey’s attic to meet Galloway. He told Lincoln’s man, “I’ll raise a regiment if you do three things”: give us equal pay, educate our children while we’re fighting, and guarantee that when we win this war, we will be full citizens with an equal vote.
That was the deal when many Black men from Eastern North Carolina put their lives on the line for this nation. After they won, this district became known during Reconstruction as the “Black Second.” It elected some of the first Black members of Congress: John Hyman of Warren County, James O’Hara of Halifax County, Henry Cheatham of Vance County and George Henry White — the last Black member of Congress from the South until 1972.
Sara Small was a leader of the Williamston Freedom Movement, and the first Black woman to run for US Congress in NC. Willa Cofield, a teacher & civil rights pioneer in Enfield, stood up to being sprayed with fire hoses because they refused to vacate the town’s downtown when the 9 o’clock whistle sounded.
My parents moved back to Eastern North Carolina to enroll me in desegregated schools, and they enrolled me in this freedom movement before I had any say in it. I grew up with people like Golden Frinks at the dinner table. He was a fearless field secretary for Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and became one of the most important civil rights leaders in the country in the 1960s.
This district is the home of the great C.R. Edwards, a civil rights advocate, pastor, and lawmaker. He was the first Black person elected to the Fayetteville City Board of Education and the first black lawmaker from Cumberland County in over a century.
This is the place where Ella Baker grew up, sitting in the pulpit beside her granddaddy from the time she was a young girl, watching the faces of the people and learning the truth that she taught this nation: “Shine light, and the people will find a way.” She helped SNCC and SCLC and CORE organize Freedom Summer in Mississippi, and the next summer, she brought students right here to Eastern North Carolina to do the same thing.
And let’s be clear: it was never just Black folks in the struggle. My people in Washington County were always Black, white, and Tuscaroran Indian. Gertrude Weil was a white Jewish woman who founded the League of Women Voters and the Biracial Committee in Goldsboro. She funded a swimming pool and a park for Black people in Goldsboro in the Jim Crow era.
After nearly a century without Black representation, North Carolina elected Eva Clayton to Congress in 1992. The fight for this district took us 90 years, and we won’t let it be taken back and broken apart on our watch.
Trump doesn’t get to tell us what we will take. He is not from here. Trump never primed tobacco in Eastern North Carolina. He never chopped cotton or cut fire wood. He never sent his children to under-funded schools that still figured out how to lift children up, and he didn’t make it through hurricanes where white, Black, and Native people came together to help one another.
Trump isn’t from Eastern North Carolina, but many of us who are learned our lessons from our ancestors, and in the their name, we cannot or will not bow. We’ve fought this kind of voter suppression and election subversion for over a decade in North Carolina, and we have won - both in the courts and at the ballot box. We launched this campaign in Wilson today to say loud and clear, “We aren’t going anywhere!”
In this moral moment for our nation, it’s important to me as a Bishop of the church to say that there is another element to why we are launching this campaign. In Eastern North Carolina, as across much of the Bible Belt, there is a church on every corner and two or three on every road Which means that the people who are trying to engage in this robbery are also trying to steal the language of my faith to trick people into believing that their cause is righteous.
They open the General Assembly with prayer but then pass policies like this that prey on vulnerable people. But the Bible is clear: we can do all the church-going we want to, but if we don’t do justice and mercy, we have left undone the weightier matters of the law - what’s important form God’s perspective. If we don’t feed the hungry, care for the sick, bind up the wounded, and welcome the stranger, then our living is in vain, and our claim of salvation is suspect.
This is Bible 101. Still, some preachers try to say, “Yes, that’s what the Bible says a Christian ought to do, but it’s their personal responsibility. It doesn’t have anything to do with government.” But that’s not what the Bible says. That may be how religious nationalists have taught them to misread the Bible, but it’s not the plain message of the text.
Jesus says nations will be judged by how we treat the least of these – not just individuals, but the governments of nations. And the prophet Isaiah says, “Woe unto you who make unjust laws and rob the poor of their right.” Yes, it’s a sin for any one of us to say “be warm and well fed” and not do what we can to feed our hungry neighbor. But the Bible is clear that it’s also a grievous sin to commit policy violence by supporting policies that hurt vulnerable people.
Ezekiel calls the politicians who do it “ravenous lions.” But he doesn’t stop there. The prophet says that the preachers who blessed the policy violence of his day whitewashed the political leader’s wicked deeds. Ezekiel calls it robbery.
Denying people voting rights is sin, and this immoral voter suppression and racist redistricting will not win. It will not win because the people are waking up to the fact that the racism was never just about hurting Black people. It’s actually about keeping power that they are using to hurt most people.
People are not only waking up; they’re getting up. Here in the South, every state but Florida has poverty rates higher than the U.S. average. Together, these states are facing a loss of more than $160 billion in federal Medicaid funding over the next 10 years as a result of the budget cuts that Congress has passed this year.
An analysis of Medicaid enrollees in these southern states shows that all racial groups stand to suffer heavy losses. White people make up the largest group of current enrollees in six of the 11 states. Black people make up the largest group in three states, and Latinos are the largest group in two.
The South is particularly vulnerable to the coming spending cuts because many states in this region are disproportionately rural and rural residents and hospitals rely most heavily on Medicaid. 94 rural hospitals in these Southern states have already been identified as at risk of having to cut some services or close down completely.
Military veterans will also be hard hit by the spending cuts to these critical support programs. Nationwide, about 1.2 million veterans live in households that receive SNAP and nearly 1.6 million are enrolled in Medicaid.
Our current leadership in Washington, DC has passed a big, ugly, and deadly budget bill. They threw a party at the White House to celebrate this bill and are lying to the people about how it is going to cut their taxes and usher in a new so-called “golden age” in America. They’ve shut the government down for a full month rather than address the pending healthcare crisis that is a direct result of this bill – and now they are holding hungry children hostage – most of whom are white – to try to force these cuts on the American people.
This is the immoral agenda they are trying to steal seats to have the power to enact.
We came together in Wilson tonight to say, “No. Not on our watch.” We can push back and win. In the Bible, there’s a story in 1 Samuel 7 about a time when an enemy came against the people – the mighty Philistines, whose Goliath is remembered as a sign of their power and might. It looked like they had all the power - army power, political power, monetary power. It loooked like victory was theirs. But when the people stood on God’s truth, the text says, “that day the voice of the Lord thundered with loud thunder against the Philistines and threw them into such a panic that they were routed before the Israelites.”
Down in Eastern North Carolina, we know about the sound of thunder. When it shakes the entire atmosphere, everybody listens. Later in the Bible, it tells us that the thunder was God’s voice - God’s kol in the Hebrew. God’s kol was like thunder, and it shook things up.
My Jewish friends have taught me that kol - that word for “voice” in the ancient stories - is the same word for “vote” in modern Hebrew. If this nation ever needed the voice and the vote of God, we need it now.
God’s voice is a voice of love. We ought to echo God’s voice of love until it sounds like thunder. If we join our voice with Gods voice and declare it’s time for our voice and our vote to be respected, never neglected or rejected, then thunder will roll across Eastern North Carolina and across this nation, declaring a new birth of freedom and the new possibility of a Third Reconstruction.
I invite you to watch the mass meeting where we launched this campaign, and I invite you to join us by becoming a monthly supporter of Repairers of the Breach [ [link removed] ]. We need to put paid staff in Eastern North Carolina to work full-time for the next year to organize hundreds of volunteers who can turnout more than 60% of the electorate in a midterm year.
Forward together, not one step back!

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