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"The war is still raging. And [Gene Nichol]'s still fighting."
-John Grisham North Carolina has, since 2013, undergone a greater
political sea change than any other state. For the first time,
seven years ago, state government became completely captured by a
radicalized and aggressive Republican leadership determined to
produce the most ultra-conservative political regime in the nation.
In a remarkably brief time span, Republican lawmakers have moved
successfully toward that goal. The New York Times refers to the
project as "North Carolina's pioneering work in bigotry." Other
states have begun to follow what they expressly deemed the "North
Carolina playbook." Indecent Assembly lays out in detail, and with
no small dose of passion, the agenda, purposes, impacts, and
transgressions of the Republican North Carolina General Assembly
since it came to dominate life in the Tar Heel State. Nichol
outlines, without holding punches, the stoutest war waged against
people of color and low-income citizens seen in America for a
half-century. All-white Republican caucuses, dominating both houses
of the General Assembly, have behaved essentially like a White
People's Party, without the nomenclature. Bold steps have also been
taken to diminish the equal dignity of women and an internationally
famed crusade against LGBTQ+ Tar Heels has capped off what has
become a state-based battle against the Fourteenth Amendment. But
the Republican General Assembly has not stopped with substantive
legal changes. It has attacked the fundaments of American
constitutional government. In 2019, the state of North Carolina, in
short, is involved in a brutal battle for its own decency. If the
contest is lost here, other states will likely abandon defining
cornerstones of American liberty and equality as well. North
Carolina today is not presented with the mere give and take of
normal politics. It struggles over its meaning as a commonwealth
and its future as a democracy. The book is introduced with a
foreword by Rev. William Barber, leader of the Moral Monday
Movement in North Carolina and the Poor People's Campaign
nationally, and Timothy Tyson, Duke University civil rights
historian, activist, and author of The Blood of Emmett Till and
Blood Done Sign My Name.
More than 1.5 million North Carolinians today live in poverty. More
than one in five are children. Behind these sobering statistics are
the faces of our fellow citizens. This book tells their stories.
Since 2012, Gene R. Nichol has traveled the length of North
Carolina, conducting hundreds of interviews with poor people and
those working to alleviate the worst of their circumstances. In an
afterword to this new edition, Nichol draws on fresh data and
interviews with those whose voices challenge all of us to see what
is too often invisible, to look past partisan divides and
preconceived notions, and to seek change. Only with a full
commitment as a society, Nichol argues, will we succeed in truly
ending poverty, which he calls our greatest challenge.
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