If Progressives Show Up to Protest, Will Anyone Hear About It?

This past Sunday, 80K – 100K people from all over the US took to the streets in Raleigh, NC to protest the draconian policies that the GOP are implementing there. The protest, called the Moral March on Raleigh, was kick off of this year’s long Moral Mondays marches in Raleigh — marches that resulted in arrests of non-violent protesters last year.

The “Moral March on Raleigh,” organized by Historic Thousands on Jones Street (HKonJ) and the North Carolina NAACP, marched from Shaw University to the state capitol to push back against the “immoral and unconstitutional policies” of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory during the 2013 NC General Assembly session. Since North Carolina Republicans took over both legislative chambers in 2010, legislators have eliminated a host of programs and raised taxes on the bottom 80 percent, repealed a tax credit for 900,000 working families, enforced voter suppression efforts, blocked Medicaid coverage, cut pre-Kindergarten funding, cut federal unemployment benefits, and gave itself the authority to intervene in abortion lawsuits.

Check out some of the great photos (from Think Progress, and there’s more there):

So did you hear about this massive rally? As far as I can tell, the MSM that covered it (outside of NC) was USA Today and MSNBC. Even though the MSM shows up to point its cameras and microphones and provide extensive prime time coverage of teajhadi events that are mostly a bust, it is intriguing to me that 80 – 100K progressives show up in Raleigh, NC to protest the worst of the wingnuttery and there is little reporting. Perhaps this has something to do with it:

The Moral Monday protests transformed North Carolina politics in 2013, building a multiracial, multi-issue movement centered around social justice such as the South hadn’t seen since the 1960s. “We have come to say to the extremists, who ignore the common good and have chosen the low road, your actions have worked in reverse,” said Reverend William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP and the leader of the Moral Monday movement, in his boisterous keynote speech. “You may have thought you were going to discourage us, but instead you have encouraged us. The more you push us back, the more we will fight to go forward. The more you try to oppress us, the more you will inspire us.”

If today’s rally was any indication, the Moral Monday movement will be bigger and broader in 2014. An estimated 15,000 activists attended the HKonJ rally last year, bringing 30 buses; this year, the NC NAACP estimated that 80,000 to 100,000 people rallied in Raleigh, with 100 buses converging from all over the state and country. It was the largest civil rights rally in the South since tens of thousands of voting rights activists marched from Selma to Montgomery in support of the Voting Rights Act.

If this can happen in Raleigh, this can happen anywhere and this NEEDS to happen all over the US. These folks are standing up for the kind of policies that often poll well with Americans, yet don’t help the special interests that the GOP (and plenty of Democrats) seem to be representing. And no doubt that the MSM is pretty much biased towards the needs of those special interests too — so people in the streets protesting that no one is representing *their* interests makes the decision for (not) covering this kind of thing. Because what happens if people take to the streets all over the country?