Pay It Back by the Red Clay Ramblers for the Moral Mondays movement and the upcoming

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12. Saturday at 9 am

Details:
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/02/06/3597437/naacp-and-other-protesters-against.html


--------------------------ALSO:
http://www.southernstudies.org/2014/02/from-selma-to-raleigh-moral-movement-readies-for-m.html

The Moral March on Raleigh, as the Feb. 8 event is billed, draws on that history at a time when voting rights are under attack in North Carolina and other Southern states. Last year, North Carolina's Republican supermajority-controlled legislature passed a voting law that's been called the worst voter suppression legislation in the nation, with numerous provisions that disproportionately affect voters of color, women, the elderly and youth.

The Moral March on Raleigh also builds on a tradition with roots closer to home: North Carolina's Historic Thousands on Jones Street People's Assembly marches, named for the address of the state legislature. Held annually on the second Saturday in February since 2007, the event -- nicknamed "HKonJ" -- involves a broad coalition of social justice groups led by the NAACP that promotes a 14-point legislative "people's agenda" that includes expansion of voting rights, better funding for education, livable wages, and health care for all.

The HKonJ movement won a number of key legislative victories, including a law allowing same-day voting and another that banned racial discrimination in administration of the death penalty -- both of which were overturned by the legislature last year.

The legislature's reactionary response to the gains made by the HKonJ coalition -- and last year's decisions to block Medicaid expansion to 500,000 North Carolinians under the Affordable Care Act and to cut extended unemployment benefits for some 170,000 long-term jobless -- spurred the Moral Monday protests, which began last April and continued in Raleigh for 13 weeks before spreading across the state. The protests gained national media attention and have inspired similar actions in other states.

The Feb. 8 Moral March on Raleigh is the North Carolina movement's first mass protest of 2014 -- a key political year with all members of the General Assembly facing re-election this fall.