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| Students took the lead on the march around the governor's mansion. |
At a youth-led demonstration in Raleigh, some 250 people marched around the governor’s
mansion to demand a roll back on the
voter suppression and education cuts enacted in July. Some also carried
three children’s coffins to honor the memory of four little African-American
girls killed in a Birmingham, Ala. church bombing 50 years ago yesterday during
the height of the civil rights movement in the South.
College students from around the area came to the protest to
show they are concerned about the state’s future. They held signs reading “We
will fight for our future,” “Reinvest in public education,” and “Take your
hands off our voting rights.” Dylan Su-Chun Mott, a member of the University of
North Carolina’s Student Power group, said students need to stand up and be heard:[The UNC-system Board of Governors] is trying to tell us that the only thing we are in school for is to get jobs. … More importantly, we are learning to be fully participatory citizens in this, our great democracy.
Rev. Nelson Johnson of Greensboro’s Beloved Community Center
said that Berger and other elected officials have forgotten the main purpose of
government:
Mr. Berger, government and our democracy is supposed to work for the people and not against the people.Week after week, North Carolina residents are pushing back on an agenda crafted by state budget director Art Pope, a multimillionaire who helped underwrite the campaigns of Gov. McCrory and his cronies in the Legislature. It is largely modeled on the pro-corporate, anti-worker platform of the American Legislative Exchange Council.
McCrory says the changes will help everyone in the state, the numbers just don’t bear this out. In fact, they show the state spent $100 million less on public schools, cut taxes only on out-of-state corporations and the wealth and made benefit cuts that hurt low-income citizens, not help them.
