William Barber II

William J. Barber II He is the president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival. He also serves as a member of the national board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and is the chair of its legislative political action committee. From 2006 to 2017, Barber served as president of the NAACP's North Carolina state chapter, the largest in the Southern United States and the second-largest in the country. He pastored Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro, North Carolina, from 1993 to 2023. who then moved their young family to Washington County, North Carolina, to participate in the desegregation of the public school system there: his mother as a secretary/office manager, his father as a physics teacher, and young Barber as a kindergarten student.

Barber was elected president of the local NAACP youth council in 1978, at the age of 15. At 17, he became student body president of his high school, the first president to serve the integrated school for an entire year, breaking the previous tradition of alternating a black president & white president for each semester.

In 1984, he met a first-year NCCU student, Rebecca McLean, at a march in support of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign; they married three years later.

Activism Beginning in April 2013, Barber led regular "Moral Mondays" civil-rights protests in North Carolina's state capital, Raleigh. The Wall Street Journal credited Barber's NAACP chapter with forming a coalition in 2007 named Historic Thousands on Jones Street People's Assembly, composed of 93 North Carolina advocacy groups. "With this changing demographic, we had to operate in coalition", Barber was quoted as saying. Historian and professor Timothy Tyson named Barber, "the most important progressive political leader in this state in generations", saying that he "built a statewide interracial fusion political coalition that has not been seriously attempted since 1900". An article in the Michigan State Law Review, "Confronting Race: How a Confluence of Social Movements Convinced North Carolina to Go where the McCleskey Court Wouldn't" credits him with bringing together a statewide political coalition. He "has become as well known [in North Carolina] as [Governor] Pat McCrory and Republican leaders of the House and Senate", according to a 2013 Huffington Post profile of him. He traveled with NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous to meet with Georgia prison officials.

In 2014, he founded Repairers of the Breach, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization "formed to educate and train religious and other leaders of faith who will pursue policies and organizational strategies for the good of the whole and to educate the public about connections between shared religious faith".

In 2016, he delivered a speech at the Democratic National Convention; the address was described as rousing and was well received.

In May 2017, Barber was arrested after refusing to leave the North Carolina State Legislative Building during a protest over health care legislation. The following month, a state magistrate banned Barber and the other protesters from entering the Legislative Building. Barber and his lawyers contend that the ban is unconstitutional, because the state constitution guarantees citizens the right to assemble to communicate with their legislators.

In May 2017, Barber announced he would step down from the state NAACP presidency to lead "a new 'Poor People's Campaign'", named Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival in honour of the original 1968 campaign founded by Martin Luther King Jr.

Barber preached at the interfaith prayer service for President Joe Biden's inauguration.

In April 2025, Barber was arrested while praying in the United States Capitol rotunda. He had delivered a sermon on the Capitol steps and delivered a Moral Monday address at the U.S. Supreme Court earlier in the day.

In February 2026, Barber organized a 51-mile protest march from Wilson to Raleigh to protest congressional gerrymandering.

Awards and recognition

Barber was awarded the 2006 Juanita Jackson Mitchell, Esq. Award for legal activism, the highest award in the NAACP for legal redress for advocacy, he was the 2008 recipient of the Thalheimer Award for most programmatic NAACP State Conference, and in 2010 he won the National NAACP Kelly M. Alexander Humanitarian Award.

North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue awarded him the Order of the Long Leaf Pine in 2010—a North Carolina citizenship award presented to outstanding North Carolinians who have a proven record of service to the state.

In 2017, Barber was awarded an honorary doctorate from Drew University, his alma mater, and also delivered the university's sesquicentennial address at commencement exercises. Barber was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Occidental College preceding his speech (which was also livestreamed) to students, alumni, and community members in Thorne Hall.

In 2018, Barber was named a MacArthur Fellow for "building broad-based fusion coalitions as part of a moral movement to confront racial and economic inequality".

Barber is a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation, an American non-partisan research foundation.

Publications Preaching Through Unexpected Pain (self-published) Forward Together: A Moral Message for the Nation (Chalice Press, 2014, ). The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement (Beacon Press, 2016, ) Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing (Beacon Press, 2018, ) We Are Called To Be A Movement (Workman Publishing Co., Inc., 2020), White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (WW Norton & Co, 2024),