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The Progressive

NewsWire

A project of Common Dreams

For Immediate Release
NAACP
Contact:

Sarah Bufkin, NC NAACP - smbufkin@gmail.com or 404.285.3413

The Forward Together Movement Stands with Women for Day 5 of the Moral Week of Action to Demand Lawmakers Stop Rolling Back Their Rights and Their Opportunities

RALEIGH, NC

Day 5 of the Moral Week of Action will challenge this North Carolina General Assembly's extremist attacks on women, their rights and their capacity to provide for themselves and their families. Women and other allies from the North Carolina NAACP, the Forward Together Moral Movement and women's groups in the state are mobilizing for a protest march this afternoon in Raleigh to call for greater economic protections and childcare support, reproductive justice and voting rights.

Fifty activists and women impacted by these regressive policies will gather at Bicentennial Mall at 3:30 pm today before undertaking a Jericho march around the NC state capitol. After the march, advocates will hold a press conference to address social justice and policy issues that are impacting them and their families before holding voter registration and education canvases in Raleigh.

"Too often, women are the ones left to bear the brunt of the harm of these extremist public policy choices - the majority of which are proposed, debated, voted on and passed into law by men," said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, president of the North Carolina NAACP. "Denying the Medicaid expansion left single mothers with the difficult choice of deciding whether to pay for their children's health care or their own. Laws attacking women's health care access make it harder for young and old women to take care of their bodies, and the cuts to child care subsidies make it harder for them to take care of their livelihoods. These are people the General Assembly is hurting are our mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, friends and neighbors. Today, we are going to make sure their voices are heard outside the offices of power in North Carolina."

For this Moral Week of Action, North Carolinians stand in solidarity with justice-loving coalitions in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin as they raise a moral critique of the extreme Tea Party agenda and mobilize the people to make their voices heard.

For more about the regressive policy agenda that motivates the Moral Week of Action, please see the following meditations and fact sheet:

Founded Feb. 12. 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest, largest and most widely recognized grassroots-based civil rights organization. Its more than half-million members and supporters throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.