Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address

Bishop William J. Barber II is President and Senior Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, Bishop with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, Executive Board Member of the Christian Church Disciples of Christ, and Professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy and Founding Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He is Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and a Kettering Foundation Senior Fellow.

Bishop Barber is the architect of the Forward Together Moral Movement, which gained national acclaim in 2013 with its Moral Monday protests at the North Carolina General Assembly. In 2015, he established Repairers of the Breach to train communities in moral movement building through the Moral Political Organizing Leadership Institute and Summit Trainings (MPOLIS). In 2018, he co-anchored the relaunch of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival—reviving the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign organized by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the women’s rights movement, the worker’s rights movement, religious leaders, and people of all races to fight poverty in the US. As a moral leader engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience, Bishop Barber has been arrested more than 15 times in various states standing up with those who have been marginalized by systematic racism, poverty, and injustice.

Bishop Barber is the author of five books: We Are Called to Be a Movement; Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing; The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and The Rise of a New Justice Movement; and Forward Together: A Moral Message For The Nation. White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy was released in June 2024.

“William Barber is the closest person we have to Martin Luther King, Jr. in our midst.” 

— Dr. Cornel West