People From North Carolina

"Women have fought too hard and come too far to have their rights stripped away. Women, not politicians, should make decisions about their own healthcare. I stand firmly in defense of a woman’s right to make her own healthcare decisions"

"I recognize the concerns that some have about how this program might affect public schools. As senator, I will work to close any gaps within the Opportunity Scholarship program, because I know it’s not a perfect system. I believe we can support both public and private education, and I’m committed to finding solutions that improve the program while ensuring our public schools remain strong. This doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Competition can drive improvement, and at the end of the day, it’s about making sure every child — no matter their background — has access to a quality education."

"The biggest challenge facing North Carolina today is affordable housing. As our state experiences rapid growth, housing costs continue to rise, making it harder for working- and middle-class families to find affordable places to live. This issue directly impacts our workforce, local economies, and community stability."

"It seemed like the entire world knew I'd come out of Womack's Nut Ward, and as a result I was accused of everything from shoplifting to armed robbery to murder. Nobody took my word for anything. Any derogatory stories that could be old about me were given maximum dissemination. When you have the Medal of Honor, all actions- good, bad, true, or false- are magnified, and an undue amount of significance is attached to each. My every move- real or imagined- became front-page news. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but not much."

"For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. S/Sgt. Miller, 5th Special Forces Group, distinguished himself while serving as team leader of an American-Vietnamese long-range reconnaissance patrol operating deep within enemy-controlled territory. Leaving the helicopter insertion point, the patrol moved forward on its mission. Suddenly, one of the team members tripped a hostile booby trap which wounded four soldiers. S/Sgt. Miller, knowing that the explosion would alert the enemy, quickly administered first aid to the wounded and directed the team into positions across a small stream bed at the base of a steep hill. Within a few minutes, S/Sgt. Miller saw the lead element of what he estimated to be a platoon-size enemy force moving toward his location. Concerned for the safety of his men, he directed the small team to move up the hill to a more secure position. He remained alone, separated from the patrol, to meet the attack. S/Sgt. Miller singlehandedly repulsed two determined attacks by the numerically superior enemy force and caused them to withdraw in disorder. He rejoined his team, established contact with a forward air controller, and arranged the evacuation of his patrol. However, the only suitable extraction location in the heavy jungle was a bomb crater some 150 meters from the team location. S/Sgt. Miller reconnoitered the route to the crater and led his men through the enemy-controlled jungle to the extraction site. As the evacuation helicopter hovered over the crater to pick up the patrol, the enemy launched a savage automatic-weapons and rocket-propelled-grenade attack against the beleaguered team, driving off the rescue helicopter. S/Sgt. Miller led the team in a valiant defense which drove back the enemy in its attempt to overrun the small patrol. Although seriously wounded and with every man in his patrol a casualty, S/Sgt. Miller moved forward to again singlehandedly meet the hostile attackers. From his forward exposed position, S/Sgt. Miller gallantly repelled two attacks by the enemy before a friendly relief force reached the patrol location. S/Sgt. Miller's gallantry, intrepidity in action, and selfless devotion to the welfare of his comrades are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit on him, his unit, and the U.S. Army."

"They don't have mail call out in the field like you'd think. If we all gathered round he sarge to receive your mail we'd probably be attacked. It would be an ideal time to do so, with all of us clustered together in one big, easy target. So one or more guys distributed the goodies. Just as receiving mail will boost your spirits, absence of mail will, over a long period of time, dramatically lower your morale. This is particularly true if you're expecting something. You start getting jealous of guys who get mail, especially if they are receiving it on a constant basis. I've seen two guys exchange heated words because one was extremely happy about hearing from his girl, while the other hadn't heard from home in weeks. Enough said."

"Six fellow soldiers also received the Medal of Honor with me on that warm, clear day in June, 1971. However, only one man stood beside me. Tragically, the other five were awarded posthumously. Such sorrow reflects the magnitude of the actions of those individuals who are considered for the CMH. A female lieutenant colonel once asked me if I knew why they gave me the medal. She asked the question in such a way that I took it as meaning she knew the reason- did I? Her question pissed me off. I thought, what the hell do you know? How could you, who have never seen combat, possibly know? I was preparing to give it to her with both barrels at the conclusion of her comment. However, she said something profound that hit the nail right square on the head. She said, "They gave you the medal because they realize that something has happened to you that they can't understand." You were absolutely right, ma'am. My apologies."

"Once, a student asked me what the secret was to being a good combat leader, a man who commands the loyalty and respect of his subordinates. That was a question I'd been formulating the answer to for many years, almost from Day One when I set foot on Vietnamese soil. My answer to him and the class was a simple one which I would repeat many times throughout the years. "If you want a soldier's respect and loyalty, you must demonstrate two things. First, you must show that you know more than the soldier you are leading. Your subordinate must be aware that you have knowledge he does not possess, and that you are trying to teach him. "The second thing you must demonstrate is a genuine concern for his safety and well-being. The concern must be real, because a young soldier can spot a faker a mile away. If your concern for him is genuine- and he knows it- then you can rest assured that he will follow you into the jaws of death.""

"I remember Kelly most for the times we spent playing cards. You name the card game, and we played it. We were both avid card players, and even though our card games were strictly for fun, we were both highly competitive and hated to lose. The winner always took great delight in the loser's whining, excuses, and accusations of cheating. Good-natured miniscuffles broke out on occasion. My most vivid memories were of the times we played cards by moonlight. The moon appeared so much larger by the equator, and the absence of air pollution out in the bush allowed the moonlight to bathe us unfiltered. There we sat, playing game after game inside the platoon's perimeter when we weren't pulling guard or on patrol. At night we played without the usual theatrics, whispering only to name the game or utter a put-down. The stillness of the jungle and the glossy blackness of the night sky combined with the moon's frozen brilliance to create an eerie, haunting setting. The worn, creased cards that Kelly always carried were never idle for long under those conditions. Now they'd be idle forever. Death was now close to home."

"Mail is such a critical thing to soldiers in the field because of their Spartan way of living. Mail can make or break any situation. When you get a letter, man, your morale shoots sky-high. Especially when it smells just like your girlfriend. That perfume smell, you know? There you are, sitting in the middle of nowhere, and the next thing you know someone comes along, says, "Here you go, man," and flips you a leter. A letter that he's probably sniffed most of he perfume out of before it gets to you."

"For 50 years, women have relied on their constitutional right to make their own medical decisions, but today that right has been tragically ripped away. That means it’s now up to the states to determine whether women get reproductive health care, and in North Carolina they still can. I will continue to trust women to make their own medical decisions as we fight to keep politicians out of the doctor’s exam room."

"I think what happens with classical music is that there is a concrete expectation of how it's done. For some people, that's their jam and I applaud that. I'm too sloppy of a classical player to be able to do that consistently. I want to hear colour and I want to hear and play something I've never played before. So that’s really where jazz came into it. You're learning a conversation, musically speaking, and then you're putting your own phrase into that."

"I’ve been playing for 38 years, and I will take lessons until I'm in the grave. There's always something to learn. We each have our own abilities — be it music, be it accounting, be it culinary. But there's this idea, why would anyone want to put a cap or put a ceiling on their craft, right?"

"Melody is what makes a song a memory."

"Artists, especially pianists, have to be comfortable with themselves. It's what makes us unique. We have our own voice and process of creating. I'm not entirely sure I'll ever be completely comfortable with myself, but that's probably what pushes me to work harder."

"I am the complete optimist. But I'm also a very quiet, internal processor—a guy who kind of takes things in. I think that is reflected in my music for sure, just because that is my personality. I'm not a lively person but I'm animated. I'm not boisterous but peaceful, and I don't think that there is really another way to live my life."

"Your connections and the relationships you maintain basically guide you through your career and they grow into the music that you hear."

"We didn’t have a lot of money, but my parents asked me if I wanted to play the violin. My older brother plays country music and I was supposed to go into that... A path to classical music usually starts with privilege. There needs to be a certain level of income so you can afford an instrument and private lessons. [Where he grew up] classical music education was exclusively in the cities. Sometimes, you’d have to drive three hours to find a high school orchestra."

"The voters of Western North Carolina responded to these allegations by giving Madison Cawthorn a 12-point victory over his opponent. Rep. Cawthorn is now busy doing the work he was elected to do including helping our economy recover from the pandemic, creating jobs and opportunity, making health care more affordable, protecting our natural environment and defending life and our Second Amendment rights."

"It was a was a hard road to come back from, but it definitely taught me perseverance and grit, but also it taught me empathy, which I think I would not have learned otherwise."

"We’ve been doing this for awhile, when you’ve been doing this a long time, you cross your fingers and hope for the best, but you never know. To find an audience that’s passionate, that’s as good as it gets."

"The creative community has a lot more ideas than the executive community feels comfortable with."

"It was very obvious that Vice President Biden cared, as he extended to Jacob Jr. a sense of humanity, treating him as a person worthy of consideration and prayer"

"Jacob Jr. told Sen. Harris that he was proud of her, and the senator told Jacob that she was also proud of him and how he is working through his pain. Jacob Jr. assured her that he was not going to give up on life for the sake of his children."

"Joe Biden did not denounce Black Lives Matter and they are destroying this country."

"Coco Chanel said something like, “When you’re getting ready to go out, take off one thing.” I think it’s similar with dialogue. Cut it off. Don’t say too much, because then it gets to a place where it’s not natural. Most people don’t go on and on for sentences in real life. Also, when two characters are in a space that’s emotionally raw, they can’t always articulate everything. They’re talking, but not saying the right things. Another thing is to never let people directly answer each other’s questions if you’re trying to create tension."

"Absolutely has the particularity of African-American experience. But I feel strongly that this kind of experience is not so different from other people’s experiences. This is about a particular time and place, but I think there are so many other resonances here to other kinds of experiences. And that to me is the beauty of reading. As a reader, you know the gut of it and say, ‘I get this,’ and I’ve felt like that, too."

"I think it is a natural impulse to look to your own past and history to discover the stories that move and inspire you. The problem is that the past is nebulous and waiting for a shape. What ultimately gives it form and context is the present. That’s the part of writing inspired by personal history that is exciting to me."

"Humor is absolutely necessary to keep going…So many of the people in my family and my community were wonderful storytellers. They would tell stories about just awful things that happened to them. But their humor made what happened into their own kind of triumph."

"There are some leaders who see faith and politics strictly as an either/or competition: You win by turning out your side and crushing the opposition. But the Rev. William J. Barber II, who has been called “the closest person we have to MLK” in contemporary America, has refined a third mode of activism called “fusion politics.” It creates political coalitions that often transcend the conservative vs. progressive binary. Barber, a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, says a coalition of the “rejected stones” of America—the poor, immigrants, working-class whites, religious minorities, people of color and members of the LGBTQ community can transform the country because they share a common enemy."

"On Thursday, the day the Rev. William Barber Jr. was awarded a $625,000 “genius grant,” Barber was hard to reach, because he was being arrested... Barber, 55, is one of the country’s best-known public advocates fighting racism and poverty, known for successfully organizing tens of thousands of people in marches and other nonviolent acts of civil disobedience around the country."

"The Rev. William Barber II is a man who impresses me deeply... I believe that my friend Dr. Cornel West is right when he states that "William Barber is the closest person we have to Martin Luther King Jr. in our midst."....Being up on a stage with Reverend Barber is an inspiring experience, but it is also challenging. It's not easy to keep up with someone who is brilliant, passionate, and able to quote the Bible at will to amplify his point. This is also a man who, his audience understands, does more than just lecture or preach. He has been at the forefront in struggle after struggle and has been arrested dozens of times in nonviolent actions."

"He has a severe arthritic condition in his spine and bursitis in his left knee. It hurts to sit and it hurts to stand. When he’s bent over in the background and propped against his stool, it’s hard to see the man Cornel West described as ‘the closest person we have to Martin Luther King Jr. in our midst."

"We are a nation crying out for security, equity, and justice. We need . We need good jobs. We need quality public education. We need a strong social safety net. We need health care to be understood as a human right for all of us. We need security for people living with disabilities. We need to be a nation that opens our hearts and neighborhoods to immigrants. We need safe and healthy environments where our children can thrive instead of struggling to survive. With the coronavirus pandemic bringing our country’s equally urgent poverty crisis into stark relief, we cannot simply wait for change. It must come now. America is an imperfect nation, but we have made important advancements against interconnected injustices in the past. We can do it again, and we know how. Now is the time to fight for the heart and soul of this democracy."

"But this measure doesn’t account for the costs of housing, child care, or health care, much less twenty-first-century needs like internet access or cell phone service. It doesn’t even track the impacts of like or the , obscuring the role they play in reducing poverty. In short, the official measure of poverty doesn’t begin to touch the depth and breadth of economic hardship in the world’s wealthiest nation, where 40 percent of us can’t afford a $400 emergency. In a report with the , the Poor People’s Campaign found that nearly 140 million Americans were poor or low-income—including more than a third of white people, 40 percent of Asian people, approximately 60 percent each of indigenous people and black people, and 64 percent of Latinx people. LGBTQ people are also disproportionately affected. Further, the very condition of being poor in the United States has been criminalized through a system of racial profiling, cash bail, the myth of the Reagan-era “,” arrests for things such as laying one’s head on a park bench, passing out food to unsheltered people, and extraordinary fines and fees for misdemeanors such as failing to use a turn signal, and simply walking while black or trans."

"The Rev. Dr. William Barber , with thousands of collaborators, is making big strides for justice and equality through his organizing of "Moral Mondays" protests, which first started in North Carolina. The protests started as a response to the "mean-spirited quadruple attack" on the most vulnerable members of our society. In the tradition of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Rev. Barber is fighting against restrictions on voting and for improvements in labor laws."

"For 27 years, the Rev. William J. Barber II has been the pastor at a church in the small city of Goldsboro, N.C... His work as an activist takes him to the state capital often enough that he’s well known there... Barber is ever in motion, and he’s still picking up momentum. He’s hardly stopped since he attracted national attention as the leader of the "Moral Mondays" protests held at the North Carolina capitol in Raleigh beginning in 2013. Any resemblance to the work of Martin Luther King Jr is intentional: King launched his own Poor People’s Campaign less than a year before he was assassinated in April 1968. It was also in 1968 that Barber—who was born just days after the 1963 March on Washington—moved with his family from Indiana to North Carolina. His father, a teacher and preacher, had gotten a call from a black principal asking him to return to his home state to help with the cause of integration. The young boy found himself on the front lines of that fight. In the process Barber learned an early lesson: “There is not some separation between Jesus and justice; to be Christian is to be concerned with what’s going on in the world." And so, at his church in Goldsboro, politicians are welcome to worship and stay for a conversation, and many do. But they’re not allowed to preach. Neither Barber nor his organizations endorse candidates, though they do endorse issues."

"Decades after Depression-era reforms, Wall Street fought successfully to deregulate the , paving the way for the 2008 financial crash that caused millions to lose their homes and livelihoods. And the ultra-rich and big corporations have also managed to dominate our campaign finance system, making it easier for them to buy off politicians who commit to rigging the rules against the poor and the environment, and to suppress voting rights, making it harder for the poor to fight back."

"The United States has always been a nation at odds with its professed aspirations of equality and justice for all—from the genocide of original inhabitants to slavery to military aggression abroad. But there have been periods in our history when courageous social movements have made significant advances. We must learn from those who’ve gone before us as we strive to build a movement that can tackle today’s injustices—and help all of us survive."

"Our military budgets continue to rise, now grabbing more than fifty-three cents of every discretionary federal dollar to pay for wars abroad and pushing our ability to pay for health care for all, for a Green New Deal, for jobs and education, and infrastructure, further and further away. The wars that those military budgets fund continue to escalate. They don’t make us safer, and they’ve led to the deaths of thousands of poor people in Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and beyond, as well as the displacement of millions of refugees, the destruction of water sources, and the contamination of the environments of whole countries. The only ones who benefit are the millionaire CEOs of military companies, who are getting richer every year on the more than $350 billion—half the military budget—that goes directly to their corporations. In the meantime 23,000 low-ranking troops earn so little that they and their families qualify for food stamps."

"Why do we hear so much about crime rates and opioids and gun violence in America, but poverty kills more people than all of those things?"

"There is a sleeping giant in America. Poor and low-wealth folks now make up 30% of the electorate in every state and over 40% of the electorate in every state where the margin of victory for the presidency was less than 3%. If you could just get that many poor and low-wealth people to vote, they could fundamentally shift every election in the country."

"The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet millions of American families have had to set up crowdfunding sites to try to raise money for their loved ones’ medical bills. Millions more can buy unleaded gasoline for their car, but they can’t get unleaded water in their homes. Almost half of America's workers—whether in Appalachia or Alabama, California or Carolina—work for less than a . And as school buildings in poor communities crumble for lack of investment, America’s billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than the poorest half of households. This moral crisis is coming to a head as the coronavirus pandemic lays bare America’s deep injustices. While the virus itself does not discriminate, it is the poor and disenfranchised who will experience the most suffering and death. They’re the ones who are least likely to have health care or paid , and the most likely to lose work hours. And though children appear less vulnerable to the virus than adults, America’s nearly forty million poor and low-income children are at serious risk of losing access to food, shelter, education, and housing in the economic fallout from the pandemic. The underlying disease, in other words, is poverty, which was killing nearly 700 of us every day in the world’s wealthiest country, long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. The moral crisis of poverty amid vast wealth is inseparable from the injustice of systemic racism, ecological devastation, and our militarized war economy. It is only a minority rule sustained by voter suppression and gerrymandering that subverts the will of the people. To redeem the soul of America—and survive a pandemic—we must have a moral fusion movement that cuts across race, gender, class, and cultural divides."

"Key to these rollbacks: controlling the narrative about who is poor in America and the world. It is in the interest of the greedy and the powerful to perpetuate myths of deservedness—that they deserve their wealth and power because they are smarter and work harder, while the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy and intellectually inferior. It’s also in their interest to perpetuate the myth that the poverty problem has largely been solved and so we needn’t worry about the rich getting richer—even while our real is full of gaping holes. This myth has been reinforced by our deeply flawed official measurements of poverty and economic hardship. The way the U.S. government counts who is poor and who is not, frankly, is a sixty-year-old mess that doesn’t tell us what we need to know. It’s an inflation-adjusted measure of the cost of a basket of food in 1955 relative to household income, adjusted for family size—and it’s still the way we today."

"The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II — an orator and activist whom Dr. Cornel West has likened to Martin Luther King Jr. — recently spoke with PEOPLE about poverty, racism, President Donald Trump's administration amid the novel coronavirus pandemic and national unrest after George Floyd's death. Barber's conclusion? People need to rise up together and push for change. "The only way we make it through this — and we come out better — is if we find our way together, we lift up everybody," he says... Barber is a leading voice of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and is preparing for two major events. On Tuesday, his book inspired by one of his most acclaimed sermons, We Are Called to Be a Movement, was published by Workman Publishing. And on June 20, Barber will guide the nation's first digital Mass Poor People’s Assembly & Moral March on Washington to, in his words, change the narrative about America's poor and interlocking issues like racial inequality, the lack of police accountability and voter suppression. More than 100 organizations will participate, along with national figures and celebrities including Al Gore, Danny Glover, Wanda Sykes, Debrah Messing and Jane Fonda."

"Don't fear the word "poor," Barber says: If poor people voted in large numbers, that would change everything... What we found were three things: No. 1, don't go into these communities and say, you just need to vote. Say, we honor you, because we respect that some of them have not voted because they never heard anybody call their name.... We need to say the word "poor." If you look at the number of poor people — 52 million without a living wage, 140 million [overall] — you have to talk to them as human beings. Second of all, say to them, "I am not here to ask you to vote. I am here for you to join a movement that says there's something wrong with our policies that this many people can be left disinherited." Thirdly, I am asking you to believe that democracy is not just an idea, but democracy and justice are on the ballot."

"Tell me one state where there's been a debate about what they are going to do about poverty. Even in the presidential race it didn't happen. Every problem we face — poverty, lack of health care, lack of a living wage — is created by policy. They can be changed by policy, and poor and low-wealth people hold the power to put people in office that can make a difference."

"Please God, grant us wisdom, grant us courage, until the poor are lifted, the sick are healed, children are protected, and civil rights and human rights never neglected. Grant us wisdom for the facing of this hour until love and justice are never rejected. Grant us wisdom and courage for the facing of this hour until, together, we make sure there is racial justice and economic justice and living-wage justice and health care justice and ecological justice and disability justice and justice for homeless and justice for the poor and low-wealth and working poor and immigrant justice—until we study war no more and peace and justice are the way we live. This is the only path to domestic tranquility and healing. So God, grant us as a people; grant us as an entire nation, grant our new President; grant our new Vice President; grant every preacher; grant every politician; grant every person, Black and white, Latino, Native, Asian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, people of faith, not of faith but with a moral conscience, every human being created by God, documented or undocumented; gay, straight or trans, young or old. And what a day it will be when our children’s children call us what you have called us to be: repairers of the breach. Amen."

"Well, we are in a jam today. Trouble is real, and whether we like it or not, we are in this mess together as a nation. When this word of the Lord came to Isaiah, his people were also in a jam. Bad leadership, greed, and injustice and lies had led them into trouble, exile, and economic hardship. In that day, some tried to simply cover up the trouble with false religion and deceit. But God said to the prophet, “Sound the trumpet. Tell the nation of its sin. Tell them that just going through the motions of prayer will not get them out of this jam. I need them to repent of what got them here and turn in a new direction.” The prophet was saying what Jesus would say about nations caring for the least of these. The prophet was saying then what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in the 1930s to an America with one-third of the nation ”ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished,” besieged by the Great Depression and beset by bigotry and hatred."

"We’re telling people, vote by absentee ballot. In North Carolina, where we have 16 days of early voting, vote early. And if you vote on Election Day, then put your shield on, put your mask on, put your gloves on. Pack you a lunch. Get you a folding chair. Put some water in that lunch bag and vote. And if they want to come watch us vote, let them watch millions of people, because we’re not scared. We’re not giving away this democracy. Let them come and watch. And then stop saying Trump won the last time. He was elected by the Electoral College because of 80,000 votes."