Moral Monday Comes to Greensboro, Chapel Hill 

It’s a movement that started just as students were taking final exams last semester.

Moral Mondays began as a small movement of people angry with new policies enacted by North Carolina legislators. Every Monday for the last four months, protesters met in Raleigh, and as their numbers grew, so did the issues.

New voter ID laws, public education cuts and limits on the expansion of Medicare all became topics of debate in the state.

While the protests have been peaceful, authorities have arrested more than 900 people. But that didn’t stop the movement.

Just last week, on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, protesters gathered in 13 locations across the state for their largest protest yet.

“This is not a commemorative event,” said Laurel Ashton, an NAACP organizer in Chapel Hill. “This is an event that says we’re going to heed Doctor King’s call at the end of his speech to go home and organize. To go back to the south and organize. And we’re going to pay our respect to him by doing just that.”

While protests haven’t spilled over to Elon, there were some nearby in Greensboro and Chapel Hill. Even some Elon students, including 2013 graduate Jasmine Whaley, attended the rally in Greensboro.

“Earlier in this year when the moral Monday movement was getting started, I thought that it was really important as a young person, as someone who just got the right to vote a few years ago to come down and be involved,” Whaley said.

And the protests don’t seem to be winding down any time soon. Organizers say that Moral Mondays will continue until the state addressed their concerns.