The Bishop William Joseph Barber II

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 serves as Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival and is a Kettering Foundation Senior Fellow.

He 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*. His most recent work, White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, was released in June 2024.

Bishop Barber served as senior pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church, Disciples of Christ for thirty years and as president of the North Carolina NAACP from 2006–2017. He also served on the National NAACP Board of Directors from 2008–2020. He 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., women’s rights activists, worker’s rights advocates, religious leaders, and people of all races to fight poverty in the U.S. As a moral leader, Bishop William Barber II has engaged in non-violent civil disobedience and has been arrested more than 15 times in various states while standing with those marginalized by systemic racism, poverty, and injustice.

A highly sought-after speaker, Bishop Barber has given keynote addresses at hundreds of national and state conferences, including the 2016 Democratic National Convention. He was one of the few preachers in U.S. history invited to deliver the homily at the 59th Inaugural Prayer Service for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. He has also spoken at the Vatican regarding Pope Francis’s encyclical *Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home* and at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In June 2018, he addressed the 5th UNI Global Union World Congress, speaking to representatives from more than 25 countries.

Bishop Barber is regularly featured in media outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, NNPA, *The New York Times*, *The Washington Post*, and *The Nation* magazine. He was named one of BET’s 100 Entertainers and Innovators in 2020 and received the North Carolina Award in 2019, the state’s highest civilian honor. He is a 2018 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award recipient and was honored with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award and the Puffin Award in 2015.

Bishop Barber has received twelve honorary doctorate degrees. He earned a high school diploma from Plymouth High, a Bachelor’s degree from North Carolina Central University, a Master of Divinity from Duke University, and a Doctorate from Drew University with a concentration in Public Policy and Pastoral Care. He has also completed a special fellowship at MIT.

Joe Lindsay

Joe Lindsay is an articulate and versatile guitarist that smoothly grooves through jazz, funk, rock and blues with an abundance of feeling and flow, expertly expressing his personal journey and life’s diverse experiences. His ability to imprint his own distinctive style on a multitude of genres with refined sensitivity illustrates his extensive training and deep understanding of the musical universe. He studied at the prestigious Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA) and has performed and recorded with R&B and contemporary jazz legends such as James Brown, Roy C and Howard Hewett, Ronnie Laws, Brian Simpson, Jeff Lorber, Tom Browne, Ki-C & JoJo, Anthony Hamilton, Calvin Richardson and Stephanie Mills.