Bernie Sanders will visit Durham to discuss the minimum wage. Here’s what to know.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a former Democratic presidential candidate, is visiting Durham Thursday to hold a rally in support of raising the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour.
Durham will be the first of three stops on the Vermont senator’s “Rally to Raise the Wage” campaign, Sanders announced Monday. He will be joined by Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner whom Sanders previously endorsed in her unsuccessful 2022 congressional campaign for North Carolina’s 4th district. Allam also served as a political director for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.
The Rev. William Barber II, a longtime North Carolina activist and the founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, will also join Sanders.
The rally will be at 7 p.m. at the Hayti Heritage Center on Old Fayetteville Street. Attendees can RSVP for free on Sanders’ campaign website.
“At a time of massive and growing income and wealth inequality and record-breaking corporate profits, we must stand up for working people who are struggling every day to provide a minimal standard of living for their families and raise the minimum wage to $17 an hour,” Sanders wrote in a tweet.
Following the Durham rally, Sanders will visit Nashville, Tennessee Friday where he will be joined by Tennessee State Rep. Justin Jones, one of two representatives whose expulsion from the Tennessee General Assembly made national headlines in March. Sanders will then travel to Charleston, South Carolina Saturday, where South Carolina State Rep. Wendell Gilliard will join him.
Sanders — chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions — began pushing for a $17 federal minimum wage earlier this month. The current minimum wage is $7.25, both federally and in North Carolina.
“Here’s the bottom line: you’ve got over 60% of the people in this country living paycheck to paycheck, tens of millions are working at starvation wages,” Sanders said on MSNBC in January. “It is not too much to ask the wealthiest country on Earth where we have massive income and wealth inequality, people on top doing phenomenally well, to say that in America, if you’re working 40 hours a week, you’re not living in poverty.”
Sanders visited Durham in February 2020 for a campaign stop during his presidential campaign.
This story was originally published May 30, 2023 at 5:26 PM.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly said that Rep. Justin Jones was one of three Tennessee legislators expelled from the state’s General Assembly in March. He was one of two legislators expelled. A third, Rep. Gloria Johnson, narrowly survived a resolution to expel her.
