A nation in pain seeks a voice. The Rev. William Barber can be the one to provide it.

If ever America needed a successor to Martin Luther King, Jr., it’s now. Fortunately there’s a good candidate in North Carolina’s own Rev. William J. Barber II.

Barber, the former head of the state NAACP and the pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, has revived one of King’s last projects, the Poor People’s Campaign, and now he’s leading another – a march on Washington.

The march was planned for this month until COVID-19 interrupted. But Barber wasn’t deterred. He’s taking the event virtual. “One thing we’re not going to do is quit,” he said.

As co-chairman of the Poor People’s Campaign, he and various affiliated groups and unions have invited 50 million people to watch the event on social media on June 20.

If Barber is to ever fully take up the mantle of the slain civil rights leader, this is the moment. What he once envisioned as a march for economic justice for people of all races has become something much more intense. The nation has come to a turning point. He can point the way forward.

The effects of systemic racism were already being revealed by a pandemic that is taking a heavy toll on people denied access to health care. It’s also plunging them into a potential economic depression. Now the nationwide uprising over the killing of a black man by a white officer in Minneapolis has given that physical and economic oppression a sharp and brutal clarity.

Millions of Americans are struggling with stagnant wages, Gilded Age economic inequality, persistent discrimination against black Americans and official hostility toward Hispanic immigrants. They are yearning for a leader to give voice to their anger and their anguish and set before them a new dream.

Barber, a man of rare integrity, intelligence and eloquence, may be that leader. He will speak on the state of nation at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on June 14. At the close of the virtual March on Washington on June 20, he will speak from Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh to potentially millions of online viewers.

In a sermon aired over the Internet last Sunday, Barber said that when the date was set for the Washington march nearly two years ago, “We had no way of knowing that over 100,000 Americans would have breathed their last breath due to COVID-19 nor that George Floyd’s dying words would have forced the nation to consider how the knee of white supremacy continues to bear down on our common life.

“But because we have listened to the wounds of this nation—from California to the Carolinas, from Maine to Mississippi—we know where to look for hope. Now is the time to unite our collective power and demand transformative change. Now is the time to revive the heart of America’s democracy.”

The virtual march will include appearances by such celebrities as Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Wanda Sykes, Al Gore and David Oyelowo, the actor who played King in the 2014 film “Selma.”

But the event’s main focus will be on the nation’s 140 million poor and low-income people from around the nation of various races and walks of life. Among those featured will be a West Virginia coal miner, a Kansas farmer and the Mississippi sister of a food processing worker who died of COVID-19. They and others will tell of their circumstances and what they wish would change.

“We are going to put a face on poverty,” Barber said in an interview. “We are going to show America to herself.”

And perhaps in the showing also reveal a leader who can inspire and change that America.

To view the Moral March on Washington on June 20 visit: www.june2020.org

This story was originally published June 7, 2020 at 12:00 AM.