… the University of North Carolina continues – it should be remembered – to feature people like Charles van der Horst on its faculty.
van der Horst was recently arrested.
… He was arrested along with other Moral Monday protesters on May 6 in Raleigh for trespassing, violating building regulations and illegal gathering in the Capitol Building. The day before, he ran a relay race in California and grabbed a red eye flight back to North Carolina.
… Police slipped plastic restraints around van der Horst’s wrists and led the protesters to a bus that took them to Wake County jail where van der Horst was booked and fingerprinted.
“The attached arrest documents shows that I was arrested for my ‘singing,’ something I am sure my family would say was completely justified,” he wrote in his journal…
He marched with his father during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, worked in the Vietnam anti-war movement in high school and appealed to the N.C. General Assembly in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic… Van der Horst’s father was a member of the NAACP in New York, and his mother was a Holocaust survivor.
… Van der Horst said the state’s decision not to expand Medicaid pushed him to join the Moral Monday protests. He believed that decision was based on politics, not on what would be best for the state.
… He also protests voter ID laws, anti-abortion legislation and low teacher pay.
“For God’s sake, I think South Carolina pays its teachers more,” he said.