A year ago, on a bleak and chilly February morning, North Carolina’s Forward Together movement, a coalition of progressive groups with broad support among liberal-minded Carolinians, held its eighth-annual rally at the state capitol in Raleigh. The movement had begun drawing national attention, and the march through downtown was widely called the largest civil-rights gathering in the South since the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery; estimates put between fifty thousand and eighty thousand people there.

At the time, a sense of momentum gripped Forward Together, which had swollen from small vigils of conscience to something not seen for decades—a sweeping alliance of the religious and the secular, attached to no candidate and not beholden to a major party, with members from far outside the usual-suspects list of professional and recreational full-time citizens. The main event was Moral Mondays, a weekly vigil at the capitol building that grew from dozens of participants to thousands after a new Republican governor, Pat McCrory, and the state legislature marched through abortion restrictions, limits on voting, a rejection of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, environmental rollbacks, and such symbolic enormities as the repeal of the Racial Justice Act, a law that commuted the death penalty to life without parole when race had influenced the original sentence. Those first rallies were often hurried in order to finish ahead of  thunderstorms, which form over the Blue Ridge Mountains, two hours to the west, and sweep across the Piedmont toward the piney coastal plane that runs from Raleigh to the coast.

At this time last year, the midterm elections were coming up, and Forward Together planned to send organizers into every county in the state, to register tens of thousands of new voters and turn the election. The movement was particularly focussed on defeating Thom Tillis, the Senate candidate who, as speaker of North Carolina’s House of Representatives, was the figure most associated with the recent spate of conservative legislation. The organizing and registration drives happened; the victories didn’t. Instead, Tillis narrowly but decisively beat the sitting Democratic Senator, Kay Hagan. Republicans kept their nearly two-to-one advantage in the state legislature and picked up a seat in the House of Representatives.

Forward Together’s leaders had explanations, almost too many. North Carolina’s political map is a triumph of gerrymandering: the Republicans’ lock on the state legislature rests on a mere fifty-five per cent of votes, and the same goes for their ten-to-three advantage in the federal house. After two Obama campaigns, there are few unregistered voters waiting to be reached and cajoled to the polls. New laws cutting back on early voting and eliminating same-day registration may have inhibited students and black voters. Everyone knows that midterms are hard on Democrats, with a baseline electorate that is older and whiter than during Presidential contests.

But, as the political cliché has it, the person explaining is probably not winning. The Forward Together activists tried and lost. Last November, disappointment and exhaustion were palpable in liberal towns like Durham and Chapel Hill. What else was there to do?

This year’s rally, held on Valentine’s Day, under one of the clear skies that locals describe as tarheel blue, was visibly smaller, though other marchers and I took more than an hour to weave through six long blocks. The Reverend William Barber, a North Carolinian child of civil-rights activists who earned a master’s degree at Duke’s divinity school, and who has been the movement’s central figure since he launched the annual march, in 2007, was full of energy. The marchers were into it, and were as visibly diverse as they have been all along. There were students and other young people, many retirees, and plenty of people between them in age. The crowd looked like North Carolina, which is about sixty-five per cent white, twenty-two per cent black, and nine per cent Latino. All the same, there was a quieter energy and a sense of settling in for a long game, along with hints of uncertainty about what a long game means, these days, for a progressive movement in the South.

Maybe to their credit, the speakers at this post-defeat rally were not doing much explaining. Instead, they—and, above all, Reverend Barber—doubled down on rhetoric that was unmistakably Southern, even Carolinian, and deeply rooted in the region’s history.

The first note that strikes the ear at these events is a religious one. In North Carolina, the N.A.A.C.P. has a core of clergymen (mainly, in fact, men) at the heart of its leadership. The Prophet Ezekiel and John the Revelator are contemporaries and companions in Reverend Barber’s addresses. No oration is complete without a call for justice to roll down like a mighty stream. Speakers from outside the N.A.A.C.P. are often other ministers or rabbis. Although there is always a perfunctory reference to “those who have no faith but believe in a moral universe,” or some similarly awkward phrase of inclusion, the movement’s claims are transcendent, and that transcendence is rooted in the clapboard churches and red-clay roads of a devout region with few other civic institutions. (Organized labor is always present and name-checked, but North Carolina has long had the lowest rate of union membership in the country.)

The second attribute of the rhetoric at Moral Mondays rallies is constitutional. The Declaration of Independence and North Carolina’s 1868 Reconstruction constitution are constant reference points, for their announcement of the “self-evident” truth that all men are created equal. In American political discourse, the Constitution stands for principles whose authority outruns and outlives all partisan divisions. If the Constitution says it, it must be good and true; if it is good, it must be in the Constitution. At this year’s rally, one speaker used her brief time to argue that denying Medicaid coverage and labor-organizing rights violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws,” not a doctrinally sound position but part of a long tradition of calling on constitutional principles to dignify political claims. Here, too, the movement’s claims to authority are transcendent, though only to an earthly, political transcendence.

The third theme that’s often invoked at the rallies is also the most regional: it is an appeal to a fraught local history. Reconstruction was a hurricane in North Carolina. Free blacks helped to write the 1868 state constitution, which established, at least notionally, equal and universal citizenship. For a time, black Republicans represented the state in Washington, and in alliance with mainly white Populists they held racist Democrats at bay and governed the state. Then, in 1898, a set of young Democrats staged an electoral upset that came to be called Redemption. They ran a well-financed, nakedly race-baiting statewide campaign, and launched an effort of extra-legal racial intimidation and terror to keep black voters from the polls. In Wilmington, a major coastal town whose officials were not up for election that year, the Redeemers drove a Republican government from office with a paramilitary force of five hundred armed men, who killed between ten and twenty blacks in a day of fighting. When the ballots were counted and the blood had dried, North Carolina had an overtly white-supremacist government that quickly consolidated its power, writing literacy tests for voters into the constitution and largely keeping blacks out of office until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In Barber’s telling, the Moral Mondays movement is trying to establish a Third Reconstruction: a new alliance of black voters with working-class whites, Latinos, other immigrants, and liberal élites to meld the formal equality of the civil-rights era (the Second Reconstruction) with economic opportunity and fairness. The state legislature, on the other hand, is hellbent on a Second Redemption, rolling back the right to vote and undercutting democratic representation through gerrymandering. Of course, these interpretations of history, morality, and constitutionality are not simply true or false. They are the kinds of things that become true when people start living as if they were.

I went to jail for the first time—not for long at all, and not in hard conditions—in June, 2013, for an act of peaceful civil disobedience that the Forward Together leadership had asked of its supporters. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested that upward of a thousand North Carolinians would die that year because the state had refused the Medicaid expansion. I felt the need to amplify my objection in a way that a vote, an op-ed, or a political donation (at least one that an ordinary person can afford) doesn’t allow. Civil disobedience is the American idiom for that kind of objection, a respectful but emphatic way of raising the stakes.

As I presented my wrists for the police cuffs, my mind bristled with misgivings. I wasn’t comfortable with the movement’s religious language, which sometimes slid into a suggestion that the legislature was sinful and illegitimate. It troubled me to consider that the Tea Party legislators inside the building where we were protesting were equally sure that God, the Constitution, and history were on their side. I disliked the way that putting myself silently on the line for a movement indicated that I identified with it totally, when I could have ginned up a dozen demurrals just from the speeches I had heard that day. I felt, as I did at this year’s “march for love and justice,” that, really, justice would be enough. Love sounds good, but I’m not at all sure what it means in a political community, or whether I would like it there.

Then again, high-minded principles and dry realism have never been enough. American democracy depends on its austere legalists and cautious pragmatists, but also on those like Walt Whitman, an ecstatic prophet of democratic community as a kind of mystery and joy, and Frederick Douglass, who turned slave revolt into a mode of constitutional interpretation. Douglass, who claimed February 14, 1818, as his birthday, was the hero of Barber’s Valentine’s Day address this year: “A righteous troubler of America,” he was called. There is also something of Whitman’s sensually democratic mood in Barber, for whom words seem to carry a blend of idea and sensation. A feeling of being in something together is a great part of what the movement gives to its members—often in challenging ways, as gay activists end up literally side by side with traditional churchgoers. The great changes of the past sixty years—civil rights, feminism, and gay rights—have depended on hard-nosed reforms, but they are also unimaginable without new modes of sympathy and moral imagination, new ways of gaining strength from being together.

Of course, those of us who attend these rallies go home to fragmented worlds. Some of us will see one another on campus and at the food co-op. Others will meet at church, but I won’t see them—nor will most of the white Episcopalians see the black Baptists, or vice-versa. Without common institutions, such as the unions we don’t have here, the urban spaces we mostly lack, and the integrated neighborhoods that are too few and far between, an episodic movement may be too thin and low-intensity to change political sensibility. If it only mobilizes what is already there, last November’s losses suggest that it will not be enough.