Riggs: Working together can lead to sustainable communities

Details: Lance Martin; News; 12 January 2024; 2022

On a day set aside to honor the civil rights legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs came to the Center for Energy Education to discuss her role as a community organizer.

Serving as the keynote speaker for the center’s event Thursday, Riggs said, “In my 15 years struggling here in North Carolina I’ve seen progress made and it’s because of many of the people in this room.”

She told the audience she came into the law knowing it was a tool — not a solution or a sole solution — and “the power to create environments in communities and a state that lives up to our dreams, that provides for every North Carolinian depends on our ability to work with each other and to work in the face of challenges to make those dreams come true.”

She said, however, she realizes the hard conversations and the realities that need to be grappled with “in the implicit bias that we see in too many systems and governmental business that are holding folks back.”

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Working together, Riggs said, as well as thinking creatively, “We can achieve what we want to see which are healthy, happy, sustainable communities where people can take care of their families and take care of their loved ones.”

She said the work she came to North Carolina to do began with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice when it was a brand new organization.

The organization was started with a dream “that if you brought together people with different skill-sets — the best position to make change, you could do that.”

Riggs said she cares about the mission of the center and the work that it’s doing. She said she recognizes “that systemic oppression is layered and the challenges that face communities include drinking water and having good jobs or being free from the bias of a broken criminal justice system. These are impacting the same kinds of communities. Until we show up for people as a whole, recognizing those challenges, we’re limiting ourselves. We’re limiting the ways in which we’re giving people the power to make sure they can change their situation.”

She said voting rights and environmental justice issues are not separate. “If you care about economic development, if you care about bringing industries into Halifax County and northeastern North Carolina that are going to provide good jobs and not pollute the environment, not injure workers with no recourse … you have to care about who’s in charge and how they get elected and making sure everybody’s voice is welcomed and being part of that discussion of who’s going to be leading us and who’s going to be making those policy decisions.”

As this year represents a presidential and gubernatorial election season, Riggs said she hopes the candidates recognize the power in rural northeastern North Carolina. “I hope they knock on your doors … I also know there’s something not super warm and fuzzy about someone just coming around for your vote.”

She said transactional democracy isn’t transformational democracy. “You are so much more than your vote. Your vote is important — it is your voice.”

She said it is important to be in relationships with organizations like the center or faith- or community-based groups which work to make people in northeastern North Carolina get good industries, help them be able to weather-proof and make energy-efficient homes.

Riggs grew up in West Virginia, a state she said is perhaps the poster child for not having sustainable energy for a business model. “The mines were everything,” she said, providing good jobs for a while. “It wasn’t sustainable and you know the second they figured how to blow the top off the mountain so they didn’t have to pay a man to go in and do the hard labor, they were going to do that and it affected our drinking water, it affected the environment around us, our ability to live and flourish.”

Now, she said, West Virginia is a dying state.

“What I’ve seen growing up is what affects my work now and I want to make sure no community in any part of rural North Carolina faces those kinds of insurmountable hurdles — that instead we are creative and think about paths forward and what are the kinds of industries that can keep us safe and healthy. What are the kinds of energy that can keep us safe and healthy so you don’t have to make a decision about paying a heating bill or keeping your house; make a decision about keeping your house or keeping your child safe and stable. All of these things are related.”

Riggs said before the service began, she witnessed people who wanted to help each other. “That’s what this is about — celebrating today not only the great work of the center, the legacy of Dr. King, but just the love and commitment of building and supporting each other in the community here moves me. It inspires me to make sure that your courts are doing the exact same work that the center and other leaders here are doing, which is to say, are we working to create a level playing field? Are we working to ensure that everyone has the opportunities that they desire? Are we working that we are handing off to the next generation an earth that we have taken care of, that we are proud of the stewardship that we have offered?”

Together, she said, “We are still bending that ark, that moral ark of the universe is bending slowly towards justice and we put all of our efforts together, pointing in the same direction. I'm very hopeful we will continue making the progress that we continue to make and even more.”

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