Thousands remind North Carolina’s government – and the entire country – they can’t be silenced.

On Feb. 1, 1960, four black students at North Carolina A&T kicked off the 1960s civil rights movement by trying to eat at a segregated lunch counter at Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro. Two months leader, young activists founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University in Raleigh, which would transform the South through sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration drives.

So it was fitting that North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement held a massive “Moral March” in Raleigh on Feb. 1, 2014, which began at Shaw, exactly 54 years after North Carolina’s trailblazing role in the Civil Rights Movement. Tens of thousands of activists – from all backgrounds, races and causes – marched from Shaw to the North Carolina State Capitol, where they held an exuberant rally protesting the right-wing policies of the North Carolina government and commemorating the eight anniversary of the HKonJ coalition (the acronym stands for Historic Thousands on Jones Street, where the N.C. legislature sits).

Since taking over the legislature in 2010 and the governor’s mansion in 2012, controlling state government for the first time in over a century, North Carolina Republicans eliminated the earned-income tax credit for 900,000 North Carolinians; refused Medicaid coverage for 500,000; ended federal unemployment benefits for 170,000; cut pre-K for 30,000 kids while shifting $90 million from public education to voucher schools; slashed taxes for the top 5 percent while raising taxes on the bottom 95 percent; axed public financing of judicial races; prohibited death row inmates from challenging racially discriminatory verdicts; passed one of the country’s most draconian anti-choice laws; and enacted the country’s worst voter suppression law, which mandates strict voter ID, cuts early voting and eliminates same-day registration, among other things.

The fierce reaction against these policies led to the Moral Monday movement, when nearly 1,000 activists were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience inside the North Carolina General Assembly, rallies were held in more than 30 cities across the state.

“This Moral March inaugurates a fresh year of grassroots empowerment, voter education, litigation and non-violent direct action,” said Rev. William Barber, head of the North Carolina NAACP and leader of the Moral Monday movement. There will be a new wave of direct action protests when the legislature returns in the spring, a new wave of activists doing voter mobilization during the “Freedom Summer 2014,” and litigation challenging North Carolina’s voter suppression bill. The movement will be active in the streets, in the courtroom and at the ballot box. They will be focused not just on changing minds, but on changing outcomes.

Barber has called North Carolina “a state fight with national implications,” and that has started to break through nationally. Barber just wrapped up a 16-city tour of the state last week, and he’ll hit the road again next week.

ARI BERMAN is contributes to The Nation magazine.