Bishop Barber wants 1 million Black men at the polls. He has 652 marches to get them there.

Bishop William Barber II is trying to walk 5 million people who usually skip elections to the polls before Nov. 3, and he has named a specific group to start with: at least 1 million Black men, particularly in the South.

His campaign, “100 Days; 1,000 Marches to the Polls,” had organized 652 marches in 428 locations by Oct. 15, according to Word In Black. They run from Seattle to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and they are led out of churches, synagogues, campus groups and lodges. The target is low-wage and poor voters in Southern and battleground states.

The pitch is arithmetic. Barber’s organization, Repairers of the Breach, says 90 million people did not vote in the last election, and that about 7,000 votes decided the congressional majority. In early September the campaign counted 320 marches in 23 states. It has roughly doubled since.

Black voters are the base of the effort because of what Barber ties a ballot to. He links voting to health care, funding for historically Black colleges and universities, and a living wage. “You cannot have a democracy unless you have participation,” he said, as Word In Black reported Friday. He has also pressed candidates to say what they would do, not only whom they oppose.

The marches are one part of the work. Organizers are also texting, phone banking and knocking on doors, and more than 40 organizations had joined the campaign by late August.

It is a turn from where the Moral Mondays movement was in the summer. In early August, Barber and a group of faith leaders were arrested in Washington after a demonstration inside the Hart Senate Office Building, where they had tried to meet Senate Majority Leader John Thune to oppose voter suppression and the SAVE America Act, as North Carolina Newsline reported. By late August he had changed the message. “All of our money, energy and effort needs to be marching, walking, running and riding to the polls,” he said.

Walking to vote has a history in North Carolina, Barber’s home state. In 2020, police used pepper spray on a march to an early voting site in Graham, N.C., and eight people were arrested.

Early voting is under way in most states. Election Day is Nov. 3.