William Barber Pays a Visit

The Rev. Dr. William Barber, a minister and civil rights leader from North Carolina who is president of the nonprofit Repairers of the Breach, will be the guest of honor at a fund-raiser for that organization on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. in East Hampton. 

Dr. Barber, whom Cornel West described as “the closest person we have to Martin Luther King Jr. in our midst,” last year helped found the Poor People’s Campaign to carry on Dr. King’s mission to fight urban poverty. 

“We are being called, like our foremothers and fathers, to be the moral defibrillators of our time,” Dr. Barber said in his speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. He has taken up that call himself through his work in and out of the pulpit. 

Repairers of the Breach, a nonpartisan group, organizes, trains, and works with “a diverse school of prophets from every U.S. state and the District of Columbia who are rebuilding, raising up, and repairing the moral infrastructure of our country,” according to its website. “We declare that the moral public concerns of our faith traditions are how our society treats the poor, women, L.G.B.T.Q. people, children, workers, immigrants, communities of color, and the sick. Our deepest moral traditions point to equal protection under the law, the desire for peace within and among nations, the dignity of all people, and the responsibility to care for our common home.”

Barbara Layton, Patti Kenner, Julie Ratner, and Sam Eskenazi are organizing Saturday’s fund-raiser, which will also include music by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and the Thunderbird Sisters of the Shinnecock Nation. Tickets, which can be reserved by calling Ms. Layton at her East Hampton restaurant, Babette’s, start at $50. The address of the gathering will be provided upon reserving a spot.