GOP Plan To Split Black College Campus Backfired: NC A&T State Univ. Students Vote In Record Nos.
'How a Republican plan to split a Black college campus backfired.' Gerrymandering divided North Carolina A&T State University in two. Now, united under a single district, students are voting in record numbers. The Guardian, Nov. 1, 2020.
She didn’t know it at the time, but when Jonezie Cobb first set foot on North Carolina A&T State’s 13,000-person campus as a freshman last fall, the university was split in two. In 2016, Republican state legislators had drawn a line down Laurel Street, which runs through the middle of campus, effectively dividing the nation’s largest historically black university into separate congressional districts.
Walking from the library to the dining hall, Cobb would frequently cross from the state’s sixth district over into the 13th, both represented by white Republicans: Mark Walker and Ted Budd.
- First Lady of the U.S. Michelle Obama was presented a hood signifying her honorary doctoral degree by N.C. A&T Chancellor Harold L. Martin in 2012.
Cobb, now a sophomore, remembers first learning about the distinct districts from student groups that were organizing calls, protests and even a visit to Walker and Budd’s offices in Washington DC. However, after a court decision late last year, for the first time since 2012, the university’s students will be voting in a general election under the umbrella of a single district. The newly minted 6th district, which includes all of A&T as well as the largely Black cities of Winston-Salem and Greensboro, is one of 2 North Carolina congressional seats likely to flip in favor of Democrats in the election.
In the other – the state’s second district – Republican incumbent representative George Holding announced after the 2019 redistricting that he would not be seeking reelection.
Cobb, who is 19 and studying political science, cast her vote on the first day of early voting at a polling station on campus. The station itself was another fight – last fall, dozens of A&T students packed the county’s board of elections meetings to lobby for a voting site at the university, a request that was eventually granted. These forms of suppression, intentional or not, made voting feel even more important, Cobb said.
“As African Americans we pride ourselves in voting, because that’s what our ancestors fought for,” she said. “It’s something that I will never forget.”
..A&T has a long history of organizing around politics and racial justice: the Greensboro Four – the group of Black activists whose sit-ins in 1960 at a local department store helped further the civil rights movement – were all students at the university. But in the past year, gerrymandering has been added to the list of seemingly evergreen conversation topics on campus that include economic inequality, criminal justice reform and systemic racism, said Derick Smith, a political science lecturer at the university.
More than 37,000 people aged 18-29 have already voted in the 6th district, nearly twice the tally recorded in 2016. Statewide, of the 3.3m votes cast, 12% have come from Cobb’s age group, up more than a point over 2016...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/01/republican-north-carolina-sixth-district-gerrymandering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_A%26T_State_University
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