On Feb. 1, 1960, four freshmen from North Carolina A&T sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro and refused to leave. Students from Bennett College, the Black women’s college across town, soon joined them, and within weeks the sit-in movement had spread across the South.
Students from those same two campuses are once again showing the country how to resist, this time against a Republican election machine working overtime to keep young Black voters from casting ballots.
On Oct. 15, the first day of early voting, students from A&T, Bennett, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro marched together to Union Square, the closest polling place left open to them. The trek took about 45 minutes in 85-degree heat, on roads where missing sidewalks forced some into traffic, and many waited hours more to vote on arrival.
The long walk was a direct answer to state election officials. Since Republicans seized control of the North Carolina State Board of Elections last year, they’ve been working hard to shrink the electorate.
In January, the board’s GOP members voted 3-2 along party lines to kill early voting sites at A&T, the largest HBCU in the country, with more than 15,000 students, as well as at UNCG and Western Carolina University. In August, they did it again, even though the A&T and UNCG sites had served voters in 2024.
The same board has cooperated with Trump’s Justice Department on a deal demanding more personal information from voters. The GOP legislature, meanwhile, redrew the congressional map again to grab 11 of 14 seats, targeting District 1, which has elected Black representatives since the 1990s.
Moving the polls also pushed same-day registration during early voting out of reach for students without cars.
In January, four students joined the College Democrats of North Carolina in filing a lawsuit against the state board and the Guilford and Jackson county boards, arguing that the closures violated the 1st, 14th, and 26th Amendments. Federal Judge William Osteen, a George W. Bush appointee, refused to order the sites reopened, though, justifying his inaction by claiming that a ruling so close to the primary could “confuse voters.”
With the courts unwilling to step in, the students took their case to the streets. Before the March primary, a coalition called Protect Ours NC led dozens of A&T students on a half-hour walk to the polls carrying “Aggie Votes Matter” signs, and more than 60 of them packed a Guilford County Board of Elections meeting.
Coalition co-leader Olu Rouse told Capital B he was stunned to hear the board chair say “it wasn’t our right to vote.” As more and more county boards have flipped Republican, Rouse noted, voting access has started vanishing.
Students in Texas have faced the same treatment. In Houston, Texas Southern University students marched to an early voting site to protest Republican redistricting of the 18th Congressional District, the seat long held by the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, vowing that redrawn lines would not silence them.
Greensboro and Houston are local fronts in a national campaign. Trump and his MAGA allies know their agenda of billionaire tax cuts, tariff-fueled inflation, gutted health care, war in Iran, and union-busting can’t win a fair fight, so they purge voter rolls, gerrymander districts, and close polling places wherever Black, young, and working-class people live.
Defeating that strategy will take every tool available, from lawsuits and public testimony to marches and rides to the polls, and the Greensboro students have tried nearly all of them. Student organizer Xavier Jones told local public radio station WUNC they will keep coming “no matter how far you push a polling site off our campus.”
Plenty of people are ready to back them up.
The AFL-CIO is running election protection trainings for union leaders on spotting voting barriers and responding to intimidation. Common Cause is recruiting volunteers for its nonpartisan Election Protection program and the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline. Indivisible says more than 50,000 people have joined its Hands Off Our Vote program, and the NAACP Youth & College Division is training young people to serve as poll monitors and poll workers.
Protect Ours NC, the voting rights coalition in North Carolina, is also raising money to get students to the polls this year and in 2028. The funds will go toward transportation to polling sites, rides to future Board of Elections meetings, voter registration efforts, campus informational events, and more.
Anyone with a few free hours before Election Day can sign up for one of these trainings, take a shift as a poll monitor, or offer students a ride. If you’ve got a few dollars to spare, contribute to Protect Ours NC. Early voting is already under way in many places, and Election Day is Nov. 3.
The students who sat at that Woolworth’s counter in 1960 changed history by standing up to racism. Their successors are doing the same today, setting an example for all of us to follow.
As with all opinion and news-analytical articles published by People’s World, the views represented here are those of the author.
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