Millions of Americans will make their way to polling places today to cast ballots in the 2026 midterm elections. Some will walk a few blocks, others will drive across town or arrange transportation around work, school, and family responsibilities. For some, the journey will be considerably more difficult.
For students at several historically Black colleges and universities around the country, getting to the ballot box has become part of a familiar fight rooted in a much longer journey over access and who gets to participate in our democracy.
My daughter was born in February of 2008. Her daddy and I picked our nine-month-old up from daycare on November 4, 2008 and took her with us to cast our ballots for Barack Obama before the polls closed; she wouldn’t have any concept of what was happening, but it was important to me that we set a precedent for our children to see us exercising our civic duty.
This year, the now-18-year-old is a freshman at North Carolina A&T State University. She came home during fall break a few weeks ago to vote early, and when she returned to campus, she cheered on her classmates during the Votecoming celebrations that preceded their official homecoming.
Students from Winston-Salem State University marched to their polling place during early voting October 21 as they celebrated "Votecoming."Steven J. Gaither | HBCU Gameday
But long before students were organizing Votecoming celebrations, HBCU campuses were helping to launch a movement that would fundamentally change the nation's understanding of citizenship and political participation.
In February 1960, four freshmen at North Carolina A&T sat down at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro. Their refusal to leave helped ignite a student-led movement that spread throughout the South. Students from Bennett College joined the demonstrations, organizing alongside their A&T counterparts to challenge segregation.
Two months later, at Shaw University in Raleigh, Ella Baker convened a gathering of young civil rights activists that led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC would become one of the most influential organizations in the movement, mobilizing young people to register Black voters across the South, often in communities where doing so could cost them their jobs, their safety, or their lives.
Today, the stakes are different, but equally high. In October 2024, Central State University students had their own Votecoming moment as they crossed the road to neighboring Wilberforce University to cast their ballots, accompanied by the Invincible Marching Marauders. This year, following Central State's annexation into Xenia, Ohio, students have been reassigned to a temporary polling location approximately six miles away.
In North Carolina, students at A&T and Bennett have spent months advocating for the restoration of campus early voting sites. After election officials rejected their requests, students organized marches to polling locations, transportation and voter-engagement activities to ensure their classmates could participate in the election.
There is an unmistakable irony in watching students at institutions that helped shape the modern civil rights movement fight for something as fundamental as access to a polling place.
James Weldon Johnson's Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing spoke of a stony road we trod, wet with the tears and blood of those who came before us. The anthem was written at a time when Black Americans were fighting to preserve and exercise the political rights they had won after the Civil War — at the very moment Southern states were systematically dismantling them.
The fight for the ballot was then and is now inseparable from the fight for education, economic opportunity and equal citizenship. That history is especially important today because the vast majority of the nation's HBCUs — approximately 85% — are located in the South. Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas are among the states with the largest concentrations of these institutions. These are also states where the legacy of Jim Crow voting restrictions remains part of the contemporary political landscape.
The tactics have changed, but the questions surrounding access have not disappeared.
The Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder weakened a central federal safeguard of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by eliminating the formula used to determine which jurisdictions needed federal approval before changing their election laws. Since then, states and localities have continued to debate and implement changes to voter identification, registration, absentee voting and polling-place access.
In 2026, those debates have taken on renewed urgency.
The Brennan Center for Justice reported in October that, since the 2024 election, lawmakers in 22 states had enacted 47 restrictive voting laws. At least 11 states enacted 14 such laws during 2026 alone. The measures range from additional documentation requirements for voter registration to changes in acceptable identification and restrictions on mail voting.
Mississippi has implemented new documentary citizenship requirements for certain prospective voters whose citizenship cannot be verified through existing databases. Louisiana has enacted changes to acceptable voter identification, while Florida passed legislation tightening citizenship documentation and voter identification requirements, although some provisions will not take effect until after the midterms.
And the North Carolina disputes over campus early voting sites have placed college students directly in the middle of the fight over access.
The cumulative effect of policies that add documentation requirements, reduce voting options, or move polling locations farther from the communities they serve deserves serious examination.
Those consequences are particularly important for students, many of whom are first-time voters. Some are registered in the states where they attend college; others must navigate absentee voting in their home states. Many do not own cars. A polling location that moves six miles away may represent a minor inconvenience to one voter, but it is a significant obstacle to a student living on campus.
The 2026 midterms will help determine the direction of federal and state policy on higher education funding, student financial aid, civil rights enforcement, and economic opportunity. They will shape the environment in which HBCUs recruit students, educate future leaders, and serve communities that have historically received fewer public and private resources.
The struggle over who gets to participate in American democracy is happening right now, in many of the same states where HBCUs were established, where Black people fought for the franchise, and where students once risked their lives to register voters. HBCUs provided more than an education to the young people who participated in that movement; they provided community, intellectual grounding, and the institutional connections that helped turn individual acts of resistance into collective action.
As we cast our ballots today and candidates take their seats in early 2027, there must be consideration given to advancing candidates and policies that will protect our democracy. Students should not have to organize marches to secure convenient access to a polling place. Neither should they have to build elaborate transportation networks to overcome avoidable obstacles.
That responsibility belongs to election officials, policymakers, and the broader institutions of democracy to ensure that eligible voters can participate without unnecessary barriers.
So, as Americans make their way to the polls today, we should remember the students who made that journey possible for generations of voters, and vote for the future of the students who are still treading the stony road for future generations. We should celebrate those who are carrying the work forward, even when the road is longer than it should be.
The stony road is not a metaphor confined to the pages of history or the verses of a beloved hymn; the promise of democracy is that every eligible citizen has a voice in shaping the nation's future. The legacy of HBCUs reminds us that making that promise real has always required people willing to fight for it.
HBCUs have never simply educated Black students — they have helped prepare, organize, and mobilize generations of Black Americans to exercise the rights that the country has repeatedly tried to deny them. The fight over access to the ballot box is just another chapter in that history.
