CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Standing in a manicured field near the edge of Johnson C. Smith University — an HBCU in Charlotte where his fraternity, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and others display some of the symbols associated with their organizations – Kevin Napier explained just how large the election has loomed on campus in recent weeks.
In September, Napier had watched what turned out to be the only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump with much of the student body. And in early October, he’d helped out at a nonpartisan election forum for students as new to politics as himself. Napier was 9 years old when Trump, the businessman and reality TV star, rode down a gold-toned escalator and began the process that made him a major party’s presidential nominee. He was 17 when Harris, a longtime prosecutor and former U.S. senator, became the nation’s first female vice president. And now that he is 20, Napier is old enough to vote in his first presidential contest, one which will make either Trump or Harris the nation’s 47th president.
At the campus election forum, Napier had fielded questions about registration, about the right way to pick a candidate, what happens inside a polling place when one votes in person, and how one gets involved in a campaign.
Despite his youth and inexperience as a presidential voter, Napier is one of those students to whom others turn. He’s active, involved, organized. Napier and other speakers at the forum had answered in the fact-based, politically neutral way the setting required. But, looking back on it now, Napier tells me that the thing he hopes most of all he made clear was this: “Vote. Whatever you do, vote. But, vote not just for you. Vote for your community, what’s good for your community.”
Johnson C. Smith enrolled about 1,100 students last year. Like other historically Black colleges, it was a hotbed of political activism in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election, holding forums, debate watch parties, and other registration and mobilization efforts. In Durham, about two hours east, dozens of student groups at another HBCU, North Carolina Central University, gathered and marched together to an on-campus early voting site in this swing state.
The election activity at HBCUs underscores the role that members of the Divine Nine, historically Black fraternities and sororities, have committed to playing in mobilizing Black voters this election cycle. It also highlights the degree to which young voters, including Black college students in swing states, appear eager to vote in the 2024 election despite earlier analyses suggesting the same voters may have been particularly disengaged.
Early voter totals are high in several swing states. And, in the final weeks of the election, young Black voters have described differing but often significant levels of concern about issues that distinguish the candidates or that they believe are likely to shape their lives. That list includes increasing access to abortion and other reproductive health care, ensuring there is a check on the power of the Oval Office, electing a president with the right character and temperament to lead the country, and improving social and economic conditions for those not born to wealth.
Capital B visited the campus of JCSU in October as a part of a six-city tour of swing states that stopped in Charlotte. The tour examined the power that Black voters have to influence the outcomes of this historic election, in which Harris, a Black and Southeast Asian woman, is leading the ticket of a major party as the Democratic nominee.
North Carolina is a swing state with a large Black population. About 22% of those who live in this state are Black and in 2020, during the last presidential election, nearly 68% of North Carolina’s eligible Black voters cast a ballot, slightly more than the national average for all voters. Black voters in North Carolina participated at a rate higher than in any other swing state. Yet, in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte and one of the state’s largest concentrations of Democrats, turnout in recent election cycles has not kept pace with participation in similar communities.
In 2020, 80% of voters in Wake County, which includes Raleigh, and a similar number of Democrats, participated, compared to 72% in Mecklenburg. And that year, Trump carried the state.
This time, North Carolina ranks among the most closely watched of the swing states. While an aggregate of 11 polls gives Trump a slight lead, many political analysts are hesitant to consider the state a lock, due in part to the untapped voter potential in Mecklenburg County. Significant turnout gains there could change things.
If Johnson C. Smith and other organizations mobilizing Black voters in Charlotte can increase Black turnout here, they could swing the election into the Democratic column.
The Divine Nine and its 2 million members have committed to a massive nonpartisan voter registration and get-out-the-vote initiative and some have, for the first time this year, also formed PACs to engage with politics in additional ways.
“This time, it feels like there’s more at stake,” Napier said.
Student loan forgiveness
Admir Hart, a student at Johnson C. Smith University, said he cannot understand the logic behind supporting former President Donald Trump: “Why would I vote for a rich white man who only likes and respects other rich white men?” (Cornell Watson for Capital B News)
Johnson C. Smith was founded in 1867. Here, most students are Black, but not all. Students come from what the school describes in its promotional materials as, “a variety of ethnic, socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds. The enriching environment enables students to explore and grow — intellectually, socially, culturally and spiritually — and develop a sense of social responsibility.”
Admir Hart, 18, was playing what looked like an old-school upright arcade game in a dim part of the Mary Joyce Taylor Crisp Student Union at JCSU.
Hart was one of only a few students on campus because fall break had just begun. He had a few things he wanted to do before driving a couple of hours to spend time with his family in Wyles, South Carolina, a town near the North Carolina border.
Seated on a stool with his over-the-ear headphones and a student ID affixed to a lanyard on the table nearby, Hart explained that he’s a computer engineering major who is aiming to become a fashion director. He can handle technical information but is creative. So, he is the kind of person who can think about most things in more than one way. But, when it comes to the presidential election, he said, he simply can not understand the logic behind supporting Trump.
Like Napier, he watched the September presidential debate between Trump and Harris, along with several other students. Hart could not believe some of the things Trump said.
Trump said he had “concepts” of a health care plan after four years in office and four years loudly and frequently critiquing the Biden-Harris administration. There were points, Hart said, where it sounded as if Trump was simply stringing together political buzzwords or terms that are supposed to induce fear. “Transgender prison sex change,” Hart said, describing Trump’s efforts to make Harris sound illogically radical or profligate because of her support for spending public dollars on gender-affirming surgery for transgender inmates in California. The New York Times reported that it was also federal policy under the Trump administration, but was not put in practice until after Trump left office.
Hart was a voter who wanted to vote for Biden before his performance in a previous presidential debate led Biden to step out of the race and endorse Harris in July. He is prepared to vote for Harris because of her support for student loan forgiveness, price controls on prescription drugs, and support for small-business owners and her general temperament and intelligence. She seems like a responsible person who will make choices after careful thought, the opposite of Trump, Hart said. And there is another question Hart has asked himself: “Why would I vote for a rich white man who only likes and respects other rich white men?” Harris’ policies seem, to him, likely to actually help the middle class.
An NAACP poll made public in September found that 26% of Black men under 50, so a substantial minority but a minority nonetheless, planned to support Trump.
Hart is planning to vote for Harris on Election Day in South Carolina, where he remains registered. He wants to vote there with his parents, where the polling sites seem as if they will be less contentious places.
The idea of shifting his registration to North Carolina sounded to Hart like a hassle with an uncertain outcome. A few days before our conversation, the North Carolina’s Court of Appeals had issued a ruling barring University of North Carolina system students, nearly 248,000 people on 16 campuses across the state, from using electronic identification when voting. Republicans sued to stop the practice.
Black supporters of Donald Trump attend a Trump bus tour event in Charlotte, North Carolina. An NAACP poll from September found that 26% of Black men under 50 planned to support Trump. (Cornell Watson for Capital B News)
Going home to their country
It was just before 2 pm on a Thursday, and Alijah Leslie was wrapping up a tennis match with Jeffry Theophilus, 21, on the JCSU tennis courts when I walked over to talk and encountered students who represented another portion of the Black population in many states which could prove important in the election outcome.
Almost 10%, or 4.6 million, of the nation’s 41.5 million Black residents are foreign born. Some have become naturalized citizens or had children since their arrival who are citizens with current or future voting rights. Others live in the United States on student, work or refugee visas and can not vote. But many watch U.S. politics closely.
Leslie is from Trinidad and Theophilus is from the Bahamas. Trinidad and Tobago, a two-island nation, and the Bahamas are together home to about 1.8 million people. While the latter is far more dependent on tourism, investment management and international banking activity, Trinidad and Tobago ranks among the most prosperous countries in the Caribbean.
Leslie and Theophilus are attending JCSU on tennis and academic scholarships and are part of the school’s Division II tennis team. So this was really a casual game between competitive friends. The two were part of a small group staying on campus during the break.
Neither man can vote in the November election, because they aren’t U.S. citizens. And despite a wave of claims from Republicans that noncitizens want to or will attempt to illegally vote, neither man has any interest in doing so. It wouldn’t be in their own interest to even try. They are in the country on student visas, which can be revoked. And, they don’t think or talk about the United States as their country. But they do care what happens here.
The American president and his or her decisions have an impact on the world so large and varied it’s difficult to describe or fully anticipate. Theophilus’s dad likes Trump, or rather respects him, but his broader family is concerned about how a Trump-led U.S. would interact with the Bahamas and other countries.
Sometimes what Trump says startles Leslie, he said.
It seems almost unreal that Trump and his ideas have gotten this far. But, unlike some Americans who are not Trump fans, Leslie said he isn’t exactly afraid of a possible second Trump presidency.
“The worst thing that happens, that possibly happens, is I go home to my country,” Leslie said.
Students exit the student union at Johnson C. Smith University. The North Carolina’s Court of Appeals recently issued a ruling barring University of North Carolina system students from using electronic identification when voting. (Cornell Watson for Capital B News)
A “reproductive justice voter”
Napier is a health communications major from Long Island, New York, whose family has since moved to Atlanta, but he is registered to vote in North Carolina. As we talk near his fraternity’s symbolic knee-high pyramid, other students precision paint or tidy the Alpha space and that of the neighboring Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity.
He’s sometimes alarmed by the way that people seem to approach the election like a popularity contest. And, one candidate is, “a little more memorable than the other,” he said, referring to what he described as Trump’s antics.
Napier, who was careful to point out that he was speaking only for himself, not for his fraternity or school, said it wasn’t the debate that sealed his choice of candidate.
He is motivated by his opposition to Project 2025, the nearly 1,000-page plan for a second Trump term. Trump has disavowed the plan, which is the work of others. However, most of its authors worked in or advised the first Trump administration.
Napier is concerned about much of the document’s contents and the country it would create. He also doesn’t like the way that Project 2025 seems to take a stance against IVF because it is a tool or part of the so-called “gay agenda,” and makes it possible for some same-sex couples to have biological children. And, Project 20205 seems to want to erase LGBTQ people from American society, he said.
But, he’s the first Black male swing state voter I’ve encountered who describes himself as a, “reproductive justice voter.” He works with the National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda and he’s equally concerned about access to safe and legal abortion as he is the Black maternal mortality crisis.
Many of the states that have, since the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, severely restricted abortions or outlawed them all together are Southern states with large Black populations, as well as high maternal and infant mortality rates.
North Carolina has implemented a 12-week abortion ban and what the Center for Reproductive Rights describes as other “burdensome” restrictions. And in North Carolina, 43% of the women who died from pregnancy-related causes were Black, according to state data.
For Napier, it’s the sections of Project 2025 dealing with reproduction that rank among those which frighten him most, he said. He plans to vote for Harris.
“They are trying to take away rights,” he said. “That is going to have a direct and dangerous impact on the Black community.”
The post At a North Carolina HBCU, Black Students Get Out the Vote appeared first on Capital B News.