For generations, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have provided the infrastructure for voting rights advancement. Yet their stability is now insecure as the threats of executive orders, unreliable funding, and anti-voter policies loom. As we reflect on how the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, changed the course of the struggle for voting rights 60 years ago, it is imperative that we recognize the institutions that undergirded this movement.
The landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which dismantled racially discriminatory voting barriers, became law in large part due to the organizing efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The group, which originated from a gathering organized by Ella Baker at Shaw University, was a collective of predominately Black college students committed to creating a desegregated, multiracial democracy. Its grassroots strategy gave voice to poor, undereducated, and marginalized Black Southerners who had been violently locked out of electoral politics, like SNCC organizer Fannie Lou Hamer.
SNCC’s work began with nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins to protest segregation — which they trained for under civil rights leaders such as Rev. James Lawson — across a variety of HBCU campuses, including Fisk University, South Carolina State University and Howard University. The work progressed to “Freedom Rides,” which protested segregation on interstate buses, and “Freedom Summer,” when students forwent educational and career opportunities to increase voter registration in the Deep South.
SNCC’s Voter Education Project held courses to help Black Southerners overcome voting policies like the “literacy tests” required to vote. Across multiple years they coordinated large-scale attempts to register Black voters en masse. Its leaders knew that potential registrants would be met with forceful opposition, yet they held these demonstrations to make it undeniably clear that Black people’s exclusion from electoral politics was not due to lack of knowledge or interest but because of racist voting policies.
As HBCU students laid the path for the Voting Rights Act through direct action, HBCU faculty used legal advocacy to advance voting rights. In 1957, Alabama legislators redrew Tuskegee’s electoral district boundaries to exclude nearly all the city’s Black residents and the city’s Black college, Tuskegee University. The effort to exclude Black voters was met with a multiyear economic boycott and legal challenges from 12 Black residents. The lawsuit, led by Tuskegee professor Charles G. Gomillion, resulted in a pivotal Supreme Court ruling outlawing gerrymandering that disenfranchises Black voters.
It would not be the last time that legislators attempted to dilute the voting strength of Black colleges and the surrounding Black communities, however. In Texas, state legislators created a similar gerrymander targeting students at Prairie View Agricultural and Mechanical University in the 1980s, and they imposed new barriers every couple of years — from extensive residency requirements to the removal of campus polling sites. As recently as 2016, North Carolina legislators split student housing at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University into two congressional districts. North Carolina legislators have continued the trend of manipulating district lines to dilute Black voter influence, well into recent years.
Examples of restrictive policies targeted at HBCUs are abundant, but so too is the evidence that when students and faculty take a stand, access to democracy is extended beyond campus boundaries and across generations. Given these institutions’ historic and present-day contributions to voting rights, political attacks on their vitality should also be seen as attacks on the future of American democracy.
Throughout their 200-year history, Black colleges have been subject to the whims of inconsistent funding sources. The most recent formidable threat comes from President Trump’s executive orders against diversity, equity, and inclusion. As institutions whose mission is to educate students who have faced racial discrimination and segregation, the core function of these universities makes them a target for the administration’s funding cuts.
The risks of reduced funding are acute given that the vast majority of HBCUs are already underfunded, as evidenced by the $12 billion disparity in funding between HBCU land grant institutions and their non-HBCU peers reported in 2023. Institutional leaders in Alabama, Mayland, and Tennessee have legally challenged state funding inequities for multiple generations, and in the case of Mississippi, litigating for nearly 30 years to receive equal funding.
Funding to support students directly is also under threat as agencies providing scholarships for HBCU students have already begun withdrawing their support. Last month, the Department of Agriculture attempted to roll back its 1890 National Scholars Program for HBCUs, but it later reversed the decision following public backlash. Education is a cornerstone of our democracy, and any efforts to limit a racial group’s access to education would diminish multiracial democracy.
As history has shown, the enfranchisement of student and young adult voters is imperative to ensure that elected officials reflect the racial and ideological diversity of the electorate. However, congressional Republicans are pushing the SAVE Act, which would require voters to present a birth certificate, passport, or other citizenship document to register to vote. This poses a threat to student voters, many of whom do not have easy access to these documents — as is the case for millions of Americans.
The anniversary of Bloody Sunday should remind us that the fight for voting rights is advanced not by the political environment being ripe for change but by the unwavering commitment of groups and institutions dedicated to racial equity. To protect democracy, we must make it a priority to safeguard the institutions that were instrumental in building it and the groups critical to sustaining it.
