Second Line to the Polls: HBCU Students Are Building a Civic Infrastructure to Last

On the last day of early voting in Louisiana, Southern University's famed Human Jukebox marching band led more than a hundred students and neighbors through downtown Baton Rouge. The procession on October 27, billed as "Second Line to the Polls," borrowed the city's oldest tradition of celebratory procession and turned it into an argument: that young Black voters are not missing from American democracy, only from the stories that complain about them. The route ended at City Hall, where early ballots were waiting, and among the walkers were the commentator Roland Martin and the actress Meagan Good, who urged the students to stay engaged past this election. Essence*, Oct. 30; WAFB, Oct. 28

A rebuttal written in group chats

Behind the spectacle sits an organization built to outlast any single Election Day. The Andrew Goodman Foundation takes its name from the twenty-year-old volunteer murdered with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner during Mississippi's Freedom Summer in 1964. Its HBCU Cohort, founded in 2020, now supports more than two dozen Andrew Goodman Ambassadors on roughly fifteen campuses across eleven states and the District of Columbia, according to the foundation and Essence. Through Vote Everywhere, the cohort supplies funding, mentorship and training, and pushes student organizers to treat voter education as year-round work rather than an election-season transaction.

Christina Pollonais, the foundation's HBCU coordinator and a Spelman alumna, put the stakes plainly: "The HBCU vote represents legacy, history, power and justice for all." Her office's goal, she said, is to mobilize and educate, so that access to the polls survives the enthusiasm cycle.

Walking where the sidewalk ends

Greensboro, North Carolina, offered the week's clearest image of what happens when the access is taken away. After the Guilford County Board of Elections declined to put early-voting sites on the North Carolina A&T and UNC Greensboro campuses — locations both schools had used in 2024 — more than a hundred students from A&T, UNCG and Bennett College walked roughly forty-five minutes to the nearest polling place on October 15, the first day of early voting, over stretches of missing sidewalk. A second march on October 22 drew hundreds more and a few celebrities. We covered that first march, and the Callais ruling behind it, in "Walking to Vote"; the Guardian's report a week later confirms the marches became the story of the state's early-voting opening. WUNC*, Oct. 16; WXII*, Oct. 22; The Guardian*, Oct. 27

In Mississippi, the training is the tradition

At Jackson State University, the memory work is inseparable from the election work. Mississippi recorded at least 654 lynchings of Black people between 1877 and 1950, and in the twentieth century Medgar Evers and Herbert Lee were murdered for organizing voters — as were Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in 1964. So when Jackson State's Andrew Goodman Ambassadors convened a fireside conversation on October 21, it flowed directly into poll-monitor training with the ACLU of Mississippi and Mississippi Votes: thirty students, including eleven who came from Alcorn State and two from Tougaloo, learned to assist voters and observe problems outside polling places on Election Day.

The campus arrangement itself is a statement. Instead of appointing a faculty member to supervise the ambassadors, Jackson State handed the role to a student, Anastasia Taylor, a graduate student in English who works through group chats and trusted campus networks so the information actually reaches people. "It's kind of just understood that you need to be civically active," Taylor told Essence.

Making civic life ordinary — and fun

Texas Southern University in Houston has folded voting into the ordinary pleasures of student life. Joseph Carter, a graduating senior who sits on the university's Board of Regents, spent nearly four years coordinating voter education and helped revive Texas Southern's March to the Polls tradition. The campus keeps an on-site polling location, and the student-life office mixes registration into game nights and parties. "They make all the initiatives fun," Carter said. His classmates, he added, have stopped treating politics as distant: delays in financial aid made the connection between Washington and their rent unmistakable. On October 22 his March to the Polls brought state Senatorial hopeful James Talarico, the recording artist Monaleo, and State Representative Christian Menefee to campus with Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.

Two thousand one hundred out of eight thousand four hundred

The most sobering number of the season came from Southern University, where an early-semester assessment found only about 2,100 of the campus's 8,400 students registered to vote, according to the campus organizers. The response was a registration drive — one October 5 event alone signed up 147 voters — and then the second line itself. Eugene Lee-Johnson, a political scientist advising the organizers, framed it as inheritance: Southern students staged lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960, and in 1972 Denver Smith and Leonard Brown were killed by law enforcement during a campus protest. "People mistake a different kind of engagement for a lack of engagement," Lee-Johnson said. "Young people are deeply political."

Infrastructure, not spectacle

When the ballots are counted on November 3, they will register this organizing only as turnout — and turnout numbers will be fought over the way every Black turnout number is. The more durable achievement is the other thing being built: young people who have learned to assemble a coalition, navigate an elections bureaucracy, train poll monitors, and bring neighbors into political life. A ride to the polls, a registration table, a group chat, a trained observer — none of it looks like power on its own, and together it decides who can participate at all. That is why we followed the fight for the ballot across three eras in "Vote Anyway", and why this year's version, after Louisiana v. Callais, looks so much like the older ones.

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