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Behind Alabama, North Carolina is tied with Georgia for having the most historically Black colleges and universities. And that means that as Vice President Kamala Harris makes a play for North Carolina, she has made a play for HBCUs.
HBCUs play a significant role in the Black community. Initially created after the Civil War, they became important institutions for Black Americans when they could not attend predominantly white institutions that remained segregated.
Harris’s history as an alumnus of an HBCU — Howard University — and a member of the Alpha Kappa Alphas has some believing she will be able to uniquely appeal to younger Black voters who were moving away from the Democratic Party until President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election.
James Christian, who is from Prince George’s County in Maryland, and a student at North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina, called the election “brutal” but said he made his decision after the debate between Harris and Trump. He likes that Harris is representing the Black community, he added, and thinks she’s “the better of the two options in this election.”
Aimy Steele, the chief executive at the New North Carolina Project, told The Independent said that her organization is going to high schools and colleges to get voters registered and energized. But she added that Israel’s war with Hamas, as well as student loans and economic mobility, remain big issues for young people. That could pose a problem for Harris later down the line.
And on NCCU’s county of Durham, Harris’s support is not as dyed-in-wool as she might hope.
Cameron Johnson, a senior at NCCU, said that he will be voting for Harris, but added caveats.
“I think she's getting a lot of love right now, not necessarily because of her policies or anything like that, but because a lot of people can't stand Trump,” he told The Independent. “I think one thing that we need to focus on is trying to clean up our own problems before we clean up other problems for other nations.”
Harris’s ascendancy to the top of the ticket has seen a marked improvement with young voters for the Democrats, particularly with young Black voters in swing states like Pennsylvania. A survey by North Carolina Asian Americans Together, a non-profit group, showed that 53 percent of young Black voters between the ages of 18 and 35 have either a favorable or somewhat favorable opinion of Harris, compared with only 29 percent who said the same about Biden.
But some voters are not torn between Harris or Trump; instead, they can’t decide whether they will vote at all.
“It's either Harris or no one, okay, but I'm trying to study more on Harris first before I just decide, just because she's a Black woman, that I should vote for her,” Nya Lumsden, who is from Atlanta, told The Independent on NCCU’s campus on Thursday. “As a college student, it's kind of like I don't really know which way to lean to.”
Lumsden said abortion is a top issue for her, which would make some believe that Harris would be the perfect candidate for her, given that she has focused heavily on restoring abortion rights in her campaign and has traveled to the state to talk about abortion rights. Meanwhile, former president Donald Trump nominated the judges who overturned Roe v Wade. But Lumsden isn’t as sure.
“Trump shouldn't tell us what we can and can do with our body,” she said. “Also, Kamala is very big on keeping abortion. But... I don't think she's going to keep all the wars away from us like Trump did.”
Barack Obama won North Carolina in a rare victory for the Democrats in 2008, becoming the first Democrat to win it since Jimmy Carter in 1976. He did so by energizing turnout in places like Durham County, where he won more than 75 percent of the vote and more than 136,000 voted. By comparison, 144,000 people voted for Biden in Durham County four years ago and he still narrowly lost the state to Trump.
Like many young people, Christian sees affordability as the top issue: “making sure everyone has housing, affordable housing, making sure that you don't have to spend $60 to get gas” are two of his biggest priorities, he said.
Lumsden is not the only voter who is undecided. Aaliyah Burt from Henderson said she likely was not going to vote for either candidate.
“They both just say very reckless things about people, about us, people in the world,” she told The Independent. Specifically, she cited Harris saying in 2014 that kids between 18 and 24 are “stupid,” which has been used to hammer Harris, but was taken out of context from a speech about reducing recidivism.
“And Trump just talks so bad about the immigrants,” Burt added.
Other students are more focused on what the consequences are of a second Trump presidency. Aundrea Diaz, a graduate student from Jacksonville, North Carolina, said Biden’s decision to drop out surprised her. But she said she would be voting for Harris.
“I try to base all my political decisions off of not just my own morality,” Diaz, who is half-Black and half-Puerto Rican and is gay, told The Independent. “I feel like, personally, I take a lot of things into consideration, and I feel like Trump being the president, I don't really feel safe.”
So far, Harris has not campaigned in the HBCUs, though she has campaigned near them in places like Greensboro, home of North Carolina A&T University. If the vice president is to have any hope in this state, she will need to convince students to turn out for her in a big way — and it’s clear they still need convincing.
But Democrats will not just need to win Black college students; they will need to win Black voters without degrees. Khalil Thompson, who runs Strategies for Change Group, said he leads a group of young Black men who meet regularly to discuss politics at a barber shop. He pointed out the first question they would ask Harris was about abortion.
“They see the Dobbs decision as being not just impactful on women, but what does this mean about the health choices that they wish to have?”he told The Independent.
He added that as a Jamaican American, he was disgusted by Trump’s vitriol toward Haitians.
“The fact that at this particular moment, we couldn’t find ways to just talk about policy, but we’re talking about a red herring and a nasty, ugly trope that just shouldn’t be discussed, I think, is telling about the two options that we have in this election cycle,” he added.
