This is a North Carolina NAACP voter turnout rally.
Here, the election is about more
than choosing a candidate or party.
It's a climax of a three year fight against
some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country.
The whole line of discrimination down through history
has turned on the issue of who is a person
and who deserves citizenship.
We are citizens, we are persons,
we are made in the image of God.
And we will vote.
North Carolina could swing the election this year.
And I want to know what's important to voters
in my home state.
I'm bringing along my little brother to find out
because like a lot of teenagers,
Richard doesn't really see how politics
affects him.
With this trip I'm hoping to show him
just why voting is so important to people in the state.
Our first stop is a town named for Zebulon B. Vance.
The confederate governor of North Carolina during the civil war.
The election right now, it make me scared.
It make me scared because,
what I have in this country I don't have in my country.
What country are you from?
I'm from Gambia.
Gambia? -Yes I'm from West Africa, from Gambia.
Because of the new restrictive voting law,
Bimta had trouble voting in the primary election
just a few months ago.
It made me like, I can't vote because I went to
Zebulon here, and they said it's not here.
So I was confused and mad.
I don't vote, and I have to vote.
This election is not like white or black, this election
is for America, our future.
Just being in a hair shop talking about politics
Yeah that was something new.
I mean, you don't talk politics in a barber shop?
I don't talk about politics.
Of course we had to stop by my hometown.
You know we were just in Zebulon and we talked to
people from Gambia and they were afraid of Trump
and his policies on immigration.
If she wants to be an American just like us standing here
she would want the very same thing that we want.
She would want secure borders,
look at what's going on in the country today.
Suicide bombers.
I honestly feel like our country has regressed,
I grew up in the country and some of my best friends
were black,
you know and they were my playmates,
love 'em to this day,
and I don't see that now,
it's just a lot of concerns I have and I want
I would like to see morality brought back
that people cared for each other, the love.
Underneath all that anxiety,
is a fight over the most fundamental right of all.
The right to vote.
Just a few decades ago,
the spectre of Jim Crow hung over voter in NC.
Literacy tests were in place until the 1970s.
Hope for black voters came with the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Because a state could no longer restrict
access to the polls without federal approval.
But all that changed in 2013.
When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.
Soon after, North Carolina's Republican legislature
passed a law that seemed to target voters of color.
Voters had to show a state-issued ID.
Teenagers could no longer register to vote in advance.
It eliminated voting on the day many black people vote
with their church.
And it limited where you could vote.
All together it made it harder for hundreds of thousands
of people to access the polls.
Reverend Barbara and the North Carolina NAACP
held dozens of Moral Monday protests
over what they described as a return to Jim Crow.
Then, just months before the election
a federal court threw all these rules out
because they're designed to:
"Target African-Americans with almost
surgical precision."
So North Carolina's voting restrictions were struck down
but more than a dozen other states have put up
new barriers for voting that are in effect
for the 2016 election.
I wanted to come out here because
some of the earliest political discourses I had
outside of the barber shop
outside of my family,
were talking with people fishing.
What did you learn today?
What I saw today was people are voting
not based on what we think of voting on interest,
voting on what you believe in,
what people are voting on is they're voting on fear.
And that's why
I wanted to go on the trip with you
because I was afraid about you.
Richard is coming of age in a North Carolina where
fear and anxiety are everywhere.
The question is, will that motivate a new generation of voters?
or discourage them?
The voting restrictions are gone,
but maybe the damage has already been done.
Or maybe not.
Maybe you thought messing
with our vote would divide us.
But boy did you get it wrong.
You have united us,
you have brought us together,
in ways we maybe otherwise
wouldn't be together,
and we're going to send a shock throughout this nation
that says, when you mess with the right to vote
you wake up a giant.