I’m in district 6.
I’m in district 13.
We see these crazy shapes and we look at the racial density maps and we're like, wow,
it's a perfect match.
It is to gain partisan advantage on the map.
Like I'm 21. I just started voting.
It just isn't supposed to be like this.
So right now we’re in district 6. We’re about to walk across the street into our next
district which is district 13.
This right here is the gerrymandered line that we’re walking over.
North Carolina A&T is the largest public historically Black college or university in the country.
Often times when I’m going back and forth from classes in the back of my mind sometimes
I distinctly recall, oh, I’m going across different districts.
I explained it to one of my line brothers the other day.
The first question I got back is how is that even legal.
And I had to respond that it’s actually not.
North Carolina, first time since 1870 do you have a Republican legislature.
In 2011, when the Republicans assumed power of the North Carolina legislature they decided
to draw redistricting plans for both chambers of the General Assembly and congressional
districts that packed Black voters into as few districts as possible, thus limiting their
overall influence and political power.
We knew from the get go this wasn't right.
We see these crazy shaped districts with appendages and arms. We overlaid them over racial data.
And we're like wow it's a perfect match.
Every 10 years the state redraws district lines. The last time this was done was in 2011.
That's when a group sued the state saying the new lines relied too heavily on race calling
them unconstitutional. Fast forward to February when a federal court agreed and required the
state to draw new congressional maps.
My district, the 12th district in North Carolina,
is the most gerrymandered district in the nation.
The district, initially when I ran in 2014, spanned the corridor of 85.
They call that a sort of
a serpentine district, a snake district.
In the middle of my re-election the court determined that there had been
racial gerrymandering by our legislature.
And so both the congressional districts that were racially gerrymandered, and the state
legislative districts that were racially gerrymandered, needed to be corrected. And when that happened
in early 2016, Representative David Lewis was the head of the House side of the process.
And during debate in the legislature he unavowedly defined his goal.
I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats because
I do not believe it is possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.
It is to gain partisan advantage on the map.
And I want that criteria to be clearly stated and understood.
He said the courts have said we were guilty of racial gerrymandering and so we're going
to turn off the race button, not consider it at all. And we're just going to draw a
partisan gerrymander because partisan gerrymandering isn't illegal.
You have a legislature that is really disconnected
from the political will of the people and any accountability
for their misdeeds.
We have East market street on our left and the line comes down there and comes straight
down the street.
Originally we were drawn into District 12 which was represented by Rep. Alma Adams a
Democrat here in North Carolina. That district was deemed unconstitutional.
And so we were considered packed into that district.
Now we are not packed, we're cracked into
district 13 and into district 6.
Here on campus
we are divided by Laurel Street which is very
much in the center of campus.
It’s the continuation of the split if you can kind of see up ahead where the rest of
the road is.
This is like a big central area of our campus.
Students who want to go to the CAF go in 13 and when they want to exercise in the gym they go in 6.
Students are constantly walking across district lines.
Some are aware.
Many are not.
Let’s put this to the test. Tylik, which district are we in right now?
We’re on. 6?
Yay!
This line right here.
There’s people I find today that still don’t understand the concept of gerrymandering and
how it is racist and how it affects the students on this campus everyday.
I think awareness is really the key.
I don't think we came into this space knowing that we were organizers but rather saw an
issue on campus and wanted to know what we could do to go about correcting this issue
or at least drawing attention to it.
Folks that are Black and young and college-aged are voting towards the left.
And for North Carolina to cut our campus in half, the largest HBCU in the nation, to me is just unnatural
because naturally we would be voting as a collective.
We are gerrymandered into two mostly white, Republican-leaning districts.
We have a representative who owns a gun store.
I’m Ted Budd. And I approve this message.
We have a representative, there’s talks about him being the speaker of the house,
replacing Paul Ryan.
Students on campus, we have to become like these almost political experts.
We are a representative democracy.
It's not supposed to be hard
especially for young folks that are just getting this right.
Like I'm 21. I just started voting.
It just isn't supposed to be like this.
This is a good neighborhood to canvass.
There’s a lot of houses.
All right, which number?
There's a real deficit to democracy when, apart from the different weight that people's
votes have, just in terms of being able to effectively reach voters, get your message
out, for voters to know who represents them, it's a lot harder in districts that are drawn
with boundaries that don't make a lot of sense.
This is what the district looked like before it was redrawn in 2011.
And this is what it looked like after it was redrawn.
And this just shows you who had been elected prior
to it being redrawn.
I’m a civil rights attorney.
I’m also a candidate for the North Carolina Supreme Court.
I grew up in a mixed race family. My father is Black and my mother is white.
And it's always been my goal to try to get us closer to equal justice.
Since I moved here could I vote here?
Yeah. In fact we could register you to vote right now.
This is about how we structure our Democracy and people understand there should be a level
playing field. Districts shouldn’t be drawn in a way that gives
some voters more weight than others.
Every vote counts.
Every vote counts for sure.
Ok, thank you.
Great, thank you.
I was taught that when I turn 18 I have the right to vote.
But if my right is diluted
and is suppressed, why should I vote? And so that's what I get from a lot of young people.
And I tell them that's the reason why we need to.
If they're suppressing my vote, that means
that I must have a big vote power out here. So I have to show it.
If you really want people's voices to not be silenced anymore, gerrymandering is something
that we're really going to have to tackle and address.
It's not enough to want to change.
You have to actually gather together and make that change yourself.
On election day we’re going to do a march to the polls, the classic march.
Gather students together.
We did a lot of marches last year.
And the year before.
A lot of roll to the polls.
One thing that we’re known for is the Greensboro Four that went to the Woolworth counter in
downtown Greensboro and demanded to be served.
That’s a legacy that we have here at A&T.
There’s this like big misconception of you know millennials are just too lazy to be politically
engaged. Or too this or that.
I think it's pretty evident that the youth are involved
and the youth actually care.
The key issue is to get students riled up before such an important election.
We’ve seen so many races come down to a couple of hundred votes.
That’s half of a floor of a dorm at this campus.
The truth is as toxic as gerrymandering is to our democracy,
gerrymandering can be overcome.
If enough people turn out and vote, it can be overcome.
The power of the youth vote is just the fact of being able to know that, hey, if I vote
not just me but my friends and my friends’ friends and their friends, if we all vote
we will be able to make some type of a blue wave happen and something big and change happen
in terms of November.
If better Is attainable, why not go get it.
You know, we deserve it.
I think we should have it.