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Gerrymandering has been a common practice in the U.S. intended to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries. This history showed its ugly head in gerrymandered maps in North Carolina resulted in North Carolina A&T State University (NCAT) being split between two districts.

Now This News examined the issue in a short documentary. The GOP took over the state in 2011 and quickly redrew the electoral districts in a way that skeptics took advantage of race to retain power.

Alison Riggs, a senior attorney for the Southern Coalition of Social Justice, “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 that this wasn’t right. We see these crazy-shaped districts with appendages and arms. We overlaid them with racial data and we were like, ‘wow, it’s an exact match,’” Alison said.

NCAT is the largest HBCU in the country, was originally drawn into the snake-shaped District 12 overseen by Democrat Alma Adams. Then after the changes, half of the university sits in District 13 and the other lies in District 6.

Adams referred to her area as “the most gerrymandered district in the nation.”

In 2011 the maps were ruled unconstitutional and redrawn again in 2016. GOP State Representative David Lewis made his intentions clear during a 2016 debate of the plans.

“I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it is possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats,” Lewis stated. “It is to gain partisan advantage on the map. I want that criteria to be clearly stated and understood.”

In the Now, This News video documentary displays the illustration of this move by standing on opposite sides of the same street putting the students in different districts. The effects of gerrymandering has inspired the students of NCAT to become activists.

Senior NCAT student Braxton Brewington said, “I don’t think we came into this space knowing that we were organizers. But, rather, we 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.”

Fellow senior Same King believes fighting against gerrymandering is vital to fair elections.

“If you really want people’s voices to not be silenced anymore, gerrymandering is something we really have to tackle and address,” King said. “It’s not enough to want change. You actually have to gather together and make that change yourself.”

North Carolina’s state director of NextGen America Josette Ferguson believes the youth could be a leader in fostering change.

“The power of the youth vote is being able to know that if I vote, not just me but my friends and my friend’s friends and their friends,” Ferguson said. “If we all vote, we will be able to make a blue wave happen, and some big change happens in terms of November.”

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