North Carolina is the canary in the coalmine for attacks on our democracy—and a model for how we fight back

This article is part of South at 250, a special #WeTheCivic: America 250 series that explores how people across the region have confronted systems of exclusion and built lasting foundations for freedom. You can read more articles about communities shaping the South’s future and expanding what democracy can mean for us all here.

For years, North Carolina has been the canary in the coal mine for voter suppression, and a testing ground for policies that are rolled out across the South. North Carolinians are currently voting under the weight of a discriminatory photo voter ID law, gerrymandered districts, severe cuts to early voting days, and removal of key early voting locations. To understand where we are now, we must look back at our state’s history.

North Carolina is the site of the only successful coup d’état in United States history. The 1898 Wilmington Massacre was a violent and concerted effort by White supremacists to overthrow the city’s elected multiracial government. In the late 1800’s, Wilmington had a thriving Black population with business owners, skilled tradesmen, lawyers, and doctors, and three of the city’s 10 aldermen were Black. On Election Day in 1898, militiamen and White mobs took to the streets and murdered a still unconfirmed number of Black people to prevent them from voting, before burning the city’s only Black newspaper office to the ground. The mob issued a ‘White Declaration of Independence’, held local officials at gunpoint until they resigned their seats, and ran prominent Black families from their homes. Estimates of the number of people killed range from 60 to over 200. Before the massacre, Wilmington had a Black population of 56 percent; today, it stands at 14.5 percent.

The South has always been an important seat of Black power, and Black political enclaves like Birmingham, AL, Charleston, SC and Wilmington, NC have consistently faced attacks out of fear of that power. What we’re seeing in our state now is no different. North Carolina has a history of developing thriving Black communities that grow into hubs of power-building and resistance. During the 1960s, as the nation witnessed vicious dogs and water hoses being turned on those marching for voting and civil rights across the South, North Carolina was serving a pivotal role in that fight.

Student organizing and resistance

We know that the current attacks on student voting access are a continuation of the centuries old fear of Black success and Black power, especially when it’s being led by the next generation.

Our state has a deep-rooted history of student resistance and organizing. The Greensboro Four at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University (NC A&T) and the Bennett College Belle’s staged the historic protests and sit-ins at the F.W. Woolworth lunch counter, Durham students led the sit-ins to desegregate the Royal Ice Cream Parlor, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh. The same students that helped shape policy change and gain voting rights for the entire nation are now under attack and having their voting access stripped right here at home.

Under the state’s current voter ID requirement, not every student ID is accepted for voting use. Of the 124 colleges, universities and technical schools in the state, the North Carolina State Board of Elections only lists IDs from 73 schools as acceptable for voting. The early voting polling location was recently closed at NC A&T, the nation’s largest HBCU, and several other college campuses across the state. Despite that, on the first day of early voting, Greensboro students marched nearly an hour to the polls to vote and ensure their voices were heard. Once they arrived at the polls however, some students had to wait hours to vote and some were turned away after the polling location briefly ran out of voter registration forms. We know that the current attacks on student voting access are a continuation of the centuries old fear of Black success and Black power, especially when it’s being led by the next generation.

Black and brown North Carolinians have never had to guess at the intent of these policies and laws because the people writing them are making those intentions crystal clear. In 2013, weeks after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, state lawmakers asked for data on how North Carolinians used different voting practices, broken down by race. They then passed a sweeping law that cut early voting, ended same-day registration, and imposed a strict photo ID requirement. In 2016, a federal appeals court struck it down, finding that it targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision.”

Shutting down Sundays and cherry-picking voters

The lesson some North Carolina officials took from that was not to stop their attacks on voters, but to stop saying their intent out loud, and they haven’t even managed that. This August, as the State Board of Elections reviewed early voting plans, a Republican member of the Anson County Board of Elections argued against Sunday voting by praising Chick-fil-A for closing on Sundays. Black, brown, working class, and poor voters have historically relied on Sunday voting, but this official told the board that Sunday voting meant “requiring people to work on the Lord’s day.” When voters and public comment overwhelmingly supported keeping Sunday voting he replied, “We have other days we can vote on. God decided to heal somebody. Voting does not heal anybody.” The state board ultimately ended Sunday voting in his county anyway, and went on to strip Sunday hours from most of the contested plans that came before it. During the first week of Early Voting for our 2026 Midterms, Sunday voting was only available in seven of North Carolina’s 100 counties.

Everyone in that meeting knew what Sunday means for voting in North Carolina and across the South. Souls to the Polls, the tradition of Black congregations going straight from Sunday service to the ballot box, has powered Black turnout in this state for a generation. In 2016, the executive director of the state Republican Party emailed county board members urging them to keep the polls closed on Sundays. A decade later, the justification has evolved from budgets to fast food scripture, but the target is the same: Black, brown, working class, and poor voters.

In 1992 Eva Clayton was elected to the US House of Representatives from North Carolina’s Congressional District 1 (CD1), located in our state’s historic Black Belt region, making her the first African American to represent our state in the House since 1898. Her historic election spoke to the organizing and political power in that area of the state, and CD1 would eventually become NC Republican’s next target for voter suppression.

Earlier this year, North Carolina Republicans engaged in unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to comply with President Trump’s request for Republican-led state legislatures to ensure more Republican seats would be won in the US House of Representatives. The redrawn maps targeted and dismantled Congressional District 1 and threatened the seat of North Carolina’s only Black male representative, Don Davis. Not only is CD1 an anchor of the state’s Black Belt, it is home to thousands of working class, poor and rural voters who have had their voices silenced on critically important issues like healthcare, childcare, education, and more. The maps were challenged in court, and lawmakers argued that this redistricting was purely partisan and had nothing to do with race. The Courts allowed the maps to stand—yet another tactic to dilute Black political power and influence in our state and beyond. Prior to the new maps, the proportion of Black voters in the district was originally about 40 percent. Under the new maps, that representation dropped to 32 percent.

North Carolina regularly sees election results with razor-thin margins, making the voter suppression tactics deployed here even more alarming and destructive.

Many of the changes in election policy have been overseen by the North Carolina State Auditor, Dave Boliek. After the 2024 election, the North Carolina legislature transferred control of the State Board of Elections from the governor’s office to the state auditor’s office. North Carolina is the only state in the country where the auditor’s office controls the State’s Board of Elections, and the change was made after the governor’s office had just been won by the Democratic candidate—the candidate of choice for the majority of Black voters—and the auditor’s office had recently been flipped to a Republican politician, Dave Boliek.

Under this new governance structure, the auditor’s office has been directly involved in shaping counties’ early voting plans, including: enacting cuts to weekend voting, approving more restrictive rules for absentee ballots, requesting the ability to audit county voting records at the auditor’s discretion, and appointing committee members to county boards of elections. Since the move was announced, advocates have said that it opens the door for unreasonable partisan influence in our state’s elections. These changes carry more significance in rural counties where Black leaders previously chaired Boards of Elections. Beyond partisan control, these changes affect who has a voice in election administration and which communities are represented in decisions about who has access to the ballot. For Black and rural voters who already face barriers to voting, these decisions have real consequences.

North Carolina regularly sees election results with razor-thin margins, making the voter suppression tactics deployed here even more alarming and destructive. A 2024 North Carolina Supreme Court race was decided by 768 votes. In 2022, Chief Justice Beasley lost her Supreme Court race by 401 votes. Just this year, North Carolina Senate President Phil Berger, often considered one of the state’s most influential lawmakers, lost his primary race by just 23 votes. In a state with margins this thin, a closed polling site or a canceled Sunday is not only an inconvenience, it could shift election outcomes. These margins incentivize some of the worst voter suppression tactics in the country. North Carolina officials know the numbers, and that is why they continue to enact laws and policies to silence voters and entrench their own power. They can’t win on policy, so they’re rigging the rules and restricting voting access to create a system where they choose their voters instead of being chosen by the people.

Nowhere is this truth clearer than in the fight over who gets to vote at all. In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly voted for Amendment 4, a ballot initiative that restored voting rights for more than a million people in the state with past felony convictions. Within just a year, the state legislature tied those rights to the payments of fines and fees that many people couldn’t afford or even reasonably calculate. In North Carolina, a trial court  ruled in 2022 that tens of thousands of people living in our communities on parole, probation, or post-release supervision had the right to vote. In 2023, however, a newly elected majority on the state Supreme Court took that right away. Two of the South’s biggest states came close to reshaping the electorate, and in both, people in power found ways to close the door.

To save our democracy, all roads lead south

As organizers, advocates, and legal workers in North Carolina, we believe that stopping voter suppression in the South must start with holding the line here in our state, and that is what we are doing. Officials here have made it clear that they will continue to play partisan games to entrench their own power at the expense of voters. Without federal voting rights protections, it is up to organizations like ours and the communities we represent to stand together against official’s blatant, ongoing attempts to silence the very people they are supposed to serve. Together, Forward Justice and North Carolina Black Alliance are in the field, attending Board of Elections meetings, standing with students to support on-campus organizing, conducting statewide voter education and mobilization tours, creating online voter resources, standing up statewide voter protection hotlines, fighting restrictive voter laws in court, engaging the Protect Our Vote NC Coalition and  Black Legal Network for voter protection initiatives, and hosting convenings to strengthen a statewide ecosystem of organizations committed to ensuring every eligible voter can participate freely and fully in our democracy.

What we’re seeing in North Carolina now is another coup, but instead of using physical violence alone, we are witnessing policy violence.

Forward Justice filed a lawsuit on behalf of the NC NAACP in 2018 challenging an unconstitutional photo voter ID amendment, arguing that because the legislature came to power by an illegal racial gerrymander, they lacked the authority to amend the state’s constitution. This case has been moving through the courts and was assigned to a panel of judges in December of 2023. In September of this year, the court scheduled oral arguments in the case for October 28th, 2026—one week before the midterm election and in the middle of our state’s early voting period.  As we continue to fight the 2018 amendment in court, the legislature has put yet another voter ID amendment on this November’s ballot.

Legislators and extremists across the state continue to make it clear that they are not going to stop waging war on voting rights for Black, brown and poor people. Forward Justice, The North Carolina Black Alliance, and our partners are here to make it clear that we will continue the fight to protect the constitutional right to vote for ALL North Carolinians. Because voting is more than a choice, it is a powerful tool of accountability. As officials continue to erect barriers to avoid accountability, we’ll continue to create systems to protect voters and ensure that we can hold power to account.

What we’re seeing in North Carolina now is another coup, but instead of using physical violence alone, we are witnessing policy violence. In 1898, the men who overthrew Wilmington’s government did so with guns and fire. Today, that work is done in committee rooms and board meetings, with restrictive laws, gerrymandered maps and shortened voting schedules. The weapons changed, but their goal has remained unchanged: to entrench their own power by systemically silencing Black, brown, and poor voters through any means necessary. What we know to be true is that what happens in North Carolina doesn’t stay in North Carolina, and what happens in the South affects the entire nation. If our democracy is going to be saved, all roads lead south, through us.