Vote HBCU Helps Black Student Voters Make Their Voices Heard

As the country prepares for another presidential election, the Vote HBCU tour is visiting 10 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to register students to vote and educate them on political organization.

Vote HBCU, a program focused on educating HBCU students on voting, started the “Say It Louder” tour Aug. 16 at Virginia State University.

Tevon Blair, a Dillard University alum and co-founder of Xceleader — a nonprofit that hosts programs like Vote HBCU to empower HBCU students — spoke with BestColleges about how they teach students to hold government leaders accountable, fight disinformation, and educate their campuses about voting laws and responsibilities.

Blair started Xceleader with Aarian Forman, a Tennessee State University alum, and Jade Agudosi, a Howard University alum, in 2018 to bring national programming to HBCUs — something they said was hard to come by.

“Vote HBCU is founded by HBCU alumni who are wanting to give back,” Blair told BestColleges. “Typically, it’s state-specific work for HBCUs or national student-specific work. It’s very rare that you’re going to have something that’s nationally for HBCUs. And so that was something that was a shocker to us that we were able to accomplish something like that.”

At each tour stop, Vote HBCU will host workshops, panels, and booths where students can register to vote.

One session focuses on getting young voters’ voices heard. Blair said HBCU students have always been at the forefront of change. Another session will not only focus on registering students to vote but will also teach students how to hold elected officials accountable after Election Day.

“I want to teach the students how to show up to committee meetings, how to make your voices heard, how to use social media to even advocate for change, too, and knowing that it’s not just registering to vote, it’s the actions you take after that,” Blair said.

Blair told BestColleges that when he was in college, the only conversation was about registering to vote and voting — it was never about issues he cared about or why his vote was meaningful.

He said that some students are voting for the first time after experiencing a global health crisis, school shootings, and inflation.

“That’s why this work is so important and for us to change that narrative of how it’s so easy to tell young people who to vote for,” he said. “The hard part is educating them about the importance of voting and providing them with resources and tools to make their own decisions as informed voters.”

On its tour, Vote HBCU will also educate students on disinformation, when someone intentionally provides them with false information. This is different from misinformation, which is unintentional.

Blair said young people, specifically HBCU students, are a target for disinformation to suppress voter participation.

According to the NAACP, there’s a long history of using advertising tactics to spread inaccurate information in an attempt to prevent voting within the African American/Black community.

Vote HBCU educates and encourages students to fact-check information with three viable sources before they post or repost anything on social media sites like X, formerly Twitter, and TikTok.

Blair said that while Vote HBCU provides the resources, students lead the work and mobilize their friends. The panels at each school will feature familiar student faces, such as the student government association president or “Mr. or Ms.” of their campus, alongside NAACP Youth and College Division members.

“What we understand is that young people having those peer-to-peer relationships and having university leaders or leaders in their community has a heavier impact,” Blair said.

Blair said every campus is different, so every tour stop will be different as well.

“There’s an HBCU culture that cannot be replicated anywhere,” Blair said. “As much as people try to replicate it, that can only exist with the students.”

Blair said he’s excited about traveling to Shaw University and Bethune-Cookman University, two schools steeped in voter rights history.

Shaw University is one of the birthplaces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which organized sit-ins and other protests during the Civil Rights Movement. Mary McLeod Bethune, a voting rights and civic engagement activist, founded Bethune-Cookman University.

Vote HBCU organizers model a lot of what they teach from HBCU students’ work during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

“Those were not just one or two students advocating for an issue. It was thousands of students coming together for a common cause,” Blair said. “And that is what I pushed to our students: that they’re working with different campus organizations to partner with them for this event.”

Vote HBCU still offers assistance to schools it won’t be visiting on the tour.

Blair recently had a call with 150 HBCU student government association representatives from over 50 schools around the country. They learned how Vote HBCU and Xceleader can be resources for them. He shared an online toolkit to help students register their peers to vote.

Inside the toolkit are sample community engagement event ideas, graphic templates, posters, and talking points on how to participate in the electoral process and fight disinformation.