Advocates register voters after Supreme Court victory over gerrymandering

By Dwayne Fatherree

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When Monica Clarke began working at Alabama A&M University in Huntsville, she was looking for something, a calling, that she could bring to her work.

As the school's service and learning coordinator, she was in contact with students daily, so she was in a prime position to not only be an observer but also an influencer on the young men and women at the college.

That was in 2016, almost three years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down key portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its Shelby County v. Holder decision. And what she found out about the students at A&M, a historically Black university, scared her.

"I'm gonna go out on a ledge and say over 90% of our students were not registered to vote," Clarke said. "It was this huge wakeup call for me and others who were working with me. We were kind of shocked, kind of scared, kind of surprised all of the above and not just that they weren't registered, but they didn't even want to register. They had such a negative view of voter registration, of voting, of the government and police."

That was when she became an activist for voting rights, growing the university's voter registration service into a mission unto itself. And, as the nation notes the 10th anniversary of the Shelby decision this weekend, Clarke sees the same forces that created the need for the Voting Rights Act still threatening people of color.

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