The Struggle for Voting Rights at Colleges

The course will be a historical and interdisciplinary examination of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and outlawed age discrimination, using it as a prism through which to examine both the history of disenfranchisement and the fight for voting rights in the United States. The role of college communities, particularly at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, will be the central focus. The course will connect four institutions in the US that have been the sites of voting rights struggles and major litigation with a section held at each institution – Bard College, Tuskegee University, North Carolina A&T, and Prairie View A&M University. The history of the struggle at each institution will be examined, including organizing, protest, advocacy, and litigation, in order to elucidate methods and strategies of supporting and defending basic constitutional rights and elucidating, more broadly, strategies for organizing against anti-democratic and authoritarian actions. The course is co-designed by faculty from the respective institutions and will be taught simultaneously, with key assignments shared by the campus sites with the aim of facilitating synchronous classroom discussions and collaborations between the different sites. By the end of the course, students will have developed an understanding of the history of the struggle for student voting rights and the challenges to those rights that are being faced today.

The materials developed for this course are Open Educational Resources and free to use for non-commercial purposes. View the course materials.