Friends and Colleagues,

Currently, the Texas legislature is proposing several bills and measures that would make it harder for voters of color to cast their ballots. These bills would make it a felony for county election officials to keep voters informed about their voting options.  They also include provisions that increase voter intimidation through heightened access and power of partisan poll “watchers” and requirements of livestream surveillance of all polling locations in larger counties.   There are also plans to limit voter access by restricting the numbers of voting machines and preventing voting outside or in moveable structures which allowed for drive thru voting in 2020. We know that people of color spend much more time waiting to vote and are more likely to take advantage of alternative voting options like drive thru voting.  As a result, these measures would create burdensome physical as well as legal and psychological barriers to participation.

Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) and its students have been on the frontline of the fight against voter suppression for nearly eight decades. In Smith v .Allwright (1944), former PVAMU student, Lonnie Smith, took his case all the way to the Supreme Court to end whites-only primaries. In 1979, the Supreme Court in Symm v. US affirmed the rights of all college students to vote where they attend college because of a case involving PVAMU students. In the 1990s, nineteen students were falsely indicted for voter fraud. Much of this took place during the years of the Voting Rights Act protections. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg listed examples of why the VRA was still necessary in her dissent to Shelby v. Holder (2013), she points to PVAMU students. Sadly, just weeks before the 2020 election, PVAMU students were testifying in federal court about voting rights violations they experienced in 2018 in the ongoing Allen v. Waller case. The plight of these students will only get worse when county officials are emboldened by this new legislation. It is our obligation to say to these students and others across the state that, once and for all, we stood with and for them to finally end efforts to suppress their votes.

This is an important historical moment that must be met with a significant response.  The actions we take now will be as defining as the ones taken by the marchers who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis in 1965. We still watch that footage in awe, but we have the chance to have the same transformational impact for those who will be watching in the future. The lives of people of color have been made more vulnerable by a global pandemic and economic crisis that has disproportionately taken their lives and their livelihoods. Given the current political climate where racial hostilities are on par with the Jim Crow era, it is imperative that we demonstrate through tangible action the courage of our convictions.  The question is simple. Will we stand in the lineage of John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Ella Baker and other champions for civil rights or will we let the forces of racism and bigotry win this day? Will the Texas legislature enshrine second class citizenship for voters of color into Texas law on our watch? Our answer is vehemently, no.

We ask you to stand with us and openly declare that the actions they are taking are not being done in our name.  We want them to know that we do not condone their actions. In fact, we see them as racially bigoted, wrongheaded, and anti-democratic.

Signed,

Melanye Price, Director, Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice, PVAMU ‘95