My first year of college ended a few days before my close high school friend’s did, and I flew home by way of Greensboro, North Carolina and drove home from there with her.

It’s a gorgeous town and I totally got why Karen had chosen Guilford College for her physics degree.

Google says there are seven colleges in that county, two of them HBCUs, with A&T being the largest of those in the country.

North Carolina removed the polling places from them. The excuse given (by a Republican, of course) was that there wasn’t enough parking there.

Excuse me, sir, have you ever met college students? Most of them walk everywhere. There had been no worrying about parking when those polling places were still there. You’re not fooling anybody.

I remember wanting at 19 to buy someone’s old car and my mom (I found out later) saying to her friend to say to her daughter, Go talk to her.

She did. Shawna the daughter, my sister’s age with her own sister my age, was happy to save me from becoming her. She told me about getting a job to pay for her aging car’s expenses and how it got to where she wasn’t going to university to learn anymore, she was going to work to support her car with her classes shrinking in the background and the further she got pulled down into that cycle the more she regretted it. Don’t do it.

So I kept on walking, just like almost everybody else I knew on campus.

And that’s what these kids did. Forty-five minutes each way to the nearest polling place, making a rally of it, making our future hopeful again by refusing to let their rights be taken away from them or anybody else if they could help it. Here’s how it’s done: you go. You do.

You refuse to let them not hear your voice.