Blake Stoner is trading sun and sand for voter registration cards.
Instead of going to Florida or California for spring break, the Morehouse College sophomore will join dozens of other students from the Atlanta University Center in Ferguson, Mo., where they will help register people to vote as part of the Atlanta NAACP's Voter Registration Alternative Spring Break campaign.
Ferguson, located outside of St. Louis, became a flash point last August after a white police office shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. Protests erupted across the country following the shooting and again after a grand jury declined to indict the the officer.
“We like to act on emotion,” said Stoner, an economics major and founder of the nonprofit ONEmakesChange, a social change network. “We don’t think long term or strategically about how to make things happen.” Students were galvanized after the Ferguson incident — some even went to protest, he said. But after winter break, the momentum was lost. “People came back,” he said. “Everyone forgot about it. If we want justice to happen, we can’t just forget about it.”
About 50 student volunteers from Morehouse, Clark Atlanta University and Spelman College will take a chartered bus Saturday to Ferguson to register voters ahead of April 7 municipal elections.
The student trip is part of the NAACP’s continuing mission and also honors the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.
“This is part of a stance that people are taking that African American lives do matter,” said Haleigh R. Hoskins, 18, a Spelman College freshman, who plans to go to Ferguson. “We’ve come a long way, yet this is still happening.”
Richard Rose, the newly elected president of the Atlanta branch, said the organization chose voter registration in Ferguson and surrounding cities to show residents and students that voting can lead to change.
“There is no better example of how voter registration can make a difference than Ferguson, Mo.,” he said in a statement.
Nearly 70 percent of Ferguson residents are African American. Yet, at the time of the shooting, one of six council members was black and the school board consisted of six whites and one Hispanic. A Department of Justice probe found that police in Ferguson routinely discriminate against African Americans.
Traditionally, voter turnout has been low in municipal elections. In 2013, for instance, 6 percent of eligible black voters went to the polls, compared to 17 percent of whites, according to the Washington Post, based on data from Catalist.
“I resolved that the NAACP needed to reestablish itself within the community and focus on young people, who must lead us in the future,”,” said Rose, who graduated from then Clark College in 1970. It wasn’t a hard sell. Rose thinks with enough time, they could have filled three buses.
“This is a good way for them to become energized. This is not a new issue. It’s a new sense of outrage.”
For Stoner, the bus ride to Ferguson will not be unlike similar journeys his grandfather, Peter Stoner, made decades ago to register black voters in the deep South during the turbulent civil rights movement.
His grandfather, now a 75-year-old Mississippi author and businessman, was a Freedom Rider, and at various times worked for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
In the 1960s, Stoner, a native of Pennsylvania, moved to Chicago for school and work. While there, he joined other young people who wanted to make a change.
He’s proud to see his grandson also take an interest in making the nation a better place for everyone.
“We’re glad to see him take an interest,” he said. “We’re proud.”
About the Author
