NAACP Is Asking Black Teenagers To Save Black Voting Rights

People voting in transparent ballot box on polling day — Source: Ladanifer / Getty

In November 1910, one year after its founding, the NAACP launched its official communications hub, The Crisis magazine, which documented lynching, disenfranchisement, segregation, racial terror, and the everyday humiliations of Jim Crow. Its founding editor, the civil rights activist and child advocate W.E.B. Du Bois, featured a drawing of a Black child at play on the cover to signal what the Black freedom struggle was supposed to protect.

That illustration was radical because it sent a powerful message to America that Black children were beautiful, innocent, vulnerable, deserved beauty, joy, play, pride, protection, and they ought to be loved like a revolt. For Du Bois, the “children of the sun,” as he affectionately referred to Black children, were the very point of the civil rights movement. That image of a free Black child at play was a firm rebuke to Jim Crow segregation, racial violence, and disenfranchisement of Black voters.

But Du Bois, who did not believe in whupping children or introducing them to race consciousness too early, was very clear that Black youth were not to be used up by the movement. Prepare them for careful political awakening and future struggle, absolutely. But they were not supposed to be used as disposable symbols to be sacrificed. In much of his writing about Black youth, Du Bois did not see their bodies as raw material to demonstrate adult courage, nor should they be placed in danger to shame America about its contradictions and lies.

After all, this was a Black father who had purchased a Winchester double-barreled shotgun and sat on his front porch during the 1906 Atlanta riot, ready to defend his wife and young daughter. Mr. “Talented Tenth” wrote that “If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived, I would, without hesitation, have sprayed their guts over the grass.”

Black children have always been a political fact and central to the civil rights imagination. Du Bois knew that. So did Black parents, Black teachers, churchwomen, organizers, artists, writers, and anti-lynching activists. And the NAACP knew it too. But there is a difference between seeing Black children as the future of the freedom struggle and repeatedly asking them to become its human shield. And that is the tension sitting underneath the current debate over the NAACP’s call for Black athletes to boycott public universities in Southern states, attacking Black voting rights. Those states include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.

But why is a legacy civil rights organization asking the youngest, poorest, least protected Black people in the college sports economy to do what courts, politicians, donors, alumni, lawyers, universities, and national organizations have failed to do? What we are watching unfold is a very dangerous habit in Black political life. When the adults and leaders run out of strategy, they start looking for young Black bodies to dramatize the crisis.

Because once again, Black youth are being placed at the center of a civil rights fight. Once again, their bodies, choices, futures, and labor are being asked to carry the moral weight of a nation’s failure. But there is a difference between placing a Black child on the cover of a national magazine to declare that Black childhood must be defended, and placing Black teenagers at the front of a political strategy because adults have failed to defend their voting rights.

Since last week, I have been listening to the arguments unfold. One side says Black athletes should recognize their power and withhold their labor from schools in states where lawmakers are gutting Black political power. They argue that Black bodies fill stadiums, drive television revenue, sell jerseys, elevate coaches, and enrich universities that sit comfortably inside states hostile to Black voters.

The other side says poor and working-class Black athletes should not be asked to sacrifice scholarships, NIL money, recruiting opportunities, or professional dreams because courts, lawmakers, political parties, universities, and legacy civil rights organizations failed to protect voting rights. For many families, NIL money is rent, paid debt, a parent’s medical bills, or feeding younger siblings. It is the first real institutional offer that the family has ever seen.

Both sides are touching something true. Black athletes do have power. And Black athletes are also vulnerable because universities profit from them and because the system is designed to replace them. There is something morally uneasy about asking young Black athletes to absorb the consequences of political failures created by adults with far more resources. It risks turning them into sacrificial messengers for a democracy that was just a few years ago debating whether unarmed Black children deserved to die.

If you’ve studied the history of the civil rights movement, then you know about voluntary youth-led resistance. Think about the Children’s Crusade or the young folks in Birmingham. Grown folks did not look at these vulnerable young people and say, “Y’all go sacrifice your future now.” No, those young folks were organized, trained, and protected inside a broader movement infrastructure. Not to mention, adults argued over these strategies because they understood the danger of sending youth into police violence. The point is that no movement should be asking young people to take risks without a serious structure of preparation, protection, legal defense, and community support, and adult accountability in place.

I get folks who are defending the moral tradition of Black activism and sacrifice, but we cannot treat any athlete’s reluctance as cowardice when it may actually be a sophisticated understanding of class, risk, and exploitation. Of course Black athletes can boycott, and it could scare the hell out of Southern universities and lawmakers. But do not summon these young people to the front lines unless adults have built protective networks, financial support, legal teams, and aftercare.

Legacy civil rights organizations should not have to beg Black teenagers to rescue voting rights in the twenty-first century. They should not be leaning on 17- and 18-year-olds to dramatize the urgency of a crisis that has been unfolding since the 1970s. The fact that we have arrived at a point where the burden is being shifted onto student-athletes tells us something painful about the limits of our existing civil rights machinery.

The Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision has been widely described by voting-rights advocates as a major blow to Section 2 protections, with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund saying the decision “gutted Section 2 of the VRA.” The Brennan Center has called for congressional action in response, including codified voting-rights protections and anti-gerrymandering reforms. That is the level where the main fight has to be waged. Student-athlete boycotts may be one pressure point, but they cannot become a substitute for legal, legislative, electoral, and financial power.

The NAACP’s campaign may be morally understandable. It may even be strategically useful if it is backed by serious infrastructure. Where is the scholarship guarantee? Where is the NIL replacement fund? Where is the legal defense fund? Where are the transfer pipelines? Where are the formal commitments from HBCUs, alumni, philanthropists, professional athletes, and Black donor networks? Where is the protection from retaliation by coaches, boosters, recruiters, fans, and state politicians? Where is the safety net for the kid whose only major offer came from one of these schools? Where is the plan beyond asking teenagers to be brave in public?

Without any of this infrastructure, this will become something more troubling than a boycott. It will be yet another version of America’s oldest habit of placing Black children and young people at the front of the line when adults have run out of answers.

Folks need to stop confusing youth power with adult abdication. Because if the NAACP wants to invoke the tradition of Black youth at the center of struggle, then it must also reckon with the obligation embedded in that tradition. Black youth are not the movement’s emergency fuel. They are not the backup plan when courts fail, legislatures fail, political parties fail, donors fail, universities fail, and civil rights organizations run out of strategy. They are not here to save adults from the consequences of adult failure.

And let’s be honest, the NAACP’s call is not just a boycott strategy. It admits, whether intentionally or not, that the old civil rights toolkit is not strong enough for the current machinery now arrayed against Black political power.

The right has spent the last fifty years studying the civil rights playbook. They’ve studied the lawsuits, the language, the courts, the moral appeals, the organizing campaigns, media images, and the pressure points. They’ve been in a long game and are building a counter-machine designed to survive all of it. They captured courts, funded think tanks, and built state-level power. They turned “colorblindness” into a weapon and “election integrity” into voter suppression. They turned “parents’ rights” into an attack on Black history. They turned civil rights language itself into a cudgel against Black people.

Just think about the recent discussion about Kevin Roberts, the president of the racist Heritage Foundation, his PhD in history, and his dissertation research on Black history. He is a clear example of how the archive has enemies, too. People like Roberts who’ve been building this backlash have studied the terrain, and they know the pressure points. They know the language and the law, know how civil rights victories were won, and have spent decades building systems to reverse them.

So if the right has spent decades building a machine, then our legacy civil rights organizations should not be answering white supremacist aggression with a plea to vulnerable Black teenagers to save us.