Tyler Swanson is young, Black, and a recent graduate of North Carolina A&T State University. North Carolina A&T is one of the largest historically black public institutions and is also known for being a historic site for youth activism during the Civil Rights movement. From the Greensboro Four to the 1969 Greensboro Uprising, the campus is imprinted with its history. A statue of the Greensboro Four sits outside Dudley Hall, the oldest building on campus.
On April 12, 2013, Tyler planned to march from Dudley Hall to the Gifford County Board of Elections with fellow students and concerned citizens to protest Senate Bill 666. The bill would eliminate the $2,500 dependent child tax deduction for parents if their child voted in the town or city where they attended college. It also eliminated one week of the early voting period and only allowed one early voting station per county. Tyler and the other organizers believed that Senate Bill 666 sought to curb the student vote, which tended to be more progressive, and so they began to plan a protest to the legislation with a march.
But the university administration stopped their plans to protest on campus.
“Of course, our administration gave us the run around, saying it will take you all six months to get paperwork processed,” lamented Tyler. “You can’t do political things on campus, but we have a big statue that honors four men who became politically involved, who changed the country.”
In search of another space, Tyler and the other students reached out to the nearby Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which gladly opened its doors to them. They also reached out to Reverend William Barber II, the head of the North Carolina Chapter of the NAACP.
“I’d read about him I was like ‘He probably won’t be able to show up, since he’s a busy man,’” said Tyler. “Reverend Barber walked in the door and Rob Stevens, who was the former Field Secretary, showed up and then our local President from the Greensboro branch, Dr. Curtis Brown, so I was like, ‘Wow, we kind of started something here. We got something going.’”
To speak with Tyler Swanson is to get a glimpse into the emerging political role of millennials. Student activists have been a huge part of many political movements, especially in North Carolina. And it is no different today. Some of what these young activists face is novel. Some is not.
What is familiar is the fervor of youth. It is difficult to find a social movement that doesn’t have strong youth participation. As Tyler says, young people tend to have less to lose, while “the elders, or other folks in the community, they have jobs and had families they had to take care of, and, y’know, college students and young people, we’re trying to find ourselves.”
What is unprecedented is that today’s youth activists are confronted with completely different communications landscape. Digital media enables rapid dissemination of information across multiple platforms. For anyone with access to a phone or a computer, the obstacles to participate in political conversations have virtually diminished. Some people suggest that social media makes political conversation vapid. A popular insult hurled at millennial activists is to call them “slacktivists,” insinuating that political activity on social media is lazy and unproductive.
To take the slacktivism narrative at its face value—i.e., kids these days would rather post on Facebook than attend a protest—is to dismiss the dynamism of both youth activism and social media. Yes, a lot of youth political participation looks like Facebook statuses, Tweets, even Vines, but social media has not only changed how we have these conversations, but also who gets to participate in these conversations. This has an immense impact, especially when traditional political offices and public spaces are not traditionally amenable to or safe for marginalized identities. Additionally, social media allows for more coalition building: movements like #BlackLivesMatter became global in scope with the use of social media. Now the movements extends to not only American police brutality, but also police brutality in places like Brazil or Israel.
Yet Tyler remains rooted in the local politics of North Carolina. His Facebook page is littered with photo tags, article links, and quotes from prominent political figures, but it is almost exclusive to his home state’s politics.
Tyler claims awareness is central to his current job at the Durham chapter of the NAACP, “I’m always involved. I keep my hands in several pots. And I sometimes get burned out, because I can’t necessarily fight everything. But I love to bring awareness to things!”
For digital natives for whom information is a social currency, awareness cannot be understated. But awareness can also be a catch-all term that could range anywhere from posting on Instagram occasionally to flyer-ing local spaces, attending town halls, and building the capacities of local chapters to register potential voters.
It compels one to remember that the #BlackLivesMatter protests that erupted communities like Ferguson and Baltimore were not made possible by social media alone. Certainly, the documentation and proliferation of videos and documents related to police brutality were hugely important. But years of grassroots organizing created the social infrastructure for a community to actually turn up in the streets and protest. It is a common experience in most local organizing efforts that any large protest is preceded by tens of little protests where only a handful of folks show up. Protests don’t tend to spontaneously arise, rather protests snowball into bigger and bigger crowds. And this is largely the work of local organizers like Tyler.
The day of the protest, April 12, remains special to Tyler, both as the culmination of community organizing efforts and as the beginning to a larger public-facing political career.
“At least 50 to 75 folks showed up and a church and community members and League of Women voters, and all of these folks began to join with us and fight this cause,” Tyler said.
Their protests continued. Two weeks later, a group of students, including Tyler, went down to the General Assembly and listened to the debate on House Bill 589, a 49-page bill that changed the requirements for elections and voting in North Carolina. Tyler believed this was yet another attack by North Carolina Republicans on the vote, designed to effectively disenfranchise those who might vote Democrat, including students. He and the other students put tape over their mouths as they listened to the debate.
“We knew it was going to affect African-Americans, the poor, and college students, so we sat in the gallery with tape over our mouths,” Tyler said. “And that tape was symbolizing that once you pass this bill, you’re shutting up North Carolinians. You’re keeping us out of the process.”
The image went viral.
“We had no idea that this was gonna go viral or it was gonna cause a movement,” said Tyler. “We just wanted to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us and pay homage to those by continuing their legacy.”
Given his reverence for history, it makes sense then that Tyler now works for the NAACP. The NAACP, just like SNCC, continues to be a cornerstone of a lot of campus and local organizing, but it can also appear dated as people continue to find and create alternative ways to organize locally.
Ari Berman, author of Give us the Ballot, called Tyler the inheritor of the legacy of the Greensboro Four. Tyler was bashful when we brought this up— “I will never be able to fill the shoes of the A&T Four. I’m not trying to be the A&T Four.”—but did express his intent to run for John Lewis’ seat in Congress once it becomes available.
“We just wanted to make a difference, and we knew that the right to vote was such a sacred thing, because African-Americans gave their blood, shed their lives,” Tyler said. “The vote is the most precious thing, just because the stories behind it and the struggles behind it. So that’s why we wanted to make a stand.”
Tyler’s reverence for voting is probably what makes him unique in an age group that repeatedly has a low turnout at the polls. It also is probably what separates him most from a lot of other activists who feel frustrated with the electoral system and the current slate of candidates. He believes that the current candidates should be held accountable to the needs of people of color, but, at the end of the day, it is still important to still cast a ballot for one of the candidates, whomever that may be. He believes that voting is not just a component of the democratic project, but actually the first and most necessary tool of democracy.
“It sickens me a little bit when I see people of color, African-Americans in particular, talking ‘bout how they don’t vote or they shouldn’t vote or not encouraging folks to vote when our grandparents and our great-grandparents did not have that right and had to fight so hard to get that right,” Tyler said. “So when you tell folks that you’re not voting and that you shouldn’t vote, to me, it’s like you’re stepping on the grave of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, who were three civil rights workers in ’64 who were killed in Mississippi for registering black people to vote. To Fannie Lou Hamer and so many others.”
Voting remains just one of many political fronts for youth activists, alongside criminal justice reform, income inequality, and gender and sexuality rights. Tyler runs the circuit of protests: in one week, he’s at a Democracy Awakening march to fight for a $15 per hour minimum wage, then a gathering to combat House Bill 2, then a project working on building college chapters of the NAACP in preparation for the 2016 election. Like any good millennial activist, he is attentive to the issues and their intersections, not obligated to a single-issue protest.
If the courts decide to uphold House Bill 589, then Tyler is unsure what might come next. But he plans to remain vigilant.
“And the reason why I think we have to is because many have paved the way for us, so many, so much blood, and sweat, and tears have been shed just for us to do what we’re doing today,” said Tyler. “And I think only a selfish person could not see it, could not join the cause, not to champion and fight, because we owe this to this world. We owe it to the future generations, so that one day, fifty years from now, my children, your children, whoever’s children, won’t have to be fighting for voting rights, won’t have to be fighting to make sure that education is properly funded, and and one thing that we have to make sure, that we have to make sure to get a victory, is the right to vote. Because when you have the right to vote, without it being denied or abridged, we can see education being funded, we can see criminal justice reform, because all those issues are, are on the ballot. So we have to keep this fight up.”
