ROANOKE, Alabama — Some workshops explain rules. Others restore power.
On Thursday evening, July 2, 2026, in the Community Room at the Clark Historic Landmark Site in Roanoke, Wilkie Sherard Frieson did more than lead another voter education session. He opened a civic ledger. He took questions about HBCU funding, Alabama primaries, local sheriff races, party ballots, and political representation, then placed them where they belong: in the hands of the people whose lives are shaped by those decisions.
The message was plain, urgent, and deeply Southern: follow the money, follow the ballot, follow the power.
Frieson’s workshop began with a question about Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Alabama, and particularly the long-standing funding gap affecting Alabama A&M University. What could have sounded like a narrow education policy discussion became something much larger. It became a lesson in how budgets reveal values — and how voters determine who gets the authority to write those budgets.
Federal officials have previously identified a massive disparity in funding between 1890 land-grant HBCUs and their non-HBCU land-grant counterparts. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Education announced letters to 16 governors concerning more than $12 billion in inequitable funding for land-grant HBCUs; the USDA also noted that Delaware and Ohio had equitably funded their respective institutions. The same announcement explained that the Second Morrill Act of 1890 required states with second land-grant institutions created to serve Black students to provide equitable state funding between their 1862 and 1890 land-grant institutions.
For Alabama, that history lands with painful precision. Alabama A&M University has been identified by the U.S. Department of Education as having lost out on $527,280,064 due to unbalanced funding over a 30-year period, according to reporting on the federal letter to Governor Kay Ivey.
But Frieson did not let that number remain trapped in abstraction.
A half-billion dollars is not just a number. It is classrooms that could have been modernized. It is laboratories that could have been built. It is faculty and staff who could have been better paid. It is research that could have been funded, students who could have been supported, buildings that could have been repaired, and futures that could have been widened.
“Budgets are not accidents. They are choices made by people in office — and those people get there through ballots.”
That is why his point cut so sharply: voting is economic.
When Frieson said that “schools need funding” and that voters must “follow the money,” he was not speaking in metaphor. He was naming the machinery of public life. Money moves through elected hands. Appropriations are not accidents. Budgets are not weather. They are choices made by people in office — and those people get there through ballots.
This is the civic connection too many communities are trained not to see. A neglected school, an underfunded university, an empty research lab, a struggling faculty, a town with fewer opportunities — these are not isolated misfortunes. They are political outcomes.
And if they are political outcomes, then they can be challenged politically.
That was the power of Frieson’s workshop. He did not reduce voting to slogans. He brought it down to the hard ground where people live. He showed that a ballot is not merely a symbol of citizenship. It is a tool of survival, accountability, and distribution. It determines who controls the public purse. It determines who decides whether historic institutions are repaired or ignored. It determines whether communities are funded or merely praised during campaign season.
Then the workshop turned to another difficult question: what happens when African American voters, Democratic voters, or local voters in heavily Republican areas feel pressured to take a Republican primary ballot in order to have a meaningful voice in local races — such as sheriff — while also wanting to participate in Democratic state races?
Frieson did not pretend the question was simple. That honesty mattered.
Alabama’s primary system requires voters to choose one party’s primary ballot because they cannot participate in nominating candidates for both parties in the same primary election. The Alabama Secretary of State’s FAQ explains that voters may split their ticket in a general election, but in a primary they must choose one party’s nomination process. The same FAQ explains Alabama’s crossover voting rule: under Act 2017-340, a voter who participates in one party’s primary may not vote in a different party’s primary runoff; voters who did not vote in the primary may choose either party’s runoff ballot.
On paper, that is a voting procedure. In real life, especially in communities where one party dominates local offices, it can become a painful civic bargain.
Frieson named that bargain directly. Voters may find themselves asking: Do I vote in the primary where my state-level party candidates appear? Or do I vote in the local primary where the sheriff, county officials, or other offices may effectively be decided before November? Do I use my voice where my party identity lives, or where my immediate local power is being chosen?
That is not just inconvenience. That is representation narrowed into a choice no voter should have to make lightly.
Frieson called the situation harmful because it can force voters to calculate which part of their citizenship they can afford to exercise. In his framing, the problem is not simply the existence of party primaries. The deeper problem is what happens when political imbalance leaves voters with fewer meaningful pathways to influence both local and state power.
That is why his discussion of Alabama’s Republican supermajority was important. The structure of power matters. At the start of the 2026 Alabama legislative session, Republicans held a 27–8 majority in the Senate and a 75–28 majority in the House, while also controlling the governorship, creating a Republican state government trifecta and veto-proof supermajority in both chambers, according to Ballotpedia’s 2026 legislative session summary.
In that kind of political environment, voters who are already numerically or politically marginalized must be even more strategic — not less engaged. A supermajority does not make voting meaningless. It makes voter education essential.
Because when one party can dominate the budget, the ballot, the committees, the appointments, and the rules, communities cannot afford confusion. They cannot afford to arrive at the polls without knowing which races are on which ballot. They cannot afford to ignore primaries and then discover in November that the most important local decisions have already been made. They cannot afford to treat sheriffs, school boards, commissions, legislatures, and governors as separate from the everyday conditions of community life.
Frieson’s workshop made one thing beautifully clear: voter education is not a side project. It is community defense.
It is how people learn where power sits.
It is how people learn which office controls what.
It is how people understand why a state budget affects an HBCU campus.
It is how people see that a sheriff’s race is not only about law enforcement, but about power, discretion, safety, and accountability.
It is how people connect the silence of an underfunded classroom to the noise of a campaign rally.
It is how people stop being surprised by outcomes that were decided while they were not in the room.
The Clark Historic Landmark Site was an especially fitting place for such a lesson. Historic sites are often treated as places where the past is preserved behind glass. But on July 2, history did not sit still. It spoke in the present tense.
The struggle for representation did not end with the right to vote. The struggle continued into ballot access, district lines, funding formulas, party rules, local offices, state budgets, and the civic education needed to understand them all. The names and mechanisms may change, but the question remains painfully familiar: Who gets power, and who gets left negotiating for the scraps of it?
That is why the Southern Justice Archive must preserve workshops like this one. They are not just meetings. They are records of a community thinking out loud about democracy. They capture the questions people are really asking — not in textbooks, but in county rooms, historic sites, church halls, school gyms, and community spaces across the South.
Frieson’s answer was not despair. It was discipline.
He acknowledged that the problems are complicated. HBCU underfunding is complicated. Primary election strategy is complicated. Party rules are complicated. One-party dominance is complicated. Local power is complicated.
But his conclusion was simple enough to carry home:
We have to vote. We have to vote our numbers.
That line deserves to be remembered.
Because “voting our numbers” is not merely about turnout. It is about refusing invisibility. It is about refusing to let other people decide the value of our schools, the safety of our communities, the future of our young people, or the limits of our political imagination. It is about understanding that when communities do not show up, someone else still does — and they do not leave the budget blank.
They fill it in.
They fill in the offices.
They fill in the policies.
They fill in the future.
The work before Alabama voters is not simply to vote harder, but to vote smarter. Know the ballot before election day. Know which races are decided in primaries. Know what the sheriff does. Know who controls appropriations. Know which candidates are running unopposed. Know the difference between a primary and a runoff. Know when your choice of ballot affects your next choice. Know who benefits from confusion.
And then organize accordingly.
Wilkie Sherard Frieson’s July 2 workshop was a reminder that democracy is not abstract. Democracy is a classroom. A laboratory. A county jail. A sheriff’s badge. A state appropriation. A ballot table. A runoff rule. A historic Black college waiting for what it was promised. A voter standing in line, deciding which ballot to pull, carrying more history than any one person should have to carry alone.
At the Clark Historic Landmark Site, Frieson turned civic education into civic urgency.
And the lesson was unmistakable:
The ballot is the budget. The budget is the evidence. And the people must never surrender their power to follow the money — and change where it goes.
The Southern Justice Archive
Presented By: Charlotte A. Clark-Frieson aka
“Wilkie Clark’s Daughter”
“Documenting what happened, Preserving what matters, Protecting what must endure!”
