About 2000 students from A&M University in Prairie View Texas, marched 7 miles to the county courthouse to protest yet another attempt by local authorities to supress their right to vote.

Prairie View is a mostly white, mostly rural county in Texas. A&M Prairie View is one of Texas historically "Black" universities. It's campus creates a kind of "bubble" demographic in the whole area. This from diarist sonia of Burnt Orange Report, one of the blogs that broke the story :

Early voting starts today in Texas. In Waller County, a primarily rural county about 60 miles outside Houston, the county made the decision to offer only one early voting location: at the County Courthouse in Hempstead, TX, the county seat.

Prairie View A&M students organized to protest the decision, because they felt it hindered their ability to vote. For background, Prairie View A&M is one of Texas' historically Black universities. It has a very different demographic feel than the rest of the county. There has been a long history of dispute over what the students feel is disenfranchisement. There was a lot of outrage in 2006, when students felt they were unfairly denied the right to vote when their registrations somehow did not get processed.

It's amazing that the kind of chicanery, corruption and deceit that prompted the Selma / Montgomery march is exactly the kind of excuses county officials are giving : If there are not enough poll workers, then they don't have enough machines, if it is not enough machines, then it's the need to have the voting on a state own building (the main reason for them to deny the university a polling place), and if it is not the lack of a building, it's always something else.

What is exciting about this march is that, of the 3,000 eligible voters that are on campus, almost 2,000 of them marched for two and a half hours and it looks like with the blessing of none other than Barack Obama who wrote a letter to the Justice Department on their behalf.

What's even more exciting due to the simplicity of the act is the actual purpose of their going directly to the courthouse : They were there to queue at the only polling place the county had opened (which was in the county courthouse) and basically become a bureaucratic inconvenience. With only two machines available, they tied up the place all day and night.

They had what some consider half a victory : The county opened three new polling places, all with extended hours. Yet they continue to deny the university students a place to poll on campus.

Forty-two years after the march from Selma to Montgomery, these young people, these millennials, are the ones who are coming out in full force to the primaries; demanding the government to respect the integrity of their vote. They are citizen activists, they are politically networked and they are hell bent on making 2008 the year they change the course of US history.

It's just going to be a wild ride to November 2nd and into the general elections.