Josephus Daniels's role in North Carolina's 1898 white supremacist campaign
Daniels recalls his father's role in North Carolina's 1898 white supremacist campaign. As owner of the <cite>Raleigh News and Observer</cite>, Daniels's father used the newspaper as a tool to arouse anti-black sentiment. Despite his father's campaign tactics, local blacks still maintained loyal ties to him.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Jonathan Worth Daniels, March 9-11, 1977. Interview A-0313. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- CHARLES EAGLES:
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Did your father help in that little back porch operation?
- JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:
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[Laughter]
He financed it very much, but of course he never served the food
or anything of that sort. And shortly before I was born, my father had
been the man chosen by the Democratic Party in North Carolina to go all
over the South and devise the best, and hopefully the most
constitutional, system to disenfranchise the illiterate blacks while not
disenfranchising the illiterate whites. He went down to Louisiana. Have
you seen his books?
- CHARLES EAGLES:
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Yes.
- JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:
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He went down to Louisiana and a number of places and came back with the
legislation which was adopted. A strange thing in that fight, though.
Now this shows a little about my father. There were a lot of people in
North Carolina who wanted to divide the tax rolls and give the blacks
for education only the taxes that blacks had paid, and give the whites
all the taxes the whites had paid. My father and Governor Aycock were
very much opposed to that and defeated it. Now that friendship with
Aycock is important in my father's story. I'm not sure if they went to
school together, but Aycock was my Uncle Frank's law partner. And they
were very close. And they were both tremendously interested in education
and education for both races. Of course, by the money we're spending
today, that seems ridiculous. But my father's News and
Observer in those days of that white supremacy fight, read
through the eyes of a 1975 or '6 white man today, seemed just
horrendous. They were! Oddly, in that campaign,
though, a lot of people thought Father's life was endangered by
belligerent blacks. He worked, of course, late at night on a morning
newspaper, and, unknown to him, this man Wesley Hoover had gone uptown
every night and followed him home as an unseen bodyguard. There are so
many paradoxes in race relations.