Complicated nature of race relations
Daniels warns against viewing race relations between blacks and whites anachronistically and judgmentally. Reconstruction-era politics shaped his father's racial opinions, marking a repetitive theme of his father's fear of black domination. Daniels explains that although his father witnessed the rise of black political power in eastern North Carolina during his youth, his father believed in treating blacks fairly.
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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What made you apply that to race where he couldn't, then?
- JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:
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I must say, Charlie, we're living in different times. I hadn't ever seen
the sort of uprising of the blacks and the pressing down of the whites
that occurred in the black belt of North Carolina in his youth, when the
congressman from his district was a black and the whites were
disenfranchised. The only person who could get a federal job was his
mother, who hadn't done anything to aid the Confederacy. There's an
environmental difference there. But I think that my interest in the
blacks grew to a large extent from his feeling for the underprivileged.
While he was editor, they had a lottery in Ahoskie. The American Legion
put on a lottery. A black man won it; it was an automobile.
- CHARLES EAGLES:
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[Laughter]
- JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:
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And there were some people down there said, "Well, he can't have
it." Well, the News and Observer and my
father just raised holy hell. He'd won the damn lottery, and it would be
robbery to take it away from him. And that sort of thing, there weren't
any questions in his mind. And he was always violently opposed to
lynching, and I think quite honestly. A very gentle man, very gentle man
who could fight like hell. So many of these characters in history and in
life are so complicated, Charlie, and it's hard to look from where you
sit to where he stood.
[Interruption]