Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 30
economic recession during the 1890s left white farmers
in ruin, they “turned against the bankers and railroad men
who dominated the state’s white supremacist Democratic
Party.”4
Black and white Republicans and the Populist Party
formed a political alliance that won statewide control of
the North Carolina legislature in 1894.5
The Fusion government restored the right to elect
county officials by popular vote — a right that Democrats
had stripped during Reconstruction to prevent Black
people from attaining political power in the state’s 16
Black-majority eastern counties. The Black community
demanded political power and were appointed to political
posts and won state office.6
By 1897, a Fusion government formed in Wilmington. The
mayor and police chief were Fusionist and the alliance
controlled the city government.7
Black residents held public office and positions such as
“aldermen, magistrates, deputy sheriffs, police officers
and registers of deeds”8 — and Daniels and Democratic
Party leaders were determined to destroy Black political
power. Daniels helped orchestrate the Democrats’
campaign to end the “Negro domination” in the state with
the overthrow of Wilmington’s government and all of the
city’s Black leaders following the election.9
Daniels met the chairman of the state Democratic Party,
Furnifold Simmons, a former U.S. House member,
months before the election. Zucchino notes that following
the meeting, “Daniels concluded that the Democratic
campaign ... would require three types of men — men who
could speak, the men who could write and the men who
could ride.”10
Zucchino added that the men who could speak were
effective public orators. The men who could write were
people like Josephus Daniels and other editors who
supported the Democratic Party. And the men who could
ride were the Democratic Party’s white militia, known as
Red Shirts.11
Daniels, who called the News & Observer the “militant
voice of white supremacy,” used his publication to incite
white residents in the city and the state at large. He ran
articles as part of a disinformation campaign that spread
lies about alleged Black corruption and lawlessness.12
that time,” Zucchino told NPR. “It was two-pronged. It
focused on telling white voters that black public officials
were incompetent and corrupt and utterly incapable of
governing and utterly incapable of having the intelligence
to vote and, at the same time, being sexually insatiable and
on the prowl for white women. They even used a term for
it — it was the black beast rapist.”13
One of Daniels’ targets was Alexander Manly, a Black
journalist and publisher of Wilmington’s Daily Record,
which declared on its front-age banner that it was “The
Only Negro Daily in the World.”14 Manly used his paper
to speak out against white supremacy in the city and
denounced the lynching of Black men who were murdered
for having consensual relationships with white women.15
He wrote:
Every Negro lynched is called a ‘big, burly
black brute,’ when in fact many of those who
have thus been dealt with had white men for
their fathers, and were not only ‘black’ and
‘burly’ but were sufficiently attractive for
white girls of culture and refinement to fall
in love with them as is very well known to
all... Let virtue be something more than an
excuse for them to intimidate and torture a
helpless people. Tell your men that it is no
worse for a black man to be intimate with
a white woman than for a white man to be
intimate with a colored woman. You set
yourself down as a lot of carping hypocrites
in that you cry aloud for the virtue of
your women while you seek to destroy the
morality of ours.16
Prior to the election, reporters from several northern
papers, including The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago
Tribune, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer,
The Washington Evening Star and The Washington Post,
traveled to Wilmington to cover the “race war in the
Carolinas.”17
Zucchino notes that leaders of the white-supremacy
movement met the reporters at the train station and
handed “out cigars and whiskey and arrange[d] for their
lodging” and “took them around the city and filled them
with stories of how blacks were stockpiling weapons in
black churches and were planning to rise up and riot and
take over the city.”18
“Josephus Daniels orchestrated probably the most
effective and impressive disinformation campaign up until
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