The more I read about the true history of North Carolina, especially from the time leading up to the Civil War through Reconstruction, the more amazed I am at how distorted our own heritage has become. Many of us ride by schools named after former governors without even thinking about what kind of people those men used to be. This time of year, we drive through towns and cities on the way to various beaches without even giving a thought to what might have taken place there in the past. Indian massacres, Revolutionary War skirmishes, slave revolts, Civil War battles, Klan violence, Jim Crow segregation, sharecropping, textile mills, pine tar, cotton and tobacco.
Most of us who grew up in this state have a general idea of our history and some images of the darker side of its past; many of us remember, e.g., the KKK billboards in Smithfield and a few other towns, but the vast majority of us don't know just how badly our state's past has been either twisted or totally ignored to suit, unfortunatel,y the political aims of a few. As both a student and teacher of history, for example, I had often heard the term "rich man's war, poor man's fight," but it wasn't perhaps until I had read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain that I began to truly understand its meaning. I later read Timothy Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name and actually became proud of North Carolina's stance during the Civil War, of how, e.g., the majority of people in this state did not want to secede, and how thousands even fought against the Confederacy. Now, I am in the middle of a book that has at the same time opened my eyes yet made me feel ashamed of politics and some of our most famous political leaders in North Carolina.
Democracy Betrayed, edited by David Cecelski and Timothy Tyson, tells the ugly, ugly story of white supremacist politics, in 1898 Wilmington in particular, but also of how that reactionary mindset was grown and nurtured by a select few to seep through and poison all of North Carolina and the South, killing what could have been the reformation of democracy into a truly democratic collaboration of the common people, white and black, working together to better themselves, class over race. What instead happened was the destruction of the Fusion political effort and the turning of poor whites against their black brothers with whom they had so much more in common than the white planter and industrial elites who dooped them with the vilest form of the race card. Of course blacks lost big, but whites lost too; they lost so much more than the inkling of false and unsubstantiated pride that they may have gained.
Democracy Betrayed is indeed an accurate title for this collection of essays describing the background, actual events, and results of the white supremacist coup d'etat in Wilmington of 1898, the repercussions from which our entire country is still suffering.
Democracy Betrayed is indeed an accurate title for this collection of essays describing the background, actual events, and results of the white supremacist coup d'etat in Wilmington of 1898, the repercussions from which our entire country is still suffering.
I hope you will become familiar with these events, and then maybe you too will wonder why in this day and age we still have schools in this state named after such public white supremacists, and you might also ponder like me as to how their statues in the old Capitol park along with a statue of Josephus Daniels just a few blocks away can stand for so long uncontested. Aycock recanted his racist attitudes before his death, devoting the final years of his life to education for all of North Carolina's children, but I have yet to find any evidence that either Daniels or Gov. J. Melville Broughton ever publicly repented (the high school is actually named after his Uncle Needham). Perhaps the times were different, but did that give those holding powerful positions the right to go beyond what was accepted and act publicly to encourage and reinforce a social system that was so unfair and unjust? Dirty politics is bad enough, but invoking (albeit in error) "the bloody shirt" and airing their inflammatory opinions just led to further violence and oppression of our state's African Americans, so shame on us.
Statue of Josephus Daniels, on McDowell Street, across from the News and Observer building