Crosby estimated that perhaps 25,000 of the roughly 125,000 eligible black voters in the state could read and write. (He shortchanged North Carolina’s blacks; the 1900 US Census listed 59,597 literate blacks of voting age.) Crosby hoped to head off the grandfather clause by conceding poll taxes and literacy tests but nothing more. He suggested disenfranchising 100,000 blacks but allowing 25,000 literate black men to vote. He was ignored .
Other black leaders hastily formed a State Negro Council that met in Raleigh. It was led by Congressman White, who advised blacks to leave the state if the amendment passed. Such an exodus would deprive whites of cheap black labor. But John C. Dancy, serving as the council’s secretary, hustled to outmaneuver White. Dancy rammed through a tepid resolution requesting that Democrats not pass any laws that might “blunt our aspirations , ruin our manhood, and lessen our usefulness as citizens.”
Even that watered-down resolution was rebuffed. On February 21 , 1899, just seven weeks after the legislature convened, it approved the suffrage amendment and the grandfather clause by overwhelming margins: 42 to 6 in the state senate and 81 to 27 in the house.
Louisiana’s grandfather clause had been passed by the state legislature as an amendment to the state constitution, but Charles Aycock wanted the North Carolina amendment approved by a popular vote. Confident that Democrats could once again rely on intimidation and fraud to restrict black voting, he argued that the amendment would carry greater weight nationally if passed by the state’s white citizens and not just its politicians. The legislature approved the amendment as a referendum to be put to a statewide vote in an August 1900 election that would also select a governor. The voting was moved up from the customary November date to give the federal government less time to intervene.
Daniels and Simmons launched a campaign to build public support. The entire amendment hinged on support for the grandfather clause. Without the clause, the amendment would disenfranchise too many white voters. The two men decided that Daniels would take an extended trip through Louisiana “to make a calm study of this question,” as Daniels put it. But it was no study. It was a propaganda campaign to convince North Carolina’s white voters that the white men of Louisiana had devised an unassailable tool to disenfranchise many blacks without punishing poor, illiterate whites.
Daniels, always alert for opportunities to pursue political gain under the guise of journalism, would publish reports on his journey in the News and Observer. He did not want to pay his own expenses, so Simmons arranged for the state Democratic Party to cover the cost of the trip. That eliminated any pretense that Daniels was on an objective newspaper pursuit. But he had not bought a purely journalistic enterprise when he purchased the News and Observer. He had bought a political weapon.
Daniels began his mission in the spring of 1900 with the drive and curiosity of a journalist and the cool calculation of a politician. In Louisiana, he met with white farmers and reporters and county sheriffs. His reputation as an unyielding white supremacist had preceded him, and the state’s leading politicians lined up to greet him. Daniels stayed in private homes and was served sumptuous meals. He described his trip as “one of the most pleasantest of my life.”
Without telling his readers that the trip had been paid for by the Democratic Party, Daniels filed dispatches from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Thibodaux. Few readers were surprised when he reported that his “investigation” had found widespread support among Louisiana’s white voters for the amendment and the grandfather clause.
Daniels reported that Louisiana had found a way to protect “uneducated voters … of old American stock.” He interviewed Judge E. B. Kruttschnitt, a bombastic white supremacist who had helped draft Louisiana’s amendment. The judge said of the law: “It does not deprive anyone of the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude but it catches the ignorant Negro just the same.”
The Louisiana law had been in effect for several months—long enough for Daniels to judge how thoroughly it disenfranchised blacks not just on paper but also in practice. He traveled to New Orleans, where he interviewed the parish registrar. He was delighted when the registrar opened his books to reveal that in the most recent city election the new law had helped reduce the number of black voters from 14,117 to 1,493.
Buried deep in Daniels’s story the next day was a curious aside related by the registrar. He mentioned that seven mulattoes had been permitted to vote after signing affidavits attesting that their white fathers or grandfathers had voted prior to 1867. “No questions were asked,” the registrar told Daniels. The exceptions had potential consequences for North Carolina, where many blacks with white ancestors might be able to prove that their fathers or grandfathers had voted three decades earlier. Daniels did not address the issue.
The next day, Daniels’s article celebrated the salutary effects of the grandfather clause in New Orleans. The story was headlined: IT HAS ELIMINATED THE NEGRO —BUT THE AMENDMENT IN LOUISIANA GUARANTEES TO EVERY WHITE MAN THE RIGHT TO VOTE .
In his next dispatch a day later, Daniels reported that the amendment had not permitted every illiterate white man in Louisiana to vote. A group of immigrants, many of them Italian, had been stricken from the polls by the new law. Previously, immigrants had been permitted to vote if they promised to pursue citizenship. Now, only citizens could vote. Daniels amended his previous article to specify that no native-born white man in Louisiana had been denied the vote. The headline above his article injected a note of nativism into North Carolina’s white supremacy campaign of 1900: IT IS AN AMERICAN WHITE ROLL .
For his next installment, Daniels traveled to the sugar-industry town of Thibodaux to speak to “the Acadians,” known in Louisiana as Cajuns. He reasoned that because Cajuns had high illiteracy rates, their voting experience would provide the ultimate test of the grandfather clause. Daniels interviewed four white men—a judge, a lawyer, a sheriff, and a former US congressman. Each man assured Daniels that the grandfather clause had been a boon to illiterate Cajuns by exempting them from literacy tests because their fathers or grandfathers had voted prior to 1867.
Daniels was told that the amendment had improved race relations by sharply reducing black votes, which whites considered divisive. In one parish that contained twenty-five hundred black men of voting age, not one had dared register to vote in the most recent election, he reported. In a neighboring parish, where blacks had held a five-hundred-vote advantage prior to the amendment, only forty blacks had registered to vote. “The election was perfectly fair,” a white judge assured Daniels.
The next day, a front-page headline above Daniels’s story read: CREOLES LIKE THE AMENDMENT . A subhead added: IT WORKS TO PERFECT SATISFACTION OF THE EDUCATED AND UNEDUCATED WHITES IN THE SUGAR DISTRICT .
To test how ruthlessly the grandfather clause had robbed blacks of the vote in rural areas with large black populations, Daniels traveled to St. Joseph, a black farming town. He sketched the history of the surrounding parishes, set in what he described as Louisiana’s black belt. During Reconstruction, he reported, whites in the area had suffered the same indignities of Negro rule endured by whites in North Carolina in the 1890s:
Government was just as bad as could be. There were negro sheriffs, negro clerks, a negro State Senator—negroes were in complete control of everything until it grew intolerable. It was only by an almost superhuman effort in 1876 that the white people were able to wrest control of the government from the blacks … they had a revolution not unlike that in Wilmington … They took their ballots and their guns and they drove out the negro politicians and carpet baggers just as the people of Wilmington did in 1898.
C. C. Cordill, a state senator, told Daniels that prior to the amendment, 3,000 blacks and 380 whites had registered to vote in his local parish. In the most recent election after the amendment, registered white voters had outnumbered blacks 369 to 14. “The negro being eliminated,” Cordill said, “the election was perfectly fair.”
It certainl
y seemed so to Daniels. His dispatch the next day reported that eliminating the black vote had eliminated fraud. Only black voters committed fraud, he argued. And with no prospect of black voters or black officials, he wrote, white men were assured of free and fair elections. And with blacks removed from both the polls and public office, there was no need for white men to resort to violence.
What the amendment has done for this black belt of Louisiana, it will do for the black belt of North Carolina, and make unnecessary the strenuous struggle which the white men had to adopt in 1898 to secure their counties from negro domination.
In his final dispatch from Louisiana, Daniels summarized the achievements of the grandfather clause:
1. Eliminating the Negro .
2. Guaranteeing the right to vote to every white man, whether educated or not.
3. Purifying politics.
The grandfather clause “works like a charm” in Louisiana, he told his readers. “Why should not North Carolina ‘go and do likewise’?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Leave It to the Whites
A S DEMOCRATS AWAITED the August 1900 vote on the amendment, another election had played out in Wilmington more than a year earlier. This one was preordained. By overthrowing the city government and crushing black aspirations in November 1898, the state’s white supremacists had guaranteed a sanctioned electoral municipal victory in Wilmington in March 1899 that validated their coup four months earlier. Once again, they threatened and intimidated black voters—this time with even greater success. Only twenty-one of Wilmington’s black citizens registered to vote, and only five turned up at the polls.
No Republican or Populist dared run against the aldermen appointed by the coup leaders. Running unopposed, the white supremacist aldermen who had been “elected” in November were “reelected” to two-year terms by the city’s white voters. Among those candidates were two of the men who had directed the mobs on November 10, Hugh MacRae and J. Allan Taylor.
Mayor Waddell was challenged by two white supremacist Democrats, John J. Fowler and Frank Stedman, in the race for mayor. Fowler was a former Wilmington mayor who, while serving as a magistrate, had declined to protect Police Chief Melton from the mob on November 10. Stedman was a member of the Committee of Twenty-Five who nonetheless had helped the young black lawyer Armond Scott get safely out of Wilmington. Stedman had also rescued Deputy Sheriff French, a fellow Mason, from the lynch mob on November 10. But neither Fowler nor Stedman possessed Waddell’s white supremacist pedigree, burnished by his central role in the November coup. And neither was a match for him as a public speaker. Waddell cruised to victory for a full term as mayor with an annual salary approaching $2,000, nearly double the $1,000 paid to his predecessor, the exiled Mayor Wright.
Waddell continued to deliver speeches throughout 1899, reveling in his notoriety. He dared federal authorities to interfere in North Carolina’s white supremacist citadel along the Cape Fear. If the suffrage amendment passed, Waddell assured white voters, “there aren’t enough soldiers in the US Army to make whites give up the vote.”
Waddell’s new city government erased lingering vestiges of the black experience in Wilmington. His aldermen took aim at the annual African holiday, Jonkonnu, in which blacks paraded during the Christmas holidays, wearing costumes and masks as they sang, banged drums, and knocked on doors seeking candy and coins. Six weeks after the November 10 killings, the aldermen had passed a law prohibiting the wearing of costumes or masks, with a hefty fine of $10. Jonkonnu ended. Whites soon appropriated the holiday. Young white boys began mocking blacks by dressing in wild costumes and darting through the streets, begging for coins.
The annual Emancipation Day celebrations also ended abruptly. They had been a widely attended New Year’s Day spectacle for the previous three decades, with parades, music, and speeches celebrating black freedom and achievement. But there was no parade on New Year’s Day in 1899. Blacks marked the day quietly indoors, in their homes and churches.
In Raleigh, the new Democratic state legislature of 1899 moved quickly to codify segregationist customs into law. Like other Southern states, North Carolina had practiced an ingrained, if generally unlegislated, system of segregation for decades. White supremacists who had been advocating legally mandated segregation since the early 1890s had been blocked by Fusionist control of the legislature. In Wilmington, blacks in the 1880s had defied custom by mixing with whites in public places. In 1885, a visiting black journalist from Boston, T. McCants Stewart, was surprised when he was able to eat beside whites in restaurants in Wilmington.
But in 1899, the Democratic legislature passed the state’s first formal Jim Crow law, requiring segregated train compartments. Railroad companies complained that the law would require them to build separate cars for each race. They also pointed out that whites would lose the services of their black servants while riding on trains. The bill was amended to allow the use of partitions within train cars and to permit black servants to sit with their employers in white sections.
Democrats also proposed a bill to punish “fornication and adultery between the negros and whites,” punishable by a prison sentence of up to five years. The proposal was mocked mercilessly by Republicans. A white legislator from western North Carolina pointed out a fatal flaw: if the law passed, he said, almost every man in the state house would have to plead guilty. A white Republican judge joked that “nine times out of ten, if you will chase down the fellows who are trying to stir up race prejudice, you will find that the most vigorous one is sleeping with a negro woman.” In Washington, Congressman George White invited members of the US House to accompany him to North Carolina to see for themselves the state’s preponderance of mulattoes—evidence, White said, of the widespread crime of sex between the races. The bill died without a vote.
The train car segregation law was just the beginning of a deluge of Jim Crow laws in North Carolina. Over the next few years, new legislation would mandate separate black and white facilities from the cradle to the grave—from hospitals to schools to cemeteries. Jim Crow laws soon required segregated toilets, water fountains, cinemas, swimming pools, and public parks—among them whites-only Hugh MacRae Park in Wilmington. Black cadavers could be sent only to black medical schools. White and black children used different textbooks.
In June 1899, Wilmington’s new city government rushed to implement the Jim Crow train law locally. Trains were fitted with partitions that divided coaches by race. The board argued that the law was not discriminatory, because black passengers would be given a choice of segregated first- or second-class seating.
Several more Jim Crow laws followed. One required whites to sit in the front of streetcars and blacks in the rear. Exceptions were made for black nurses or attendants caring for white children or the infirm. (The first passenger charged under the new law was a white man who insisted on sitting in his favorite seat at the back of a car.) Another Jim Crow law mandated that black and white witnesses swear oaths on separate Bibles in city courtrooms. A white judge had complained that “both races have kissed the same Bible.”
North Carolina’s Republican US senator Jeter Pritchard twice offered resolutions demanding that the Senate declare the grandfather clause a violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Both attempts failed. Governor Russell advised Republicans not to worry about the suffrage amendment; he predicted that the courts would declare it unconstitutional. Russell went to Washington to try to persuade the McKinley administration to mount political and legal challenges to the suffrage amendment, but he was rebuffed. Dejected, he returned to Raleigh and decided not to run for reelection in the August 1900 voting.
On his way out of office, Russell suggested that the state’s black citizens accept the inevitable. “My advice to the colored people is to let the amendment thing alone,” he told black Republicans. “They are helpless . Let them leave it to the whites.”
Charles Aycock, campaigning for Russell’s job, ridiculed the jowly governor. Ay
cock was the opposite of the phlegmatic Russell. He was slender and vigorous, with a prominent chin, a receding hairline, and a commanding stage presence. He had been a popular public speaker at the University of North Carolina, graduating with honors in essay writing and oratory. During the white supremacy campaign of 1898, Aycock had rivaled Waddell in his ability to rouse white supremacists to violence.
On the campaign trail in 1900, Aycock’s supporters rolled out an intimidating symbol of white violence: one of the rapid-fire guns from the Wilmington riot. Aycock was often greeted by Red Shirt brigades and young women who wore white dresses to symbolize purity. In the eastern North Carolina town of Laurinburg one oppressively hot day in July 1900, several hundred sunburned Red Shirts welcomed Aycock’s train. The Red Shirt commander wore a white hat, white trousers, and a brilliant red blouse as he rode a cantering horse at the head of a column of mounted men. Aycock stepped out of the train and was swept from the platform by several Red Shirts, who carried him off on their shoulders.
On the day Aycock accepted the Democratic nomination for governor in April 1900, he delivered a memorable tribute to white supremacy at the Academy of Music in downtown Raleigh. Two thousand white Democrats howled and cheered for several minutes after the nomination was announced. A band played “Dixie” as men tossed hats and handkerchiefs into the air.
“When we say the negro is unfit to rule we carry it one step further and convey the idea that he is unfit to vote,” Aycock told the crowd. “To do this we must disenfranchise the negro.”
Republicans could be as ignorant as blacks, Aycock went on, to more shouts and foot stomping. “We have taught them much in the past two years in the University of White Supremacy,” he said. “We will graduate them in August next with a diploma that will entitle them to form a genuine white man’s party. Then we shall have no more revolutions in Wilmington.”
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