NORTH CAROLINA STATE CONFERENCE OF THE NAACP, ET. AL
V.
PATRICK LLOYD MCCRORY, ET AL.
United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina
Civ. No. 1:13-cv-658
Hon. Thomas D. Schroeder, Hon. Joi E. Peake
Expert Report of James L. Leloudis II, Ph.D.
April 11, 2014
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I.
SUMMARY OF OPINIONS .................................................................................................. 2
II.
Background and Qualifications .............................................................................................. 2
III.
Materials reviewed ................................................................................................................. 3
IV.
Discussion .............................................................................................................................. 3
V.
A.
Race, Voting Rights, and Democracy ................................................................................. 4
B.
Civil War to Post-Reconstruction and Impact of Sharecropping Economy........................ 5
C.
Sharecropping and Economic Subjugation ......................................................................... 9
D.
From Fusion Politics to the Wilmington Riot and Jim Crow Economy ........................... 10
E.
The Long Civil Rights Movement to 1980s Judicial Intervention .................................... 21
F.
Gingles v. Edmisten and Judicial Intervention .................................................................. 29
G.
Conservative Electoral Victory and House Bill 589: 2010 to Present .............................. 32
Conclusion............................................................................................................................ 34
I.
SUMMARY OF OPINIONS 1
My name is James L. Leloudis II. I have taught history at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill for 25 years, with a focus on North Carolina and the American South.
I have published extensively on the history of the state and region, and my scholarship has won
awards from the nation's leading professional associations in my field.
I was retained by the NAACP Plaintiffs in this case to assess whether there is a history of
racial discrimination in North Carolina, specifically with respect to voting practices. Based on
my 37 years of researching, writing, and teaching in this field, and having reviewed published
works by historians of race and politics in the American South, newspapers from the time period
covered by this declaration, the public laws of North Carolina, archival sources for individuals
and institutions, and reports from various federal and state agencies, it is my opinion that:
•
North Carolina has a long and cyclical history of struggle over minority voting rights,
from the time of Reconstruction to the present day.
•
Throughout the period covered in this declaration, political campaigns have been
characterized by racial appeals, both overt and subtle.
•
Over the last century and a half, North Carolina leaders have employed a variety of
measures to limit the rights of minority citizens to register, to vote, and to participate
in the democratic process. Those measures have included vigilante violence, a
literacy test and poll tax, multi- member legislative districts, the prohibition of singleshot voting, and a host of other regulations regarding the preparation of ballots,
procedures for challenging electors' right to register and to vote, and the monitoring
of polling sites by election judges.
•
Historically, when minority voting rights have been constrained, North Carolina state
government has been decidedly unresponsive to minority concerns and interests
related to social and economic policy. That lack of responsiveness has perpetuated
minority disadvantages in employment and education, further hindering the ability of
minority populations to participate fully and freely in the political process.
•
House Bill 589 represents the latest chapter in the long struggle over minority voting
rights in North Carolina, and in its origins and provisions recapitulates the history of
earlier eras.
Each of these opinions is explained and supported in detail below.
II.
BACKGROUND AND QUALIFICATIONS
My name is James L. Leloudis II. I am employed as Professor of History at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I received a B.A. degree, with highest honors, from
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1977), an M.A. degree from Northwestern
University (1979), and a Ph.D. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
1
This report is based on information that is currently available for my review. Discovery in this matter is
ongoing. Therefore, I reserve the right to update my report and opinions upon review of any additional documents
or information previously unavailable to me.
(1989). My primary training was in the history of the United States, with a specialization in the
history of race, politics, labor, and reform in the 19th- and 20th -century American South. For the
past 25 years I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses in my area of specialization. I
have published four books, nine articles, and numerous book reviews. I have also made more
than 50 presentations to academic and lay audiences.
My scholarship has won a number of prestigious awards, including the Louis Pelzer Prize
for the best essay by a graduate student (1982, Organization for American Historians), the Philip
Taft Labor History Award for the best book on the history of labor (1988, New York State
School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University), the Merle Curti Award for the best
book on American social history (1988, Organization of American Historians), the Albert J.
Beveridge Award for the best book on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada
(1988, American Historical Association), the Mayflower Cup for the best non-fiction work on
North Carolina (1996, North Carolina Literary and Historical Association), and the North
Caroliniana Society Award for the best work on North Carolina history (2010, North Caroliniana
Society).
In 1982, as a graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, I conducted research that became part of the expert testimony provided by Professor Harry
Watson in Gingles v. Edmisten.2 A detailed record of my professional qualifications is set forth
in the attached curriculum vitae, which I prepared and know to be accurate.
III.
MATERIALS REVIEWED
I have conducted qualitative research on the history of race, voting rights, and voter
suppression in North Carolina, from the end of the Civil War to the present. Sources that I have
consulted include: published works by historians of race and politics in the American South,
newspapers from the time period covered by this declaration, the public laws of North Carolina,
archival sources for individuals and institutions, court cases, and reports from various federal and
state agencies.
IV.
DISCUSSION
House Bill 589 is best understood in the context of three historical periods of political
realignment in which African Americans' access to the franchise in North Carolina has been
significantly redefined. This history of voting rights in the state reflects significant ebbs and
flows in black citizens' ability to exercise fundamental constitutional rights.
This expert report details that history, reviewing fierce conflict between highly successful
efforts to expand access to voting rights to all citizens, especially African Americans, and
campaigns to impose extreme restrictions on African Americans' access to the franchise. The
declaration begins with the Civil War and Reconstruction era and concludes with the present
day. This declaration additionally highlights the origins and persistent effects of race-based and
2
Gingles v. Edmisten, 590 F. Supp. 345 (1984).
3
economic subjugation of blacks in North Carolina that continues to limit the opportunities of
African Americans and other minorities to exercise voting rights.
A.
Race, Voting Rights, and Democracy
In North Carolina—as in the nation—race and democratic rights have been, and remain,
tightly intertwined. Part of slavery's legacy has been to position race and African Americans'
rights as the pivot point in a long contest between Conservative and Progressive philosophies
over one of the most fundamental privileges of citizenship: the right to vote. That contest has
often played out in the context of party rivalry, but at its core it is driven by differences in
ideology in interplay with racial prejudice and our national history of racial discrimination, rather
than by partisanship.
Traditionally, Conservatives argue that the state exists solely to defend property rights
and preserve public order, and that its authority is limited by a contract with its subjects, who
surrender individual liberty only so far as "their own welfare is increased and their property
protected."3 By the same logic, those without property have no standing to make demands on
government or the wealth of others. Historically, that principle has informed arguments for a
limited franchise.
Progressives, on the other hand, embrace a range of philosophical traditions, from
Utilitarianism to Social Christianity, that are "suspicious of the unbridled self." 4 Theirs is a
relational system of ethics. The purpose of government is to sustain a commonwealth in which
citizens relate to one another through a web of rights and mutual obligations. Progressives place
a premium on political participation, because it is in democratic exchange that citizens shape the
values that govern the exercise of state power.
Over time, party labels have mapped onto these principles in shifting ways. In the
decades immediately after the Civil War, Conservatives called themselves Democrats,
campaigned for limited social provision, and took the vote from black men, while Republicans
identified as Progressives, championed an expansive state, and fought for equality at the ballot
box. Then, beginning in the middle of the 20th century, those positions flipped. Grassroots
activists and national leaders reshaped the Democratic Party to support the advancement of civil
rights, and Republicans aligned themselves as advocates for small government, limited federal
involvement in state and local affairs, and a protective stance toward citizenship and its attendant
rights.
The contest over voting rights that runs through those changes of party label and
alignment cannot be explained by partisanship. There has been something far more fundamental
at stake: racial equality and the right of all citizens to participate fully in a democratic society.
When racial equality has been denied, and when race has been used for partisan gain or as a
mechanism of exclusion from the democratic polity, the result has been a society in which vast
numbers of citizens—not only racial minorities—have had their voices silenced and their right to
fair and effective representation compromised.
3
Stephens, Locke, Jefferson, and the Justices, 19.
Frey, America's Economic Moralists, 4. Frey's work offers a succinct account of the competing political
philosophies of Conservatives and Progressives.
4
4
When HB 589 is understood in the context of this history, it is clear that today, as in years
past, the future of North Carolina's democracy—for better or worse—will be forged on the anvil
of race.
B.
Civil War to Post-Reconstruction and Impact of Sharecropping Economy
1.
1860 to 1866: Civil War to the Black Code in North Carolina
On the eve of the Civil War, North Carolina was more an oligarchy than a democracy.
The state constitution ensured that political advantage went to high-wealth eastern districts on
the coast. Seats in the state Senate were apportioned among fifty districts defined by the value of
the taxes that residents paid into state coffers; in the North Carolina House of Representatives,
apportionment was governed by the "federal ratio," which counted slaves as three- fifths of a
person. Property requirements for election to high state office disqualified more than half of
white male taxpayers, and the formulas that determined representation in the legislature
disadvantaged those citizens even further. Free black men, who comprised a small fraction of the
population, had been entitled to vote under the state constitution of 1776, but that right was
rescinded by constitutional amendment in 1835.
By 1860 more than 85 percent of lawmakers in the North Carolina General Assembly
were slaveholders, a higher percentage than in any other southern state. 5 Wealth was closely held
by this elite—roughly seven percent of the state's population of one million—who resided
primarily in the eastern Coastal Plain. These men also maintained a firm grip on political power.
Indeed, the principles of oligarchy were written into the state's constitution. At the local level,
voters elected only two county officials: a sheriff and a clerk of court. The power to govern
rested in the hands of justices of the peace who were nominated by members of the state House
of Representatives and commissioned for life terms by the governor.
North Carolina's antebellum oligarchs did not rule with unchallenged authority. In the
1850s, they faced political revolt by white yeoman farmers in the central Piedmont and mountain
West who demanded removal of property requirements for the right to vote for state senators and
an ad valorem tax on slaveholders' human property—more than 330,000 black men, women, and
children. Dissenters won the first contest by popular referendum on free suffrage in 1857, and
they prevailed in the second when delegates to the state secession convention gave ground on
taxation for fear that in war with the North ordinary whites "would not lift a finger to protect rich
men's negroes."6
Most of North Carolina remained behind Confederate lines until the final days of the
Civil War, and for that reason the state bore a Herculean share of hardship and deprivation. By
1863, North Carolina troops were deserting by the thousands, many of them with support from
the Order of the Heroes of America, an underground network of Unionists and Quaker pacifists.
Food riots broke out in the state's largest towns, and in the 1864 gubernatorial election, William
Woods Holden, a self- made newspaper publisher, ran on a peace platform, arguing that a
negotiated return to the Union offered North Carolina's only chance to "save human life" and
5
On antebellum North Carolina's economic and political structure, see Escott, Many Excellent People, chapt. 1.
The figure on slaveholders in the state legislature is from p. 15.
6
Ibid., 28-30, and 34.
5
"prevent the impoverishment and ruin of our people." Holden lost to incumbent governor
Zebulon B. Vance by 58,070 to 14,491 votes. However, his candidacy exposed a deep rift
between the state's wealthy rulers and a significant minority of whites—twenty percent of the
electorate—who had "tired of the rich man's war & poor man's fight."7
As defeat grew imminent, Calvin H. Wiley, a distinguished educator and publicist,
warned of the insurrection that collapse of the Confederacy and the end of slavery would
unleash. "The negroes [and] the meanest class of white people would constitute a majority," he
warned, and those "who were once socially & politically degraded" would make common cause
and rise up in rebellion. 8 To forestall this political realignment, self-styled "Conservatives" took
advantage of President Andrew Johnson's desire for a quick reconstruction of the South by acting
decisively to retain political power and dominion over black labor through legislative action.
In the spring of 1866, Conservatives in the North Carolina legislature passed an "Act
Concerning Negroes and Persons of Color," known informally as the Black Code. The act sought
to keep blacks subjugated and "fix their status permanently" by attaching to them the same
"burthen and disabilities" imposed on free persons of color by antebellum law. 9
Under the Black Code, freedmen could not vote, carry weapons without a license,
migrate into the state, return to the state after more than ninety days absence, or give testimony
against a white person in a court of law, except by consent of the white defendant. The law also
gave sheriffs broad authority to prosecute freedmen for vagrancy, a crime punishable by hiring
out to "service and labor."10
2.
1867 to 1868: Reconstruction, Biracial Government, and Expansion of the
Franchise
The Republican majority in the U.S. Congress watched developments in North Carolina
and elsewhere in the South with growing concern, particularly for the rights of freedmen.
Thaddeus Stevens, Senator from Pennsylvania, warned North Carolina Conservatives that they
would "have no peace until a negro is free as a white man . . . and is treated as a white man!"11
To that end, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution in June
1866 and tendered it for ratification by the states. The amendment gave citizenship to freedmen
and struck directly at the Black Code by guaranteeing all citizens equal protection under the law
and forbidding the states to deprive any citizen of life, liberty, or property without due process.
In North Carolina, as in all other southern states except Tennessee, Conservative
lawmakers stood firm. They refused to ratify an amendment that, in their view, turned "the slave
master, and the master, slave." 12 Congress answered that defiance by asserting its authority once
7
Escott, Many Excellent People, 44 and 49, and Raper, William W. Holden, 51. On internal dissent during the
Civil War, see also Durrill, Uncivil War.
8
Escott, Many Excellent People, 89-90.
9
Ibid., 130, and Public Laws of North Carolina, 1865-66, chapt. 40. For North Carolina law governing slaves
and free blacks before the Civil War, see Revised Code of North Carolina, 1854, chapt. 107. See also Browning,
"North Carolina Black Code."
10
Public Laws of North Carolina, 1865-66, chapt. 40.
11
Raper, William W. Holden, 91.
12
Escott, Many Excellent People, 135.
6
more, this time through passage of the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867. The act ordered the
continued military occupation of the South, instructed army commanders to organize
conventions that would attempt once more to rewrite the southern states' constitutions, and
granted all adult male citizens—"of whatever race, or color, or previous condition"—the right to
vote for convention delegates. 13
That extension of a limited franchise to black men radically rearranged the political
landscape in North Carolina. It was now possible that an alliance between freedmen and
dissenting whites could constitute a political majority. With that end in view, opponents of
Conservative rule gathered in Raleigh in March 1867 to establish a biracial state Republican
Party. William Holden, the Confederate peace candidate who had served briefly as provisional
governor after the South's surrender, stood at the party's head and directed efforts to build a
statewide organization using networks established during wartime by the Heroes of America and
by the Union League in its campaigns to mobilize freedmen.
When voters went to the polls to elect delegates to the constitutional convention, leaders
of the old elite were stunned: Republicans won 107 of the convention's 120 seats. Of that
majority, 15 were black, including religious and political leader James W. Hood who, in late
1865, presided over the first political convention of blacks in North Carolina. One hundred and
seventeen delegates, most of them former slaves, gathered in Raleigh to petition white leaders for
"adequate compensation for our labor . . . education for our children . . . [and abolition of] all the
oppressive laws which make unjust discriminations on account of race or color."14
During the winter of 1867-68, the new convention crafted a document that defined a
thoroughly democratic polity. The constitution guaranteed universal manhood suffrage, removed
all property qualifications for election to high state office, and at the county level put local
government in the hands of elected commissioners rather than appointed justices of the peace.
North Carolina would no longer be "a republic erected on race and property."15 The constitution
of 1868 also expanded the role of the state in advancing the welfare of its citizens by levying a
capitation tax to fund education and "support of the poor," mandating for the first time in North
Carolina history a state system of free public schools, and establishing a state board of public
charities to make "beneficent provision for the poor, the unfortunate and orphan."16
Black delegates to the convention knew that the success of these reforms would depend
on safeguarding broad access to the franchise and appealed for the forceful defense of voting
rights. The convention passed an ordinance to criminalize efforts to intimidate "any qualified
elector of this State . . . by violence or bribery, or by threats of violence or injury to his person or
property."17
In May 1868, voters ratified the new constitution, elected William Holden governor, and
gave the biracial Republican Party six of North Carolina's seven Congressional seats and control
13
Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations, 429.
Escott, Many Excellent People, 125 and 142; Bernstein, "Participation of Negro Delegates in the Constitutional
Convention of 1868," 391; and Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 240-46.
15
Constitution of North Carolina, 1868, Article VI, Sec. 1, and Article VII, Sec. 1; and Orth, "North Carolina
Constitutional History," 1779.
16
Constitution of North Carolina, 1868, Article V, sec. 2, and Article, XI, sec. 7.
17
Constitution of North Carolina, 1868, Ordinances, chapt. XXXVI.
14
7
of more than two-thirds of the seats in the state legislature. The scale of the Republicans' victory
reflected the fact that in North Carolina the percentage of whites who crossed the color line and
made common cause with former bondsmen was larger than in any other southern state. 18
3.
1867 to 1877: Race-based Violence and the End of Reconstruction
Historian Paul Escott writes that the state Republican Party "offered a new and vibrant
democracy. It seemed inspired with a mission: to open up North Carolina's . . . politics and social
system." But as he observes, the party's Conservative rivals were determined to make race, not
democracy, the "central question." They described Republicans as a "mongrel mob" spawned by
"negro suffrage and social disorder," and they warned non-elite whites of the loss of racial
privilege. "IT IS IN THE POOR MAN'S HOUSE," the editor of the Wilmington Journal railed, "THAT
19
THE NEGRO WILL ENFORCE HIS EQUALITY."
Such provocations struck deep chords of sentiment in a society that had been organized
around racial division for more than two hundred years. But in the new order, words alone could
not loosen the Republicans' hold on power. To deal the crippling blow, Conservatives turned to
the Ku Klux Klan and vigilante violence.
The Klan was first organized in Tennessee in 1868 and subsequently spread across the
South. In North Carolina, its leader was one of the Conservatives' own: William L. Saunders, a
former Confederate colonel and later a trustee of the state university and secretary of state.
The Klan's masked nightriders committed "every degree of atrocity; burning houses,
whipping men and women, beating with clubs, shooting, cutting, and other methods of injuring
and insult." In Graham, they murdered Wyatt Outlaw, the first black town commissioner and
constable, and hung his body from a tree in the public square; and in Caswell County, Klansmen
lured state senator John W. Stephens, a white Republican, into the basement of the county
courthouse, where they beat and stabbed him to death.
Violence occurred in all parts of the state, but as the murders of Outlaw and Stephens
attest, backlash against black political power was especially fierce in the central Piedmont, where
the Klan aimed to intimidate not only black voters, but also the large number of dissenting
whites who had crossed the race line. As one Klan leader explained, he and his compatriots
aimed not to restore "a white man's government only, but—mark the phrase—an intelligent
white man's government."20
On July 8, 1870, Governor Holden declared Alamance and Caswell Counties to be in
open insurrection and ordered the state militia to suppress the Klan and arrest its leaders. That
move quelled the worst violence, but gave Holden's Conservative opponents the issue they
needed to win back control of the state legislature in the fall election. In 1871, Conservatives
successfully impeached and removed Holden from office on charges of unlawfully suspending
the prisoners' right of habeas corpus. 21
18
19
20
21
Raper, William W. Holden, 101, and Foner, Reconstruction, 332.
Escott, Many Excellent People, 145-48 and 151.
Raper, William W. Holden, 156, 160, 165-66, and 174-75.
Ibid., chapts. 8-9.
8
From there, the democratic experiment of Reconstruction rapidly unwound. White
northerners, weary of a decade of struggle with the South, had little will to continue a states'
rights battle with their neighbors. Slavery had been abolished and secession, punished. That was
enough for most whites, who found it perfectly consistent to hate the institution of slavery and to
despise the slave with equal passion. For a majority, racial equality had never been a part of the
Civil War's purpose.
The last federal troops pulled out of North Carolina in 1877, a year after Conservatives—
now calling themselves Democrats—elected Zebulon B. Vance Governor, a post that he had held
for two terms during the Civil War. Across the state, Democrats celebrated "redemption" from
what they had long described as the "unwise . . . doctrine of universal equality."22
In an effort to secure their victory, white Democrats abolished elected county
government, returned authority to appointed justices of the peace, and limited appointed offices
to whites only. But continued black political participation at the state level sustained what one
historian has described as "the most competitive two-party system in the South prior to 1900."
White Democrats never polled more than 54 percent of the gubernatorial vote, and between 1877
and 1900, 43 black lawmakers served in the state House of Representatives, 11 served in the
Senate, and 4 served in the U.S. House of Representatives. 23
C.
Sharecropping and Economic Subjugation
Economic change swept through the countryside in the decades after Reconstruction as
an emerging merchant class pressed freedmen and white yeoman farmers into commercial
production. The result was the notorious system of sharecropping that turned once- independent
whites into debtors and locked blacks into virtual peonage. Each spring, sharecroppers took out
loans in the form of the seeds, tools, and supplies they needed in order to plant the year's crop.
To ensure repayment—often at interest rates as high as 50 percent—merchants demanded that
their clients grow cotton or tobacco, which could be sold readily for cash. As farmers produced
more of these cash crops, prices fell and rural families spiraled downward into debt. Whites who
owned their land sometimes managed to escape this trap, but blacks—the vast majority of whom
were landless and had to pay rent to landlords as well as interest to merchants—had no recourse.
Black sharecroppers often ended the agricultural year with no profit and were unable to
accumulate wealth. This process of immiseration repeated itself from generation to generation,
and produced enduring poverty. In eastern North Carolina, where sharecropping had dominated
the agricultural economy, the effects could still be seen a century later, when blacks’ per capita
income in the region was as low as 22 percent of that of whites. 24
Desperation and resentment over a new economic order that rewarded manipulators of
credit more than cultivators of the land led farmers into revolt. Whites joined the Southern
Farmers Alliance, first organized in Texas and then spread throughout the South by means of
local chapters, and blacks affiliated with a parallel organization, the Colored Farmers Alliance.
In 1892, these groups sought redress through the political process. Blacks remained true to the
22
Escott, Many Excellent People, 147.
Crow, "Cracking the Solid South," 335, and Escott, Many Excellent People, 181. On North Carolina's black
Congressmen, see Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872-1901.
24
Petty, Standing Their Ground, and Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War, 277-78.
23
9
Republican Party, while whites, calling themselves "Populists," bolted from the Democratic
Party—controlled by the state's economic elite—to the new national People's Party. The results
were disastrous for the Populists. In the governor's race, the Democratic candidate won 48.3
percent of the vote, while the Republican candidate received 33.8 percent and the Populist
candidate trailed with 17.04 percent. Those numbers contained a lesson that was obvious to
voters who were less than a generation removed from the biracial politics of Reconstruction.
Divided, the dissidents were all but certain to lose; united, they could challenge Democratic
power. 25
D.
From Fusion Politics to the Wilmington Riot and Jim Crow Economy
1.
1894 to 1898: Fusion Government and Electoral Reform
In 1894, white Populists and black Republicans in North Carolina forged a political
partnership under the banner of "Fusion" and ran a historic joint slate of candidates. A former
slave named Walter A. Pattillo was one of Fusion's chief architects. After Emancipation, he had
made a career as a Baptist minister, educator, and reformer. He served as superintendent of
schools in Granville County, established North Carolina's only black orphanage, and edited two
newspapers. Most notably, he also led the organization of local chapters of the Colored Farmers
Alliance, an organization for black farmers and agricultural laborers that paralleled the white
Southern Farmers Alliance. In all of that work, Pattillo devoted himself to "bringing about peace
and goodwill between the colored and white races."26
In the Arena, a national magazine of progressive opinion, Populist congressman Thomas
Watson explained Fusion's appeal:
Now the People's Party says to [the white tenant and the Negro tenant], "You are
kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to
hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of
financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that
you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which
beggars both." . . . The conclusion, then, seems to me to be this: the crushing
burdens which now oppress both races in the South will cause each to make an
effort to cast them off. They will see a similarity of cause and a similarity of
remedy. They will recognize that each should help the other in the work of
repealing bad laws and enacting good ones. They will become political allies, and
neither can injure the other without weakening both. It will be to the interest of
both that each should have justice. And on these broad lines of mutual interest,
mutual forbearance, and mutual support the present will be made the steppingstone to future peace and prosperity. 27
Fusion's logic was indeed persuasive. In the 1894 election, Populists and Republicans took
control of 74 of the 120 seats in the North Carolina legislature. On the local level, in 1894 and
25
26
27
Beckel, Radical Reform, 135-77, and Our Campaigns, http://goo.gl/O3U8AK.
Ali, In the Lion's Mouth, 61.
Watson, "Negro Question in the South," 548 and 550.
10
1896, they also elected more than 1,000 black officials, including county commissioners, deputy
sheriffs, school committeemen, and magistrates. 28
A commitment to participatory democracy was at the heart of the Fusion experiment.
Once in power, Fusionists undertook a broad program of reform. They capped interest rates at 6
percent, a godsend for cash-strapped black and white farmers who relied on credit to survive, and
restored elected county government, a Reconstruction-era reform that Democrats had reversed
after their return to power in the 1870s. 29
Most important, Fusion legislators revised state election law with the aim of guaranteeing
full and fair access to the franchise:
•
The revised law required that the clerk of the superior court in every county lay out
compact precincts "so as to provide, as near as may be, one separate place of voting for
every three hundred and fifty electors." The clerks were also instructed to publish the
details of precinct boundaries and polling places in local newspapers and to post that
information in public places. In a rural state in which population was widely dispersed,
these provisions ensured that neither travel nor lack of public notice would be an
impediment to voting. Legislators revisited the law in 1897 to provide additional
protection for the opportunity as well as the right to cast a ballot. They stipulated that
every elector was "entitled," without penalty, "to absent himself from service or
employment" for sufficient time to register and to vote. 30
•
To safeguard impartiality in voter registration and the supervision of elections, the law
gave clerks of court—who were elected officials, and therefore accountable to voters—
the authority to appoint in every precinct one registrar and one election judge from "each
political party of the state." Prior to this time, that responsibility had belonged to county
officers who owed their appointment and their loyalty to the majority party in the
legislature. 31
•
The law also criminalized various forms of physical and economic intimidation. It
specified that "no regimental, battalion or company muster shall be called or directed on
election day, nor shall armed men assemble on the day of election." In addition, any
person who attempted "by force and violence" to "break up or stay any election" was
guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment and a fine of up to one hundred
dollars. Similar penalties applied to "any person who shall discharge from employment,
withdraw patronage from, or otherwise injure, threaten, oppress, or attempt to intimidate,
any qualified voter."32
•
The law sought to limit frivolous and obstructive challenges to voter eligibility and the
legality of ballots cast by presuming the truthfulness of citizens' declarations. Challenges
were allowed only on a specified day prior to an election, at which time registration
books were opened for public review, and challengers were required to present proof that
28
Escott, Many Excellent People, 247, and Gershenhorn, "Rise and Fall of Fusion Politics in North Carolina," 4.
Public Laws and Resolutions, Session of 1895, chapts. 69, 116, and 135.
30
Public Laws and Resolutions, Session of 1895, chapt. 159, sec. 5, and Public Laws and Resolutions, Session of
1897, chapt. 185, sec. 72.
31
Public Laws and Resolutions, Session of 1895, chapt. 159, sec. 7.
32
Ibid., chapt. 159, secs. 38, 39, and 41.
29
11
an elector had withheld or provided false information at the time of registration.
Otherwise, the law treated "entry of the name, age, residence, and date of registration of
any person by the registrar, upon the registration book of a precinct, [as] presumptive
evidence of the regularity of such registration, the truth of the facts stated, and the right of
such person to register and to vote at such precinct."33
•
The law accommodated illiterate voters—22 percent of whites and 70 percent of blacks—
by authorizing political parties to print ballots on colored paper and to mark them with
party insignia, an old practice that Democrats had abolished. In this period, before the
introduction of official, non-partisan ballots and secret voting, electors received ballots
from the party, or parties, they favored, marked through the names of any candidates they
did not support, and handed their ballots to an election judge for deposit in boxes labeled
with the office or group of offices for which they were voting. The use of color coding
and party insignia helped illiterate voters correctly identify and cast the ballot of the party
they favored. To protect voters from fraudulent handling of their ballots, the law also
specified that "any ballot found in the wrong box shall be presumed to have been
deposited there by mistake of the officers of election, and unless such presumption shall
be rebutted, the ballot shall be counted." This was important, because there could be as
many as six boxes at each polling place, and apart from their labels, they all looked
alike. 34
•
Finally, the law required public disclosure of campaign financing. Every candidate had to
provide, within ten days after an election, "an itemized statement, showing in detail all
the moneys contributed or expended by him, directly or indirectly, by himself or through
any other person in aid of his election." Those reports also were to "give the names of the
various persons who received the moneys, the specific nature of each item, and the
purpose for which it was expended or contributed."35
The new election law produced momentous results in the 1896 election. Republican
registration overall increased by 25 percent, and turnout among registered black voters rose from
60 to nearly 90 percent. Fusionists won more than three- fourths of the seats in the legislature and
elected a white Republican, Daniel L. Russell Jr., as governor. Fusion insurgencies arose in other
southern states, but only in North Carolina did a biracial alliance take control of both the
legislative and executive branches of government. 36
In the 1897 legislative session, Fusionists used their super- majority to address two
decades of Democrats' underinvestment in education. This was a particularly important issue for
black Republicans, whose predecessors had led the campaign to include a mandate for public
schools in the 1868 constitution and whose constituents were profoundly disadvantaged in their
day-to-day interactions with landlords, merchants, and employers by an inability to read and do
basic arithmetic. In "An Act to Encourage Local Taxation for Public Schools," lawmakers
33
Ibid., chapt. 159, secs. 10-12 and 14.
Public Laws and Resolutions, Session of 1895, chapt. 159, sec. 19 and 20; Trelease, "Fusion Legislatures of
1895 and 1897," 282; and Beeby, Revolt of the Tar Heels, 40. On illiteracy, see Report on Population of the United
Sates, 1890, lii and lv.
35
Public Laws and Resolutions, Session of 1895, chapt. 159, sec. 72.
36
Escott, Many Excellent People, 245-247; Beckel, Radical Reform, 179-80; and Kousser, Shaping of Southern
Politics, 182 and 187.
34
12
instructed county commissioners to hold elections in every school district under their supervision
on the question of "levying a special district tax" for public education. Districts that voted in
favor of taxation were entitled to apply for matching funds from the state. To pressure those that
refused, legislators ordered an election every two years until a special tax was approved. 37
In separate legislation, black lawmakers used their influence in the Fusion alliance to
ensure equitable provision for students in their communities. A revised school law abolished
separate white and black committees appointed at the township level to manage schools for each
race and replaced them with consolidated committees made up of five appointees, no more than
three of whom could come from the same political party. The law charged the new committees
with managing the schools in their districts as a single enterprise. They were to appropriate funds
on a strict per capita basis and to apportion "school money . . . so as to give each school in their
district, white and colored, the same length of school term." Districts were also required to limit
enrollments to no more than 65 students per school, so as to ensure a rough measure of equity in
school facilities. 38
The election and education reforms enacted in 1895 and 1897 constituted a reassertion of
the values that James Hood and the constitutional convention delegates wrote into the state
constitution in 1868, which had been abrogated first by slavery, and then by the collapse of
Reconstruction. That constitution opens by invoking the Declaration of Independence and
connecting the ideals of the American republic to the economic and political struggles set in
motion by Confederate defeat and the abolition of slavery: "We do declare . . . that all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among
these are life, liberty, the enjoyment of the fruits of their own labor, and the pursuit of happiness.
. . . That all political power is vested in, and derived from the people; all government of right
originates from the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted solely for the good of
the whole."39
Fusion lawmakers in North Carolina, historian Morgan Kousser has observed, created
"the most democratic" political system "in the late nineteenth-century South."40
2.
1898 to 1900: Resurgence of White Supremacy and Voter Suppression
Election Law
As they approached the election of 1898, Democrats once again made white supremacy
their rallying cry and vigilante violence their most potent political weapon. Responsibility for
orchestrating the party's return to power fell to former congressman Furnifold M. Simmons.
Simmons lived in eastern North Carolina, in the Second Congressional District, which was
known as the "Black Second" because of its large and politically active black population.
Counties in the district sent more than fifty black representatives to the General Assembly in
Raleigh and elected all four of the state's 19th-century black congressmen, including Henry P.
Cheatham, who deprived Simmons of his seat in the 1888 election. Simmons and other
37
Public Laws and Resolutions, Session of 1897, chapt. 421.
Public Laws and Resolutions, Session of 1897, chapt. 108.
39
Constitution of North Carolina, 1868, Article I, secs. 1-2. Italics added to highlight language added by the
framers of the 1868 Constitution.
40
Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 183.
38
13
Democratic leaders dodged the economic and class issues that held the Fusion coalition together
and appealed instead to the specter of "negro domination."41
Democratic newspapers took the lead in whipping up race hatred. None was more
influential than the Raleigh News and Observer, published by Josephus Daniels. Day after day,
in the weeks leading up to the election, Daniels ran political cartoons on the front page of the
paper to illustrate the evils unleashed by black political participation. The cartoons depicted
black men as overlords and sexual predators who were intent on emasculating white men,
turning them into supplicants and ravaging their wives and daughters. Across scores of images,
the News and Observer's message was clear: in an inversion of the racial order, blacks had lifted
themselves by pressing white men down.
The Vampire that Hovers Over North Carolina
Raleigh News and Observer, September 27, 1898.
41
Escott, Many Excellent People, 253-58, and Korstad and Leloudis, To Right These Wrongs, 206. On the Black
Second, see Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872-190, and Justesen, George Henry White.
14
The New Slavery
Raleigh News and Observer, October 15, 1898.
Democrats wielded racial appeals as a wrecking ball, much as they had done during
Reconstruction. Some white Populists buckled. They gave in to the deeply entrenched ways that
race shaped political and social perception and began arguing that they, not Democrats, were the
most ardent defenders of white supremacy. Even so, the political battle would not be won by
words alone.
In the closing days of the 1898 campaign, leaders of the Democratic Party turned once
more to violence and intimidation. They organized White Government Unions throughout the
state and encouraged the party faithful to don the paramilitary uniform known as the "red shirt,"
a symbol of the blood sacrifice of the Confederacy and the late-19th-century equivalent of the
hooded robes worn by Klansmen in an earlier era. Democrats engaged in open intimidation of
voters at registration and polling places across the state. In Winston, for instance, the local
15
Republican newspaper reported that "there were crowds of men who gathered around the polls in
each ward and . . . boldly drove a large per cent of the colored Republican voters and a good
many white voters away from the polls."42
Armed Red Shirts in Laurinburg, North Carolina, and their uniform.
Courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives and
the North Carolina Museum of History.
Democrats' determination to defeat their challengers at any cost was revealed most
starkly in the majority black, coastal city of Wilmington. 43 Revisions to the city charter made by
the Fusion legislatures of 1895 and 1897 had undone Democratic gerrymandering and produced
a Republican majority—including three blacks—on the board of alderman. Democrats were
enraged by that development and the fact that they would not be able to challenge Republican
rule at the polls until the next municipal election in 1899.
On November 9, the day after the 1898 election, they drew up a declaration of
independence that called for the restoration of white rule. They acted on belief "that the
Constitution of the United States contemplated a government to be carried on by an enlightened
people; [belief] that its framers did not anticipate the enfranchisement of an ignorant population
of African origin, and [belief] that those men of the State of North Carolina, who joined in
forming the Union, did not contemplate for their descendants a subjection to an inferior race."
"The negro [has] antagonized our interest in every way, and especially by his ballot," the
Wilmington Morning Star exclaimed. "We will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled,
by men of African origin."44
The next day, armed white men under the command of former congressman Alfred M.
Waddell staged the only municipal coup d'état in the nation's history. They marauded through
42
Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 53.
For a detailed account of events in Wilmington, see 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Report. The report was
commissioned by the state legislature in 2000. In 2007, lawmakers expressed "'profound regret that violence,
intimidation and force' were used to overthrow an elected government, force people from their homes and ruin lives"
(Raleigh News and Observer, August 2, 2007).
44
Raleigh News and Observer, November 10, 1898; Wilmington Morning Star, November 10, 1898; and
Wilmington Messenger, November 10, 1898.
43
16
Wilmington's black district, set ablaze the print shop of the city's only black newspaper,
murdered as many as thirty black citizens in the streets, and drove the sitting board of alderman
from office in order to make room for a new, self-appointed city government with Waddell at its
head.
A postcard produced by a local photographer documented destruction of
Love and Charity Hall, which housed the Daily Record, Wilmington's
black newspaper. From 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Report, 128.
Democrats won the 1898 election statewide by a narrow margin. They claimed only 52.8
percent of the vote, but that was enough to oust most Fusionists from the legislature. The victors
moved immediately to "rid themselves . . . of the rule of Negroes and the lower classes of
whites."45
In the 1899 legislative session, Democrats drafted an amendment to the state constitution
that aimed to end biracial politics once and for all by stripping from black men the most
fundamental privilege of citizenship: the right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment to the federal
Constitution, adopted in the waning days of Reconstruction, forbade the states from denying the
ballot to citizens on the basis of race. North Carolina Democrats, like their counterparts
elsewhere in the South, circumvented the prohibition by adopting a literacy test.
In order to vote, citizens first had to demonstrate to local election officials that they could
"read and write any section of the Constitution in the English language." That gave Democratic
registrars wide latitude to exclude black men from the polls. Democrats also included a
grandfather clause in the amendment that exempted from the literacy test adult males who had
been eligible to vote, or were lineal descendants of men who had been eligible to vote, on or
before January 1, 1867. 46 That was a magic date, because it preceded the limited right to vote
given to black men under the Military Reconstruction Act, passed in March of that year. The
45
46
Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 191, and Escott, Many Excellent People, 258.
Laws and Resolutions, 1900, chapt. 2.
17
literacy test was thus designed to achieve the very thing the federal Fifteenth Amendment
expressly outlawed—voter exclusion based on race.
Male citizens could also be denied access to the franchise if they failed to pay the
capitation tax (poll tax) levied in accordance with Article V, Section 1, of the 1868 state
constitution. 47 This link between payment of the capitation tax and the right to vote was a new
impediment put in place by the disfranchisement amendment. The amendment required that
electors pay the tax before the first day of May, prior to the election in which they intended to
vote. At that time of year, prior to the fall harvest, black sharecroppers were unlikely to have
cash on hand for such a payment.
Democrats rewrote state election law to boost the odds that the amendment would win
approval. They repealed reforms put in place by the Fusion legislatures of 1895 and 1897, and
crafted new legislation in 1899 that would deliver "a good Democratic majority."48
47
48
49
50
51
52
•
With the aim of purging as many Fusion voters as possible, lawmakers ordered an
"entirely new registration" in advance of the next election. In that process, registrars
could, at their discretion, require an applicant to "prove his identity or age and residence
by the testimony of at least two electors under oath." The law also gave "any by stander"
the right to challenge a registrant's truthfulness and force a lengthy examination. 49
•
In a reversal of provisions made in the 1895 election law, information recorded in a
registration book no longer stood as presumptive evidence of an individual's right to vote.
On polling day, "any elector [could] challenge the vote of any person" on suspicion of
fraud. In such cases, election officials were to question the suspect voter and compel him
to swear an oath of truthfulness. But even that might not be proof enough. The law
stipulated that after an oath was sworn, "the registrar and judges may, nevertheless,
refuse to permit such a person to vote."50
•
The law loosened safeguards against partisanship in the management of elections.
Lawmakers took the authority to appoint local election officials from the county clerks of
superior court, who were directly accountable to voters, and gave it to a seven- member
state board of elections that was appointed by the Democratic majority in the legislature.
That board's power was expansive. For instance, it had the authority to remove county
election officials from office "for any satisfactory cause."51
•
The law also put an end to practices that accommodated illiterate voters. All ballots were
now to be "printed upon white paper, without ornament, symbol, or device." And if a
voter or election official placed a ballot in the wrong box (there were six), it was declared
void and was discarded. 52
Ibid.
Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 190, and Public Laws and Resolutions, Session of 1899, chapt. 16.
Public Laws and Resolutions, Session of 1899, chapt. 507, secs. 11 and 18.
Ibid., chapt. 507, secs. 11, 21, and 22.
Ibid., chapt. 507, secs. 4, 5, 8, and 9.
Ibid., chapt. 507, secs. 27 and 29.
18
3.
1900 to 1912: Racial Intimidation and Exclusion and Sharp Decline in
Voter Participation
With the new election law in place, Democrats approached the 1900 election confident of
victory. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charles B. Aycock made disfranchisement the
centerpiece of his campaign. On the stump, he offered the white electorate a new "era of good
feeling" in exchange for racial loyalty. Aycock argued that the presence of blacks in politics was
the source of bitterness among whites, and that only their removal would heal the white body
politic. "We must disfranchise the negro," he explained to white voters. "Then we shall have . . .
peace everywhere. . . . "We shall forget the asperities of past years and . . . go forward into the
twentieth century a united people."53
To whites who were unconvinced and blacks who were determined to resist, Aycock
issued veiled threats. "We have ruled by force, we can rule by fraud, but we want to rule by law,"
he told one nervous audience. In Wilmington, Alfred Waddell was more direct. On election eve,
he exhorted a white crowd, "You are Anglo-Saxons. You are armed and prepared, and you will
do your duty. . . . Go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find the negro out voting, tell him to leave
the polls, and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we
have to do it with guns." The beleaguered Populist and Republican opposition could not counter
the Democratic onslaught. With a turnout of 75 percent of the electors allowed to register under
the revised election law of 1899, Aycock and disfranchisement won by a 59 to 41 percent
margin. 54
The Democrats' triumph in 1900 cleared the way for a new order characterized by oneparty government, segregation, and cheap labor. With the removal of black men from politics,
North Carolina's Republican Party became little more than an expression of regional differences
among whites that set the western Mountains, the party's surviving stronghold, against the central
Piedmont and eastern Coastal Plain.
Leaders of the Democratic Party controlled the selection of candidates through a tightly
managed state convention. That arrangement, combined with the fact that no Republican had a
realistic chance of winning election to a statewide office, convinced most electors that there was
little reason to cast a ballot. Only 50 percent of the newly constrained pool of eligible voters
turned out for the 1904 gubernatorial election, and by 1912 the number had declined to less than
30 percent. 55
4.
1900 to 1917: Jim Crow and Economic Subjugation
Having regained control of the machinery of government, Democrats spent the next two
decades passing public policies that secured what one scholar has termed their "reactionary
revolution."56 These policies, many of which remained in place until the 1960s, made clear that
53
54
Connor and Poe, Life and Speeches of Charles Brantley Aycock , 82 and 218-219.
Orr, Charles Brantley Aycock, 155; Daniels, Editor in Politics, 368; and Kousser, Shaping Southern Politics,
193.
55
Escott, Many Excellent People, 261, and Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 195.
Kousser, Shaping Southern Politics, 261. The account that follows is adapted from Korstad and Leloudis, To
Right These Wrongs, 16-18, and Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 54-57.
56
19
while racial rhetoric had dominated the electoral battle, white supremacy was a political project
as well as an expression of racial prejudice. Democrats had deployed the idea of a white republic
in an effort to persuade whites of all classes to see themselves as members of the ruling race, but
the winners' actions betrayed their true intent.
Black subjugation was at the head of the Democratic Party's agenda. Over time, the
architects of white privilege developed an elaborate system of discriminatory law and custom
that they called Jim Crow, a name taken from the familiar blackface characters in nineteenthcentury minstrel shows.
Lawmakers passed North Carolina's first Jim Crow law in 1899, during the same session
in which they crafted the disfranchisement amendment to the state constitution. The law required
separate seating for blacks and whites on all trains and steamboats. The aim of that and other
such regulations—including the segregation of streetcars in 1907, legislation in 1921 that made
miscegenation a felony, and a plethora of local ordinances that segregated drinking fountains,
toilets, and cemeteries—was to mark blacks as a people apart and, in doing so, to make it
psychologically difficult for whites to imagine interracial cooperation. Segregation also divided
most forms of civic space—courthouses, neighborhoods, and public squares—that might
otherwise have been sites for interaction across the color line. 57
In Charlotte, soon to be North Carolina's largest city and the hub of its new textile
economy, neighborhoods in 1870 had been surprisingly undifferentiated. As historian Thomas
Hanchett has noted, on any given street "business owners and hired hands, manual laborers and
white-collared clerks . . . black people and white people all lived side by side." By 1910, that
heterogeneity had been thoroughly "sorted" along lines of race and class. 58
In communities large and small across the state, this process played out a thousand times
over. White supremacy denied blacks access to economic and political power, and erected a
nearly insurmountable wall between blacks and poor whites who had risen in the mid 1890s to
challenge Democrats' rule by asserting their shared grievances and right to the franchise.
Hardening racial segregation relegated the majority of black North Carolinians to the
countryside and created, in effect, a bound agricultural labor force. Black women who lived in
cities and towns found work mostly as maids, cooks, and laundresses. In Durham and Winston,
both tobacco manufacturing centers, and in the tobacco market towns in the east, black men and
women labored in stemmeries where they processed the leaf before it was made into cigarettes
and chewing plugs. The work was dirty and undesirable—the kind of labor that whites expected
blacks to perform. Custom and mutual understanding among manufacturers reserved jobs in the
textile industry—the state's largest employer—for whites only, with the exception of
warehousemen and yard workers.
Jim Crow held black earnings to near-subsistence levels, dragged white wages downward
by devaluing all labor, and advanced industrial employers' interests by tempering white workers'
efforts at organization with concern for the protection of racial privilege. In 1926, the mean daily
wage for a black farm laborer in Wake County was $1.19. A year earlier, in nearby Glencoe,
white women textile workers earned from $2.10 to $2.58 for a ten- hour day, and men's wages—
57
58
"Jim Crow Laws: North Carolina," Finding Sources, http://goo.gl/fUPJok.
Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City, 187.
20
with limited exceptions for highly skilled machine "fixers"—ranged modestly higher. At tobacco
factories in Durham during this same period, black women earned less than 15 cents per hour,
and their counterparts who labored in the homes of whites received even less. 59
White rule also denied black North Carolinians something they had prized since the time
of emancipation: quality education for their children. In the 1880s, the state spent roughly equal
amounts per capita on white and black students in the public schools, but by 1920 spending on
white students outpaced that for blacks by a margin of three-to-one. The state spent ten times as
much on white school buildings as it did on black schools, and black teachers made only half of
the $252 a year paid to whites. The results were predictable: in 1920, 24.5 percent of blacks over
the age of ten were illiterate, as compared to 8.2 percent of whites. Racial disadvantage was also
persistent. Of those black children who started school in 1949, only 27.5 percent graduated from
high school. The graduation rate for whites was twice that figure. 60
Added to all of this, black North Carolinians were plagued by "sickness, misery, and
death." In 1940, the annual mortality rate for blacks was 11.6 per thousand, compared to 7.6 per
thousand for whites. Blacks were one-and-a-half times more likely than whites to die from
tuberculosis and malaria, and black infant mortality exceeded that for whites by the same
margin. 61
E.
The Long Civil Rights Movement to 1980s Judicial Intervention
1.
1917 to 1950: Modest Gains Produce Backlash in North Carolina
Black disfranchisement and the economic regime it sustained held firm through the first
two decades of the 20th century. Then, in 1917, America's entry into World War I set in motion a
cascade of developments that challenged the "good order" that southern white supremacists had
established. Most important was the Great Migration, in which more than 1.5 million black
southerners moved north to take war-related industrial jobs and gained the right to vote.
Nationally, Democrats would ultimately benefit most from black southern migrants'
newfound strength at the ballot box. With the onset of the Great Depression, those voters began
to abandon the party of Lincoln and to cast their lot with Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In
1936, blacks outside the South rewarded Roosevelt by contributing to his reelection in one of the
largest landslides in American history. Not since the time of Reconstruction had the federal
government held out such hope for redressing racial injustice.
Black leaders in North Carolina seized the political opportunities the New Deal offered.
They organized a Negro Voters' League in Raleigh and established a League of Independent
Voters in Durham that later became the Committee on Negro Affairs. The Durham organization
took its name from Roosevelt's black appointees, who had begun to call themselves the Federal
Council on Negro Affairs. A year later, leaders in the two cities spearheaded the creation of a
59
Wright, Old South, New South, 149; Jones, "Race, Sex, and Class," 445; and Textile Heritage Museum,
http://goo.gl/s2CnTD.
60
Thuesen, Greater than Equal, 31, 86, and 268 n. 48.
61
Carlton and Coclanis, Confronting Southern Poverty, 33, 42, 54-55, 59; Larkins, Negro Population of North
Carolina, 29; Shin, "Black-White Differentials in Infant Mortality in the South, 19540-1970," 17. The infant
mortality rate for blacks was 76.6 per thousand live births, compared to 50.3 per thousand live births for whites.
21
statewide committee and launched a voter registration drive. By the end of the decade, upwards
of 40,000 blacks had managed to pass the state's literacy test and register as Democrats. 62
White Democrats responded by raising the familiar cry of "Negro Rule." In 1937, North
Carolina Senator Josiah Bailey attempted a revolt within the national Democratic Party. He
recruited a number of conservative Republicans and likeminded southern Democrats to endorse a
Conservative Manifesto, which, had it succeeded, would have eviscerated the New Deal and
undercut the federal government's capacity to challenge Jim Crow. The manifesto affirmed the
value of small government and the principal role of private enterprise in directing the nation's
economy; called for reduced taxation of private and corporate wealth; and insisted on the
primacy of states' rights. Bailey denounced Roosevelt for pandering to the "Negro vote" and
caricatured the New Deal as "a gift enterprise [conducted] at the expense of those who work and
earn and save."63
On the Senate floor, at home in North Carolina, and in private exchanges, Bailey invoked
memories of Reconstruction to warn national leaders of the Democratic Party that he and others
were prepared to defend white supremacy, whatever the cost. "When the Republicans . . .
undertook to impose the national will upon us with respect to the Negro," Bailey exclaimed, "we
resented it and hated that party with a hatred that has outlasted generations; we hated it beyond
measure . . . because of the wrong it undertook to put upon us; and just as that policy destroyed
the hope of the Republican party in the South, that same policy adopted by [Democrats] will
destroy the Democratic party in the South." "Keep your nose out of the South's business," the
Senator advised Roosevelt and his allies, or "be assured that a [new] white man's party [will]
arise" to claim the region's loyalty. 64
Southern Democrats managed to blunt key New Deal legislation, most notably the Social
Security Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, both of which excluded black
domestic and agricultural laborers from federal protection. But the outbreak of World War II
made it impossible to contain black activism.
In North Carolina, the CIO union of Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers
successfully organized more than 20,000 black laborers in the tobacco factories of WinstonSalem and the leaf processing plants in the eastern Coastal Plain. 65 Black citizens across the state
also joined a national Double-V Campaign for the victory of democracy over fascism abroad and
Jim Crow at home.
Returning black veterans took the lead in establishing local NAACP voter movements in
urban centers and in the eastern counties that had sent black representatives to Congress in the
latter half of the 19th century. By the early 1950s, those efforts succeeded in electing a handful of
black candidates to town councils, county boards of commissioners, and local boards of
education. The first success came in 1947 in Winston-Salem, where unionized black tobacco
62
Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 138.
Moore, "Senator Josiah W. Bailey and the 'Conservative Manifesto' of 1937"; Patterson, "Failure of Party
Realignment in the South," 603; and Bailey to Peter Gerry, October 19, 1937, Senatorial Series, General
Correspondence Subseries, Bailey Papers.
64
"Roosevelt 'Purge' Rapped by Bailey," The Atlanta Constitution, September 11, 1938, and Dunn, Roosevelt's
Purge, 237.
65
Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 190, 200, and 295.
63
22
workers helped elect Reverend Kenneth R. Williams to the board of aldermen. Williams was the
first black politician in the South to defeat a white opponent at the state or local level since the
turn of the century. 66
2.
Senate Campaign of 1950 and Resurgent Politics of Race
These modest gains pushed race back to center stage in North Carolina politics, most
dramatically in the explosive Senate campaign of 1950. 67 The contest pitted former University of
North Carolina president Frank Porter Graham, a self-proclaimed liberal on race issues, against a
field of challengers in the Democratic primary that included Willis Smith, a respected Raleigh
attorney and former president of the American Bar Association. On the first ballot, Graham
defeated Smith and the other candidates by winning a plurality, but not a majority, of votes.
As runner-up, Smith was entitled to call for a runoff, but he hesitated. He was unsure that
he could raise the necessary money or that he had the stamina for another contest. Then, on June
5, just days before the deadline for Smith's decision, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down
rulings that affirmed black students' right to equal access to publicly funded graduate education
and banned segregation on railroads. The court's actions galvanized Smith's supporters. On the
afternoon of June 6, Jesse Helms, a young news director for WRAL Radio in Raleigh, made
arrangements to air at fifteen- minute intervals a plea for Smith backers to rally at his home and
urge him to demand a runoff. The crowd that gathered on Smith's lawn was persuasive. The next
morning, Smith called for a second primary vote.
The political battle that followed was the rawest since the white supremacy campaigns of
1898-1900, and like those earlier contests, it would cast a shadow over North Carolina politics
for years to come. Smith's backers brought race front and center. They focused particularly on
Frank Graham's service in 1946-47 on President Harry Truman's Committee on Civil Rights,
which issued the first federal report on race relations and laid the groundwork for Truman's
desegregation of the military a year later. The report, titled To Secure These Rights, called for an
immediate end to Jim Crow in all aspects of American life.
Smith's supporters directed their harshest criticism at the report's recommendation that
Truman establish a federal Fair Employment Practice Commission (FEPC), which would have
been charged with eliminating racial discrimination in the workplace. In campaign press releases,
Smith warned white workers that under the proposed FEPC, "a man's job [could be] claimed by
another man just because he is of another race." Handbills distributed in rural communities and
white working-class neighborhoods raised the alarm more shrilly. "White People Wake Up
Before It's Too Late," one exclaimed. "Frank Graham Favors Mingling of the Races."68
66
Ibid., 310, and Korstad and Leloudis, To Right These Wrong, 206-8. By 1954, another ten black politicians had
won election to local office: F. J. Carnage, Raleigh school board, 1949; William R. Crawford, Winston-Salem city
council, 1951; Dr. W. P. Devane, Fayetteville city council 1951; Dr. William M. Hampton, Greensboro city council,
1951; Nathaniel Barber, Gastonia city council, 1951; Dr. G.K. Butterfield, Wilson city council, 1953; Nicholas
Rencher Harris, Durham city council, 1953; Hubert Robertson, Chapel Hill board of alderman, 1953; and Dr. David
Jones, Greensboro school board, 1954.
67
The account that follows, including quoted material is taken from Korstad and Leloudis, To Right These
Wrongs, 24-28.
68
Pleasants and Burns, Frank Porter Graham, 140 and 223.
23
That appeal echoed the white supremacy rhetoric of 1898-1900 and was powerful in its
simplicity: Graham posed a threat to white privilege and the racial division of labor from which
it was derived. By contrast, Smith promised to "Uphold the Traditions of the South." When
ballots were counted, Smith won by more than 19,000 votes. He traveled to Washington to take
his Senate seat in 1951, and carried Jesse Helms with him as a member of his staff. Twenty-two
years later, Helms would return as a leader of the Republican New Right.
A handbill circulated by Willis Smith supporters warned that Frank Graham
favored "mingling of the races." Courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection,
Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
24
The 1950 Senate race defined the tactics that white Democrats would employ over the
next three decades to contain black political aspirations. They appealed to the racial loyalty of
rural and working-class whites and set themselves in firm opposition to what Graham's detractors
called the "Negro bloc vote," by which they meant efforts to line up organized black support for
candidates—white as well as black—who promised moderation on race issues.
In cities and counties across the state, Democrats won legislative approval for
gerrymandering wards and precincts in ways that isolated black voters, for establishing at- large
electoral districts, and for switching to strong city- and county- manager forms of administration
that distanced day-to-day governance from voter scrutiny.
When blacks countered with "bullet" or "single-shot voting"—an effort to maximize
their influence by supporting only one candidate in at- large and multi-candidate contests—state
lawmakers reacted by outlawing the practice. Under the terms of a 1955 law, that prohibition
was applied in 17 counties statewide, including 14 in the east with large, politically active black
populations. Astutely sizing up the situation, one black activist remarked: "My experience . . . is
that if you beat the white man at one trick, he will try another."69
Restriction of the franchise mirrored the state's response to the Supreme Court's Brown
decision and the call for school desegregation. 70 With legislation known as the Pupil Assignment
Act, also passed in 1955, state lawmakers removed all references to race from school assignment
policy and offered all parents "freedom of choice" in selecting the schools their children would
attend. However, the new law required that black parents petition individually to have their
children assigned to white schools, and gave local school boards broad discretionary authority in
ruling on those requests.
The approach won North Carolina praise as a "moderate" southern state, but produced
one of the lowest desegregation rates in the region. At the beginning of the 1958-59 school year,
only 10 of North Carolina's 322,000 black students were enrolled in majority white schools. The
lesson was not lost on observers elsewhere in the South. School officials from Little Rock,
Arkansas, where white resistance to desegregation forced President Dwight Eisenhower to use
federal troops to restore order, complimented their North Carolina colleagues on the
effectiveness of the state's response to Brown: "You . . . have devised one of the cleverest
techniques of perpetuating segregation that we have seen. . . . If we could be half as successful as
you have been, we could keep this thing to a minimum for the next fifty years."
Ring- fencing black aspirations was only half the battle. As had been the case at the end of
the 19th century, muffling the voices of white progressives was an equally challenging task. In
1960, Terry Sanford, a protégé of Frank Graham, won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination
in a bitter primary contest with segregationist I. Beverly Lake by dodging the race issue and
promising euphemistically to deliver a "New Day" in North Carolina. He went on to win the
general election handily and to launch a crusade for better schools that, he promised, would
prepare all North Carolinians to "compete in a national market" and "keep up in [a] rapidly
advancing, scientific, complex world."
69
Session Laws and Resolutions, 1955, chapt. 1104, and Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 384.
The account that follows, including quoted material, is adapted from Korstad and Leloudis, To Right These
Wrongs, 33-119, and 175.
70
25
As Sanford visited schools—particularly black schools—across the state, those words
haunted him. "I had a sickening feeling," he later recalled, "that I was talking about opportunities
that I knew, and I feared [the black children] knew, didn't exist, no matter how hard they might
work in school." The "improvement of schools wasn't enough," he concluded. "Not nearly
enough."
By his own account, the Governor was being schooled in the harsh realities of Jim Crow,
both by the children he met and the young activists who were making North Carolina a focal
point of the national civil rights struggle. Students from North Carolina Agricultural and
Technical College in Greensboro sparked the sit- in phase of the movement when they demanded
service at a Woolworth's lunch counter in February 1960. Two months later, black and white
youth founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University in Raleigh,
and by 1963 sit- ins, boycotts, and protest marches had produced a new cadre of activists across
the state.
In January 1963, Sanford stood before members of the North Carolina Press Association
to announce a bold new vision for race relations in the state. He had begun to understand the
connections between poverty and racial justice that the biracial Fusion alliance had grasped
during the late 1890s, and that black and white Republicans had identified as the central concern
of Reconstruction. Sanford argued that white North Carolinians would never participate fully in
American prosperity without first liberating their black neighbors from the reign of Jim Crow.
To that end, in the summer of 1963, Sanford announced a bold initiative called the North
Carolina Fund that would use private philanthropy and federal resources to attack the state's
"poverty-segregation complex." Over the course of the next year, the agency became a model for
President Lyndon Johnson's national War on Poverty.
The North Carolina Fund and black activists across the state faced a daunting task.
Nearly 40 percent of all the state's inhabitants lived below the poverty line, and in eastern
counties where slavery and later sharecropping dominated the economy, black poverty was so
deep and pervasive that outsiders referred to the region as "North Carolina's 'little Mississippi.'"
Fund leaders battled those conditions by promoting more effective and efficient delivery
of welfare services and, most controversially, by mobilizing the black and white poor as a
political force. They worked closely with local youth chapters of the NAACP, the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Voter Education Project to launch voter
registration drives and get poor people to the polls. Between 1962 and 1964, the VEP alone
distributed more than $900,000 to local organizations and added nearly 800,000 black voters to
registration rolls across the South. 71
3.
1966 to 1988: Race-Based Restrictions on the Right to Vote and Judicial
Intervention
The growing challenge to white rule—along with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—became the social irritant around which a powerful
71
On the Voter Education Project, see King Encyclopedia Online, http://goo.gl/NU1YT5.
26
conservative movement coalesced. 72 In North Carolina, no single figure better represented the
emerging realignment than Republican Congressman James C. Gardner, who won election in
1966.
In June 1967—only months into his term—Gardner took to the floor of House of
Representatives to attack the North Carolina Fund for spending "taxpayers dollars to create and
organize a political machine." Its agents, he charged, had "devoted months of their time, during
working hours, researching registration and voter lists"; they had "used Government
automobiles" to transport poor residents to voter registration sites; and, on election day, they had
leafleted poor communities with sample ballots and had driven residents to the polls. "I severely
condemn such activity on the part of Federal employees," Gardner exclaimed, "and charge that it
is completely outside of the limits and purpose of the poverty program."
Gardner had more on his mind than disciplining poverty workers. He intended to tap into
white discontent and to use veiled racial appeals as tools for building a powerful conservative
movement. Republican elders in North Carolina recognized the promise of Gardner's leadership
and the shrewdness of his strategy. In August 1965, they named him state party chairman. That
autumn, Sim A. DeLapp, the party's general counsel and himself a former chairman, wrote to
congratulate Gardner and to urge him on. "From the standpoint of voter sentiment," he advised,
"we are in the best shape that we have ever been [in] during my lifetime. People are permanently
angry at the so-called Democratic Party. . . . They are mad because Johnson has become the
President of the negro race and of all the left wingers."
Gardner and his allies kept up their attack on the North Carolina Fund, denouncing it for
"actively supporting the civil rights groups in a so called 'drive for a change in [the] local power
structure,' which is in essence a shield for the so called 'black power' struggle." This "dangerous
situation," the Congressman warned, not only threatened North Carolina but was also smoldering
in communities across the nation.
I. Beverly Lake, who had lost to Terry Sanford in the 1960 Democratic gubernatorial
primary and was now a justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court, expressed the depth of
white anger. "The apostles of appeasement . . . must be removed from positions of public trust,"
he advised Congressman Gardner. "We must clean up the whole foul mess and fumigate the
premises."
In 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon tapped racial antipathy to fuel
his "southern strategy." He cast his campaign in coded language, offering himself as a
spokesman for the "great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non shouters, the
non demonstrators" who played by the rules, worked hard, saved, and paid their taxes. Four years
after Nixon carried North Carolina, the white conservatives that he had mobilized—most of them
still registered Democrats—elected James E. Holshouser Jr. governor—the first Republican to
win the office since Daniel Russell in 1896—and sent Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate. Helms,
who would serve for six terms, was widely recognized as the most conservative member of that
body.
72
The account that follows, including quoted material, is adapted from Korstad and Leloudis, To Right These
Wrongs, 290-302.
27
Conservatives in the state Democratic Party held on through the 1970s and fought a
rearguard battle as civil rights advocates used the courts to challenge the dilution of black voting
strength. In late 1965, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina ruled that
the state's system for apportioning seats in both houses of the General Assembly violated the one
person, one vote principle, derived from the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment. North Carolina's constitution guaranteed each of 100 counties a seat in the House
of Representatives. That provision privileged rural counties with small populations over larger
urban areas. The district with the most residents was 18.5 times larger than the smallest. That
meant that a majority in the House "could be assembled from members who represented only
27.09 percent of the state's population." The situation in the Senate was considerably better. The
constitution required that Senate districts contain equal populations, though a separate provision
that no county was to be divided created imbalance. The most populous districts had 2.62 more
residents than the smallest. The court ruled that it would accept a ratio no larger than 1.3 and
ordered that the legislature be redistricted immediately. 73
Lawmakers convened in special session in 1966 and drew new district maps. They
reduced the population ratio between large and small districts to 1.3, as directed by the court. But
they did so by creating a multitude of multi- member districts—15 of 33 in the Senate, which
previously had no multi- member districts, and 41 of 49 in the House, up from 12 of 100. That
arrangement disadvantaged black candidates, who would face multiple white opponents and
whose supporters were legally prohibited from maximizing their voting strength by casting
single-shot ballots. 74
To ensure the permanence of multi- member districts, lawmakers drafted and voters
approved a constitutional amendment, which stipulated that counties be kept whole in the
creation of legislative districts. That provision made it mathematically difficult to base house and
senate seats on equal measures of population without resorting to multi- member districts. 75
If there was any doubt about lawmakers' intentions, they made it clear in 1967, when they
established a numbered-seat plan in 28 multi- member House districts and 21 multi- member
districts in the Senate, which included nearly all of the heavily black counties in the eastern
section of the state. The law stipulated:
In each Senatorial and Representative District entitled to elect more than one State
Senator or member of the State House of Representatives the positions shall bear
identifying numbers as follows: 'Senate Seat 1,' 'Senate Seat 2,' etc., or 'House
Seat 1,' 'House Seat 2,' etc. Each seat shall be considered a separate office. . . .
Votes cast for any candidate in a general election shall be effective only for the
seat for which he has been nominated by a political party or for which he has filed
his independent candidacy.
That plan made it all but certain that any black candidate would face a white opponent and,
without gaining a significant number of white votes, would lose. This tactic was so effective that
in 1971 there were only two black members of the 170-member General Assembly.
73
74
75
O'Connor, "Reapportionment and Redistricting," 32-33, and Drum v. Seawell, 249 F. Supp. 877 (1965).
O'Connor, "Reapportionment and Redistricting," 33.
Session Laws, Extra Session, 1966, chapts. 2 and 5, and Session Laws and Resolutions, 1967, chapt. 640.
28
When lawmakers renewed the numbered-seat plan in that same year and applied it to all
districts with more than 30 percent black population, the U.S. Department of Justice blocked its
implementation on grounds that it violated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The U.S. District
Court for the Middle District of North Carolina affirmed that judgment in 1972, ruling that both
the numbered-seat plan and the 1955 anti-single-shot law violated the Fourteenth Amendment's
equal protection clause and were unconstitutional. 76
F.
Gingles v. Edmisten and Judicial Intervention
In 1981, a dozen black voters filed suit in Gingles v. Edmisten, challenging the
legislature's recently enacted redistricting plan and the 1968 constitutional provision that
counties not be divided when apportioning house and senate seats. The state had not submitted
that provision for preclearance by the U.S. Department of Justice, and when it did so after the
plaintiffs' filing, both the no-division-of-counties rule and the 1981 redistricting plan were denied
approval.
Lawmakers reacted quickly by drafting a new plan that included five majority-black
house districts and one majority-black senate district. The creation of those districts aided the
election of eight new black members of the House, raising the total from three to eleven. As the
court later noted, however, the legislature's change of heart was in some considerable measure
cynical. "The pendency of this very legislation," the court observed, "worked a one-time
advantage for black candidates in the form of unusual organized political support by white
leaders concerned to forestall single- member districting." The U.S. District Court for the Eastern
District of North Carolina ruled for the plaintiffs in April 1984. 77
Acting in an extra session, the General Assembly subsequently divided a number of
multi- member districts into new single-member districts that improved the prospects of black
candidates. In November balloting, two additional black lawmakers were elected to the General
Assembly, bringing the total to 13. 78
1.
1984 to 1990: Expansion of Franchise and Persistence of Racial Appeals
By 1989, nineteen blacks served in the General Assembly, more than were elected during
either Reconstruction or the Fusion era. Two years later, state Representative Dan Blue was
elected Speaker of the House, the highest legislative office held by a black politician in North
Carolina's history. Under Blue's leadership, Congressional reapportionment created two
minority- majority districts in which voters elected the first blacks to represent the state since
George White at the end of the 19th century. Eva M. Clayton represented the 1st Congressional
District, which included counties from White's 19th-century district, the "Black Second," and Mel
Watt represented the 12th district, which comprised the urban corridor from Charlotte to
Winston-Salem.
76
Session Laws and Resolutions, 1967, chapt. 1063; Towe, "Barriers to Black Political Participation," 28 and 6162; Manderson "Review of the Patterns and Practices of Racial Discrimination," 31; Watson, "North Carolina
Redistricting Process, 1965-1966," 8; and Dunston v. Scott, 336 F., Supp. 206 (1972).
77
Gingles v. Edmisten, 590 F. Supp. 345 (1984).
78
Keech and Sistrom, "Implementation of the Voting Rights Act in North Carolina," 13-14.
29
During the late 1980s, blacks also made substantial gains at the local level, largely as a
result of legal challenges to at- large elections and multi- member districts that followed in the
wake of the Gingles decision. By 1990, more than 400 blacks had been elected to county and
municipal offices across the state. 79
Despite those gains, appeals to white racial privilege continued to shape North Carolina
politics. The 1990 senatorial campaign pitted three-term incumbent Jesse Helms against Harvey
Gantt, a black Democrat and former mayor of Charlotte. Gantt's very presence in the race
testified to the gains that black North Carolinians had made in access to the ballot box and
political influence.
The contest was tight until shortly before election day, when the Helms camp began
airing a television ad that focused on two white hands crumpling a lay-off notice. The voice-over
added commentary that echoed the racial rhetoric of the 1950 Graham-Smith contest and the
News and Observer cartoons of 1898 and 1900: "You needed that job and you were the best
qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?
Harvey Gantt says it is. . . . You'll vote on this issue next Tuesday. For racial quotas, Harvey
Gantt. Against racial quotas, Jesse Helms."80
On the eve of the election, the Republican Party also mailed postcards to 125,000 voters
in heavily black precincts, warning recipients incorrectly that they would not be allowed to cast a
ballot if they had moved within thirty days, and that if they attempted to vote, they would be
subject to prosecution. Gantt subsequently lost the election with 47 percent of the vote. 81
The Helms-Gantt contest pointed to a political realignment that had been in the making
since the mid 1960's. Conservative whites—particularly white men—were moving in evergreater numbers into the Republican Party, and in the Democratic Party a new biracial alliance
was coalescing around a progressive social vision.
In the 1990s, during James B. (Jim) Hunt's third and fourth terms as governor, that
alliance made major investments to improve the welfare of all North Carolinians. During his first
eight years in office—1977 to 1985—Hunt had established a reputation as one of the South's
most forward- looking governors by persuading lawmakers to appropriate $281 million in new
spending on public schools and by appointing black colleagues to his cabinet and the State
Supreme Court. When he returned to office in 1993, he pushed an even broader agenda focused
on education and human services. Hunt established Smart Start, a program that pumped
$240 million into local communities to provide preschool education and improved health care to
young children; raised teacher salaries by a third and increased state spending on public
education from 76 to 86 percent of the national average; launched Health Choice, a state program
for uninsured children who were ineligible for Medicare, Medicaid, or other forms of federal
assistance; and created a new Department of Juvenile Justice to address the underlying causes of
youth crime. Hunt also continued to champion inclusive governance. When he left office in
79
Ibid., 14, and Earls, Wynes, and Quatrucci, "Voting Rights in North Carolina," 581.
The hands ad is available on-line: http://youtu.be/3Lw8_f6_2XQ.
81
Earls, Wynes, and Quatrucci, "Voting Rights in North Carolina," 589, and News and Observer, November 4,
1990.
80
30
2001, 22 percent of his appointees to state agencies and commissions were minorities, a figure
that matched the state's demography. 82
Members of Hunt's Democratic alliance understood that black voters now had greater
power to elect candidates of their choice in North Carolina. In order to sustain these
achievements they would have to continue expanding minority citizens' access to the franchise.
Those North Carolinians were far more likely than whites to suffer high rates of
unemployment, to be less well educated, and to work in low-wage, hourly jobs that provided no
paid time off to cast a ballot. Many of them were also poor. In 1989, the poverty rate among
blacks was 27 percent, as compared with 8.6 percent for whites. All of these factors, political
scientists Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler have demonstrated, work to discourage voting by
disadvantaged populations, and by doing so, make the national political discourse more
conservative and less attentive to the social development needs of marginalized communities. 83
Beginning in the late 1980s, lawmakers in Raleigh and Washington implemented a
number of reforms that made voting easier. Many of those measures echoed the spirit of the
Fusion election law of 1895. In 1986, the General Assembly took the lead by permitting voters in
North Carolina to register to vote when they received or renewed their driver's licenses, and in
1993, the National Voter Registration Act added registration by mail and in-person registration at
designated public sites such as libraries, schools, and social service agencies. 84
2.
Electoral Reform, Greater Expansion of Voter Participation, and Racial
Appeals: 2000 to 2012
In 2000, North Carolina implemented early voting and "no-excuse" absentee voting,
which allowed citizens to request an absentee ballot without providing a justification. Beginning
in 2005, voters could cast provisional ballots when questions arose about the precinct in which
they resided, and in 2007 new regulations permitted voters to register and cast ballots at the same
time during the early voting period. These reforms opened the way for black turnout to soar to
historic highs in the 2008 and 2012 elections, when voters rallied behind the candidacy of Barack
Obama, who would become the first African American President of the United States. In 2012,
according to data compiled by The Atlantic Wire, just over 80 percent of eligible blacks in the
state cast a ballot, the second highest percentage in the nation, after Mississippi at 82.4 percent. 85
As black voters flexed their political muscle, their antagonists used familiar racial tropes
to stir white fears. Mocking images of President Obama as an ape or buffoon flew across the
Internet, and during the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, V.R. Phipps, a selfstyled "patriot" from Duplin County in the eastern part of the state, captured an evening's
headlines when he parked his truck and trailer near delegates' downtown hotels. The trailer
82
Pearce, Jim Hunt, 145-46, and 263-266. In 1977, Hunt appointed Howard Lee, former mayor of Chapel Hill, to
serve as Secretary of the Department of Natural Resources and Community Development. Seven years later, he
named Henry E. Frye to the State Supreme Court, and in 1999 elevated Frye to chief justice.
83
U.S. Census Bureau, "State Poverty Rates by Sex and Race: 1989," http://goo.gl/n9qWM8, and Leighley and
Nagler, Who Votes Now?.
84
McLaughlin, et. al., "Improving Voter Participation," 6-7.
85
Ibid., 6-8; Crowell, "Do Election Laws Affect Voter Turnout?," 2; and Bump, "A State-By-State Look at the
Record Black Turnout in 2012," The Atlantic Wire, http://goo.gl/aa9fUX.
31
contained effigies of the President and state political figures, each strung up in a hangman's
noose. 86
This sort of demagoguery also found voice in established political circles. In March 2012,
Tara Servatius, a conservative radio talk show host from Charlotte, used the web site of the John
Locke Foundation to criticize the President for supporting same-sex marriage. The Locke
Foundation, a conservative think tank, was established in 1990 by businessman Art Pope, and
over the next two decades became an influential force in state politics. Servatius was a regular
contributor to the foundation's blog, and had stirred controversy earlier when she complained
about growing "African-American political control" in her city. Now, in the same-sex marriage
posting, she lit a media bonfire by including a Photoshopped picture of President Obama, dressed
in green fetish leather with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken between his legs. The
developments that followed revealed that the incident involved more than a partisan attack. It
was also a textbook example of what legal scholar Ian López has described as the contemporary
formula for "getting away with racism":
1) Punch racism into the conversation through references to culture, behavior, and
class; 2) parry claims of race-baiting by insisting that absent a direct reference to
biology or the use of a racial epithet, there can be no racism; 3) kick up the racial
attack by calling any critics the real racists for mentioning race and thereby
"playing the race card."
After several days of silence in response to mounting complaints, the director of the Locke
Foundation removed the offending photograph—but not the post—and Servatius offered an
apology, of sorts: “[The photo] was meant to illustrate Obama’s southern political strategy,
nothing more. . . . I didn’t think about the racial implications of the picture when I posted it. I
simply don’t think in those terms. Unfortunately some people do. To me, fried chicken is simply
a Southern Cuisine.”87
G.
Conservative Electoral Victory and House Bill 589: 2010 to Present
Fueled in part by the emergence of the Tea Party, Republicans won a majority in the
2010 mid-term elections and took control of the North Carolina General Assembly. The timing
was fortuitous: they would have the task of redistricting the state on the basis of the 2010
Census. Republicans redrew the state's Congressional and legislative district lines in ways that
favored their constituents, and in 2012 they secured a super-majority in the General Assembly.
Party leaders and journalists pointed out the obvious historical significance of the 2012 election:
Republicans now controlled the legislative and executive branches of state government for the
first time in more than a century.
The Civitas Institute, a conservative think tank, heralded the legislative initiatives
undertaken by the new majority as the fulfillment of a vision of government that they had been
advocating for nearly a decade. Civitas staff observed that after the 2012 election, "the time was
86
"'Hanging Obama" Truck Makes Way Into Charlotte," WBTV.Com, http://goo.gl/xS9EH.
Servatius, "Just Like Atlanta," John Locke Foundation blog, http://goo.gl/HPqRpx; López, Dog Whistle
Politics, 139; "Conservative Blogger Sorry for Controversy," WRAL.com, http://goo.gl/OKlrMZ; and "Charlotte
Blogger Tara Servatius Resigns Over Obama Portrayal," Charlotte Observer, March 23, 2012. Servetius's blog post
on same-sex marriage is available at this web address: http://goo.gl/RNQ7nV.
87
32
right to begin unraveling generations of big- government, liberal policies that had become the
norm in the Tar Heel State."88
The policies that the Civitas Institute opposes and that the current General Assembly has
sought to unravel have been linked directly to blacks' growing electoral clout. In the legislative
session of 2013, the new majority passed legislation to defund the forms of social investment that
blacks and their allies had championed since the time of Reconstruction. Lawmakers cut benefits
for North Carolinians who were chronically unemployed; rejected federal funds that would have
provided 500,000 poor citizens access to health care through Medicaid; and made cuts in public
school funding that threaten many of the gains of the previous 20 years. The General Assembly
also repealed the Racial Justice Act, passed in 2009, which had given inmates the right to
challenge imposition of the death penalty by using statistical analysis to prove that race was a
factor in their sentencing.
At the close of the session, the new majority in the General Assembly targeted black voting
clout directly with passage of House Bill 589, a sweeping revision of state election law that
reverses decades of reform. 89 The amended law includes a number of provisions that will make
voting harder for minority electors.
•
The law requires that in-person voters provide one of eight approved forms of photo
identification in order to cast a ballot. Blacks constitute 22 percent of North Carolina's
population, but according to an analysis of State Board of Elections data by legal scholars
Michael Herron and Daniel Smith, they represent more than a third of the currently
registered voters who do not possess the two most common forms of identification: a
valid driver's license or a state-issued nonoperators ID card. 90
•
Many of those voters will find it difficult to acquire proper identification, particularly if
they cannot get time off from work to visit a local Division of Motor Vehicles office
during weekday business hours, or if they live in rural areas where there is no public
transportation. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that in 10 North Carolina counties
the DMV operates only a single office that opens once per month. Four of those counties
have some of the state's highest percentages of black voting-age population, including
Bertie in the eastern Coastal Plain, which tops the list at 60.7 percent. The DMV offices
in four counties are open no more than three days per month; in five counties, service is
limited to no more than four days per month; and in only 18 of 100 counties does the
DMV offer weekend hours. 91
•
The law eliminates the first week of early voting, same-day registration, and straightticket voting. Numbers from the 2008 election in North Carolina suggest that these
changes will have a disproportionately negative effect on black voter participation. In the
run- up to election day, 71 percent of black voters cast their ballots early, including 23
percent who did so within the first week of the early voting period. That compared,
88
"North Carolina's 2013 Legislative Session Recap: Landmark Gains For Conservatism," Civitas Institute Blog,
http://goo.gl/6kHHnU.
89
Session Law 3013-381, House Bill 589, http://goo.gl/Ahfuk7.
90
Herron and Smith, "Race, Shelby County, and the Voter Information Verification Act in North Carolina," 34.
91
United States v. North Carolina, Civil Action No. 13-cv-861, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of
North Carolina.
33
respectively, to 51 and 14 percent of whites. Thirty- five percent of same-day voter
registrants were black, a figure 50 percent higher than what might have been predicted on
the basis of population statistics, and Democrats voted straight-ticket by a two-to-one
ratio over Republicans. 92
•
The law ends a program that permitted 16- and 17- year-olds to pre-register at their high
schools and other public sites. That opportunity has been particularly popular among
black teenagers. Blacks constitute 27 percent of the pool of pre-registered youth, once
again a figure that is significantly higher than black representation in the general
population. 93
•
The law encourages increased levels of voter challenge and intimidation. Three revisions
are important in this regard. First, residents throughout the state may now inspect and
challenge registration records in any of North Carolina's 100 counties. In the past,
challengers were permitted to act only in the counties in which they resided. Second,
residents of a county may now challenge voters' eligibility to cast a ballot at polling sites
countywide, not just in the precincts where they themselves are registered. Third, the
chair of each political party in a county may now appoint ten at- large observers to
monitor voting at any polling place they believe warrants close supervision. These poll
watchers will be appointed in addition to the election judges assigned to specific voting
sites.
Lawmakers have defended these provisions as reasonable safeguards against voter fraud. But in
the absence of compelling evidence that state elections have actually been tainted by fraudulent
behavior, such claims seem disingenuous.
V.
CONCLUSION
North Carolina has a long and cyclical history of struggle over minority voting rights,
from the time of Reconstruction to the present day. During the late 1860s, then in the 1890s,
throughout the civil rights movement that followed World War II, and again in recent decades,
black citizens pressed for free and fair access to the franchise, made alliances with sympathetic
whites, and used the power of biracial politics to democratize the state and its institutions.
In each era, those who identified as Progressives reformed state election law to remove
barriers to political participation. Voter registration and turnout increased dramatically, as did the
number of blacks elected to public office, and as political participation by African Americans
increased, government became more responsive to the social and economic needs of North
Carolinians who suffered the deprivations of white supremacy. Education, for example, became
an enduring priority. Former slaves, recognizing that literacy was the key to freedom, insisted
that the 1868 state constitution include a mandate for free public schools; Fusionists in the 1890s
insisted that local school districts raise new taxes to expand educational opportunity; and
reformers a century later brought school spending up to national averages and developed
pioneering programs for early childhood education. During these periods of change, North
Carolina won recognition as the most democratic state in the South.
92
93
Ibid., and Heberling, Francia, and Greene, "Conditional Party Teams," 117.
Herron and Smith, "Race, Shelby County, and the Voter Information Verification Act in North Carolina," 43.
34
Opponents who identified as Conservatives rejected expansion of both the electorate and
the role of government in daily life. During the late 1860s and 1890s, they relied on the Ku Klux
Klan and Red Shirts to intimidate blacks and their white allies, and in campaign speeches and
political cartoons, they conjured the demon of "negro domination." The civil rights victories of
the 1960s made such slurs unacceptable—at least in polite company—and necessitated the
invention of new code words to animate white fear and animosity. Politicians spoke of the
"traditions of the South," the rights of the "silent majority," and the injuries inflicted by "racial
quotas."
House Bill 589 evokes a similar racial sub-text. The intent announced in its preamble—to
"restore confidence in government"—bears resemblance to Charles Aycock's defense of
disfranchisement as the instrument of "good order" and "good government." House Bill 589 also
echoes the 1899 election law crafted to ensure victory for a disfranchisement amendment to the
state constitution. Today, as in Aycock's era, the law places the onus on electors to prove their
eligibility to vote, opens the door to obstructive challenges at the voting booth, and eliminates
provisions that have made voting easier and expanded political participation. In 1899, the
discarded reforms included color-coded ballots and the right to time off from work to exercise
the franchise. Today, they include same-day registration, pre-registration for 16- and 17-yearolds, and an extended early voting period—all provisions used disproportionately by black
electors.
Other legislation passed by the architects of House Bill 589 during their first session in
office points to how a constrained electorate can affect social provision and government
responsiveness to minority concerns. By making deep cuts in education spending, denying
benefits to the long-term unemployed, and refusing federal funds to expand Medicaid,
lawmakers have added to the burden borne by citizens who are already disadvantaged by the
legacies of white supremacy. These policies, in conjunction with the new constraints on voting
rights, threaten to perpetuate the long-term effects of past discrimination and, by doing so, hinder
the ability of black citizens to participate effectively in the political process.
If House Bill 589 is allowed to stand, North Carolina risks repeating history, once again
setting aside hard-won gains for racial equality and for the state's democratic and economic
vitality.
35
EXHIBIT A
Curriculum Vitae
James L. Leloudis II
ADDRESSES
Honors Carolina
CB# 3510, Graham Memorial
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3510
(919) 966-5110
E-mail: [email protected]
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENT
Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
ADMINISTRATIVE APPOINTMENTS (in reverse chronological order)
Associate Dean for Honors, College of Arts and Sciences, and founding Director, The James
M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Appointed July 1, 1999-June 30, 2004; reappointed July 1, 2004-June 30,
2009, appointment revised and extended July 1, 2007-June 30, 2012; reappointed July
1, 2012-June 30, 2017.
http://honorscarolina.unc.edu
Interim Director, Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, July 1, 1998-June 30, 1999.
Associate Chair, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, July 1,
1996-June 30, 1998.
EDUCATION
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1989
M.A., Northwestern University, 1979
B.A., with highest honors, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1977
SCHOLARLY PROJECTS AND PUBLICATIONS
Books
Co-author, To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End
Poverty and Injustice in 1960s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2010).
North Carolina (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003). 340 pp.
Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Co-author, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1987 and 2000; New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).
World Wide Web
"Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World," Teaching and Learning in
the Digital Age, American Historical Association (2001).
http://www.theaha.org/tl/list.cfm
Articles (refereed *)
"Leadership and Politics in the War on Poverty: The Case of the North Carolina Fund,"
Popular Government (Special Issue: Perspectives on Poverty in North Carolina) 68
(Spring/Summer 2003): 2-13.
* Co-author, "Citizen Soldiers: The North Carolina Volunteers and the South's War on
Poverty," in Elna C. Green, ed., The New Deal and Beyond: Social Welfare in the
South since 1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), pp. 138-62.
* "A Classroom Revolution: Graded School Pedagogy and the Making of the New South,"
in Czeslaw Majorek and Erwin V. Johanningmeier, eds., Educational Reform in
International Perspective: Past, Present, and Future (Krakow: Polish Academy of
Sciences, 2000), pp. 245-60.
* Co-author, "Citizen Soldiers: The North Carolina Volunteers and the War On Poverty"
Law and Contemporary Problems 62 (No. 4, Autumn 1999): 178-96.
* "Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920,"
Historical Studies in Education/Revue d'Histoire de l'Education 5 (Fall 1993): 203-229.
* "Oral History and Piedmont Mill Villages, 1880-1940," International Journal of Oral
History 7 (November 1986): 163-80.
* "Cotton Mill People: Work, Community, and Protest in the Textile South, 1880-1940,"
(with Jacquelyn Hall and Robert Korstad) American Historical Review 91 (April 1986):
245-86.
* "School Reform in the New South: The Woman's Association for the Betterment of
Public School Houses in North Carolina, 1902-1919," Journal of American History 69
(March 1983): 886-909.
37
* "Subversion of the Feminine Ideal: The Southern Lady's Companion and White Male
Morality in the Antebellum South, 1847-1854," in Rosemary S. Keller, Louise L.
Queen, and Hilah F. Thomas, eds., Women in New Worlds: Historical Perspectives on
the Wesleyan Tradition, vol. 2 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1982), pp. 60-75.
* "Tokens of Death: Tales From Perquimans County," North Carolina Folklore Journal 25
(November 1977): 47-60.
FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS
Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University, "Moral Challenges of Poverty
and Inequality," 2010-2011. $75,000
"The Marketing of the New South and the Education of African American Children,"
Spencer Foundation, 2000. $263,000
"Race, Ethnicity, and Schooling in the American South," planning grant, Spencer
Foundation, 1999. $50,000
Chancellor's Technology Award, "Technology in the Undergraduate Survey," University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998. $125,000
Spencer Mentor Network, The Spencer Foundation, Chicago, Illinois, 1996-1998. $50,000
for support of graduate advisees, 1996-97 and 1997-98.
Research travel grant, Asian Studies Curriculum, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. For travel to Beijing, Wuhan, and Guangzhou, November 12-25, 1994. $2,500
Course development grant, Center for Teaching and Learning, University of North Carolina,
and the Corporation on National and Community Service (Americorps), to design an
oral history offering on race and poverty in the post-WWII South, Summer 1994.
$3,000
Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship, National Academy of Education, Stanford University,
Palo Alto, California, 1992-93. $30,000
Research Fellowship for Recent Recipients of the Ph.D., American Council of Learned
Societies, 1992-93. $10,000
Spencer Dissertation Year Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation,
Princeton, New Jersey, 1988-89. $12,500
George E. Mowry Dissertation Fellowship, Department of History, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987-88. $5,000
38
William F. Sullivan Research Fellowship, Museum of American Textile History, North
Andover, Massachusetts, 1985-86. $5,000
Dissertation Fellowship, Duke University-University of North Carolina Women's Studies
Center, 1984-85. $3,000
Research Fellowship, Rockefeller Archive Center of the Rockefeller University, North
Tarrytown, New York, 1982 and 1983. $3,000
PROFESSIONAL AWARDS AND HONORS
Office of the Provost Engaged Scholarship Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, 2011.
North Caroliniana Society Book Award, 2010. Awarded for To Right These Wrongs.
Mayflower Cup, awarded by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, for the
year's best work in non-fiction, 1996. Awarded for Schooling the New South.
Claude A. Eggertsen History of Education Dissertation Award, 1989, presented by the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan, for the best dissertation on
the history of education.
Albert J. Beveridge Award, 1988, presented by the American Historical Association for Like
a Family.
Merle Curti Social History Award, 1988, presented by the Organization of American
Historians for Like a Family.
Philip Taft Labor History Award, 1988, presented by the New York State School of
Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, for Like a Family.
Honorable mention, John Hope Franklin Award, 1988, presented by the American Studies
Association for Like a Family.
Merit Award of Recognition, 1988, presented by the North Carolina Society of Historians
for Like a Family.
Louis Pelzer Memorial Award, 1982, presented by the Organization of American Historians
for "School Reform in the New South."
Honorable mention, Research on Women in Education Award, 1984, presented by Women
Educators, American Educational Research Association, for "School Reform in the New
South."
39
CAMPUS FELLOWSHIPS AND HONORS
Academic Leadership Fellow, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003. Included participation in the Leadership Development
Program, Center for Creative Leadership, San Diego, California.
Commencement Speaker, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, December, 2003
(selected by Senior Class officers and marshals).
Chapman Family Fellowship, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997.
Fellow of the Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, inducted in 1996.
Fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, 1992.
Ruth and Phillip Hettleman Award for Outstanding Scholarly or Artistic Accomplishment
by Young Faculty, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995. $5,000
Students' Undergraduate Teaching Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
1991.
SCHOLARLY PRESENTATIONS
Poverty Pedagogy Roundtable: Enlisting the History of Poverty to Change the Public
Conversation, Organization of American Historians, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, April 19,
2012.
Invited participant and presenter, "Politics, Activism, and the History of America's Public
Schools," A Conference Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Michael Katz's The Irony
of Early School Reform, University of Pennsylvania, April 12-13, 2008.
Discussant, "Southern Exceptions," History of Education Society-Canadian History of
Education Association joint meeting, Ottawa, Ontario, October 26-29, 2006.
"What Was Lost: African American Accounts of School Desegregation," as part of a panel
on The Long Civil Rights Movement: The Movement Past and Present, Organization of
American Historians, Boston, Massachusetts, March 27, 2004
"The Post-Brown South: Filling Gaps Between Law, Tradition, and Transition," American
Educational Studies Association, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 2, 2002.
Discussant, "Schooling and Teaching Before the Civil War," History of Education Society,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 2, 2002.
40
"Confronting Crisis in Schools: Women and Desegregation After World War II," Twelfth
Berkshire Conference on the History of Women: Local Knowledge-Global Knowledge,
University of Connecticut at Storrs, June 5, 2002.
"Conversations Behind the Wall," Invitational Conference on the History of Education,
Stanford University, April 2000.
"Education and the Color Line," International Standing Conference on the History of
Education, Sydney, Australia, July 1999.
Discussant, invitational conference on the "Segregated South," Sidney Sussex College,
University of Cambridge, March 23-27, 1999.
Chair and discussant, "New Research in the History of Education," History of Education
Society, October 29-31, 1998.
"Race and Ethnicity in the History of Education," American Educational Research
Association, San Diego, California, April 13-17, 1998.
Chair and discussant, "Teachers and Race: Rethinking Interpretations of the Past,"
American Educational Research Association, San Diego, California, April 13-17, 1998.
"Student Activism and the South's War on Poverty," Mellon Seminar in American History,
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, December 1,
1997.
Discussant, "Rebels and Rabble Rousers: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s," History
of Education Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 23-26, 1997.
Panelist, "A Tenth-Year Retrospective on Like a Family," Southern Labor Studies
Conference, Williamsburg, Virginia, September 25-28, 1997.
Discussant, "Southern Progressives and Labor," Fourth Southern Conference on Women's
History, Charleston, South Carolina, June 12-14, 1997.
"Student Volunteers, the North Carolina Fund, and the Meanings of Democracy,"
Organization of American Historians, San Francisco, California, April 17-20, 1997
Discussant, "Roundtable on the History and Social Context of Education," session on
"Institutional Independence and Market Choice," and book session on my Schooling the
New South, American Educational Research Association, Chicago, Illinois, March 2428, 1997.
41
Discussant, "Teachers, Race, and Biography," Joint Conference of the Canadian History of
Education Association and the History of Education Society (USA), Toronto, Canada,
October 17-20, 1996.
"Education and the Making of a New South," 18th International Standing Conference on the
History of Education, Krakow, Poland, August 5-9, 1996.
Presenter, Invitational Conference on New Perspectives on Educational Research,
Sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and the Office of Educational Research and
Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, Stanford, California, June 24-25, 1996.
Discussant, "Women's Educational Experiences in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Schools," Tenth
Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill, North Carolina, June 7-9, 1996.
"A Classroom Revolution: Graded School Pedagogy and the Making of the New South,"
History of Education Society, Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 19-22, 1995.
Chair, "Landscapes and Languages," conference on Lessons of Work: New Approaches to
the Study of Occupational Culture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
September 24, 1994.
Discussant, book session on Bruce Curtis, "'True Government by Choice Men'?: Inspection,
Education, and State Formation in Canada West," American Educational Research
Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 6, 1994.
"Writing the History of Education in the New South," Spencer Fellows Forum, National
Academy of Education, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, May 6-7, 1993.
Discussant, "Race, Class, and the Law: New Perspectives on North Carolina," Organization
of American Historians, Anaheim, California, April 15-18, 1993.
"A Classroom Revolution: The Transition from Common-School to Graded-School
Pedagogy in the New South," Canadian History of Education Association, Lethbridge,
Alberta, October 22-25, 1992.
Presenter and discussant, "The Agrarian South and the Industrial South," Vance-Granville
Community College Faculty Seminar on Southern Culture, Henderson, North Carolina,
June 20, 1991.
Discussant, "Gender, Race, and Work," Southern Conference on Women's History, Chapel
Hill, North Carolina, June 7-8, 1991.
Discussant, "Educational Change in America, 1865-1930," Missouri Valley History Conference, Omaha, Nebraska, March 14-16, 1991.
42
"Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920,"
Southern Historical Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 31-November 3,
1990.
"Roundtable: Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World," Social Science
History Association, Chicago, Illinois, November 3-6, 1988.
"The Workers' World in Piedmont Mill Villages, 1880-1930," Historical Society of North
Carolina, Durham, North Carolina, April 10, 1987.
"'Honest, Hard Working People': An Oral History of Family and Community Life in
Piedmont Mill Villages, 1880-1940," Organization of American Historians, New York,
New York, April 10-13, 1986.
Discussant, "Unions and Southern Labor," Organization of American Historians,
Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 18-21, 1985.
"Learning by Listening: An Introduction to the Southern Oral History Program," Society of
North Carolina Archivists, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, March 15, 1985.
"'Like a Family': Class, Community, and Conflict in the Piedmont Textile Industry, 18801980," presented with Robert Korstad and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall as one of six papers at
a by-invitation-only conference on the Future of American Labor History, Northern
Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, October 10-12, 1984. I authored and presented an
earlier version at the Fourth Southern Labor Studies Conference, Atlanta, Georgia,
September 30-October 2, 1982, and as the Patrick Memorial Lecture, Guilford College,
Greensboro, North Carolina, March 23, 1983.
"Schooling for a New South: The Political Economy of Public Education in North Carolina,
1880-1940," Southern History of Education Society, Atlanta, Georgia, March 26-27,
1982.
"School Reform in the New South: The Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public
School Houses in North Carolina, 1902-1919," American Studies Association,
Memphis, Tennessee, October 29-November 1, 1981; Social Science History
Association, Nashville, Tennessee, October 22-25, 1981; and Association of Historians
in Eastern North Carolina, Mount Olive, North Carolina, October 9, 1981.
"Changing Social Functions of Education in North Carolina, 1860-1920," Third Citadel
Conference on the South, Charleston, South Carolina, April 23-25, 1981.
"The Use of Historical Research to Inform Public Policy," North Carolina Association for
Research in Education, Asheboro, North Carolina, May 12, 1980.
43
"Methodist Women and White Male Morality in the Antebellum South: The Southern
Lady's Companion, 1847-1854," Women in New Worlds: Historical Perspectives on
the United Methodist Tradition, Cincinnati, Ohio, February 1-3, 1980.
SCHOLARLY EXCHANGE
Comparative Education Delegation to the People's Republic of China, November 12-25,
1994.
REVIEWS
American Historical Review, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Business History Review,
Georgia Historical Quarterly, History of Education Quarterly, Journal of American History,
Journal of Southern History, Labor History, North Carolina Historical Review
MEMBERSHIPS IN PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, Southern Historical
Association, American Educational Research Association, History of Education Society,
Canadian History of Education Association
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
Consultant, Levine Museum of the New South, 2009.
Selection Committee, Small Grants Program, Spencer Foundation, Chicago, Illinois, 2008 to
2010.
Nominating committee, History of Education Society, 2009.
Manuscript reader for the University of Chicago Press, University of Georgia Press,
University of North Carolina Press, and University of Virginia Press.
Nominating Committee, Division F – History and Historiography, American Educational
Research Association, 2004 to 2006.
History of Education Outstanding Book Award Committee, History of Education Society
1999 to 2002 (chair, 2002).
Program Committee, History of Education Society, 1998, 2002 and 2006.
Selection Committee, Spencer Dissertation Fellowship Program, Spencer Foundation,
Chicago, Illinois, 1996 to 1998.
Program Committee, Division F – History and Historiography, American Educational
Research Association, 1997 and 1998.
44
Editorial Board, History of Education Quarterly, 1997 to 1999.
Review editor, Southern Cultures, 1993 to 1998.
Editorial Advisory Board, "Documenting the American South," a World Wide Web
digitization project, Davis Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996 to
present.
Editorial advisory board, North Carolina Historical Review, North Carolina Division of
Archives and History, 1992 to -1997.
UNIVERSITY SERVICE
Arts@theCore Advisory Board, Carolina Performing Arts, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, 2013- to present.
Liberal Arts Strategic Task Force, chair, College of Arts and Science, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013 to present.
Steering Committee on Out-of-State Applications and Enrollment, Office of Admissions,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013 to present.
Global Partnership Roundtable, Office of the Provost, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, 2011 to present.
Center for Faculty Excellence Advisory Board, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
2010 to 2012.
Morehead-Cain Foundation, Scholarship Selection Committee, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, 2008 to present.
President, Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, 2008 to present.
Advisory Committee, Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, School of Law, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005 to present.
College of Arts and Sciences Study Abroad Advisory Committee, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004 to present.
Nannerl O. Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professorship, advisory committee, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, 2004 to 2006.
Chancellor's Commencement Advisory Committee, 2004 to 2006.
45
Search Committee, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, August 2003 to March 2004.
Implementation Committee, Freeman Foundation Asian Studies Initiative, College of Arts
and Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002 to 2004.
Advisory Committee, Center for Teaching and Learning (as of July 1, 2009, the Center for
Faculty Excellence), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002 to present.
Undergraduate Curriculum Review Committee, College of Arts and Sciences, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001-2002.
Universities Coordinating Committee, Robertson Scholars Program, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, 2000 to present.
Administrative Boards, General College and College of Arts and Sciences, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999 to 2008.
Capital Campaign Task Force, Sub-Committee on Academic Community, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999.
Public Fellows Program, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, 1998-1999.
Administrative Board, Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, 1998 to 2001.
Faculty Advisory Board, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, 1998 to 2001.
Chair, Faculty Legislative Liaison Group, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998.
Acting Director, Undergraduate Studies Committee, Department of History, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Spring 1998.
Faculty Advisor, Order of the Old Well, service honor society, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, 1998 to present.
Advisory Board, APPLES Service Learning Program, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, 1997 to 1999.
Architectural Planning Committee, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997 to 1998.
Leadership Development Working Group, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997 to 2004.
46
Phi Beta Kappa executive committee, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997 to
present.
Academic Coordinator, University History Project, Southern Oral History Program,
Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997 to 2000.
Public Service Roundtable, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997 to 1999.
Acting Director, Southern Oral History Program, Department of History, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Spring 1997.
Chapman Fellows' Conference on Teaching, program committee, Institute for the Arts and
Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997.
Chancellor's Intellectual Climate Task Force, Service Learning Subcommittee (Acting
Chair), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996-1997.
Executive Committee, Center for the Study of the American South, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996 to 2001.
Faculty Committee on Research, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996 to 1999.
Educational Policy Committee, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995 to 1998.
Historic Properties Committee, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995 to 2004.
Director of Honors, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
1994 to 1996.
Search Committee, Curator of the North Carolina Collection, University Library, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1993-1994.
Faculty Council, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1991 to 1994.
Committee on Teaching, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, 1990 to 1996.
Chair's Advisory Committee, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, 1990 to 1994.
Chair, Program Committee of the Faculty Working Group on Southern Studies, Institute for
Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1991-1992.
Advisory Committee, Institute for Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, 1991-1992.
47
Undergraduate Studies Committee, Department of History, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, 1989 to 1991, 1994 to 1998 (chair 1997-1998).
PUBLIC HISTORY AND COMMUNITY SERVICE
"Battling Poverty, Building Prosperity," Board of Governors, North Carolina Bar
Association, Southern Pines, North Carolina, October 9, 2011.
"Reconstructing North Carolina: Leadership Lessons from History," North Carolina
Association of County Commissioners, Concord, North Carolina, August 19, 2011.
"Child Labor in the Southern Textile Industry," Standing on a Box: Lewis Hine in Gastonia,
1908, North Carolina Humanities Council, Gastonia, North Carolina, November 15,
2008.
"Service to State and Region," Symposium on University History, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, October 12, 2006.
"The University of North Carolina in Peace, War, and Reconstruction," paper presented at a
symposium on Remembering Reconstruction, Center for the Study of the American
South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, October 2, 2004.
"Gastonia, 1929 in History and Memory," History Happened Here, North Carolina
Humanities Council symposium on the 75th anniversary of the 1929 Loray Mill Strike,
Gastonia, North Carolina, June 12, 2004.
"What's a University For? Reflection's on Carolina's History," Inaugural Gladys Coates
University History Lecture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, February 12,
2004.
"Public Education and the Making of a New North Carolina," Appalachian State University,
Boone, North Carolina, April 30, 1999; and for a symposium on "Charles Brantley
Aycock's North Carolina: Politics, Education, and Race Relations in the Progressive
Era," Wayne Community College, Goldsboro, North Carolina, January 20, 2001.
Member, Board of Directors, Pope House Museum Foundation, Raleigh, North Carolina,
2000 to present.
"Can Every Child be a High Achiever? Historical Perspectives on the Pursuit of
Excellence," Museum of the New South, Charlotte, North Carolina, February 5, 2000.
"A 20th -Century Tar Heel Retrospective," faculty coordinator, Program in the Humanities
and Human Values, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, July 28-29, 1999.
"North Carolina's Industrial Revolution," Hillsborough, North Carolina, January 17, 1999.
48
"The Once and Future North Carolina: Reflections on History and Human Relations,"
Wildacres Leadership Initiative, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, February 13, 1998.
"The Millennium and America's Educational Past," an address given by invitation of the
Secretary of Education, Millennium Project Round Table, U.S. Department of
Education, Washington, D.C., February 4, 1998.
"Through the Eyes of Race," Public Fellows Symposium, Institute for the Arts and
Humanities, New Bern, North Carolina, January 31, 1998.
"Southern Industrialization," Elderhostel, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, September 11, 1997.
"Student Radicalism in the 1930s," weekend mini-course sponsored by the Program in the
Humanities and Human Values, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April 26,
1997.
Conference planner, "No Easy Walk: The North Carolina Fund Action Project," a three-day
conference on poverty and poverty policy with grassroots activists, North Carolina Fund
volunteers, policy makers, foundation officers, and legislative representatives, Durham,
North Carolina, December 12-14, 1996.
Carolina Speakers Bureau, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1995
to present.
"Looking Back to the Future: The Fate of the Lecture in a Age of Multi-Media," Autumn
Sunday Symposium on Communicating Information in a Multimedia Culture, Institute
for the Arts and Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, October 9,
1994.
Consultant, "Only a Teacher," a series of three one-hour documentaries on the history of
teaching as women's work, produced by the Project on Women and Social Change,
Smith College, and WGBH-Boston, 1994 to present.
"Paul Green and the University of North Carolina," Program in the Humanities and Human
Values, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April 10, 1994.
Panelist, "'Tar Heel Voices, Ringing Clear': The Bicentennial Oral History Project," Friends
of the Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, December 2, 1993.
"What Should a University Be? Students, Curriculum, and Campus Life at the University of
North Carolina," Friends of the Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
October 4, 1993. This talk was later published as the introduction to an exhibit catalog
entitled "Two Hundred Years of Student Life at the University of North Carolina,"
Southern Research Report 4 (Fall 1993): 1-14.
49
"The Asheville Normal and Teachers College and the History of Education in North
Carolina," Warren Wilson College, Asheville, North Carolina, August 7, 1993.
Consultant, "Women of Substance," an oral history project on the Asheville Normal and
Collegiate Institute and the lives of white women teachers at the turn of the century,
sponsored by Warren Wilson College, the University of North Carolina School of
Education, and the North Carolina Humanities Council, 1993.
Consultant, "Memories of New Bern," a local history project sponsored by the North
Carolina Humanities Council, 1991 to 1995.
"The Old Curriculum and the New: The University of North Carolina in the Nineteenth
Century," Hinton James Lecture, Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, February 12, 1991.
"From Farm to Factory: The Worlds of Southern Cotton Mill Workers," invited public
lecture in a year-long series, "The Civil War in North Carolina, A Commemoration,
1865-1990," North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Elon College, Elon,
North Carolina, June 23, 1990.
"From Farm to Factory: The Workers' World in the Southern Textile Industry," American
Studies Conference for Foreign Scholars, United States Information Agency, Duke
University, and the University of North Carolina, July 9, 1990, October 15, 1990,
March 25, 1991, and April 15, 1991.
"Southern Regionalism," Bertelsmann Foundation German-American Teacher Exchange,
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, March 27, 1990.
"The South's Industrial Revolution," Culbreth Junior High School, Chapel Hill, North
Carolina, March 6, 1990. An illustrated lecture and small-group workshop presented
with assistance from students in the first-year graduate seminar in American history,
Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Creative and planning consultant to the Department of Speech Communication, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Spring and Fall 1988, on a project to dramatize Like a
Family and to stage performances in textile communities across North Carolina.
Performance discussion moderator, Fall 1988.
Creative consultant to playwright Garry Lyons, "Plant Me a Garden," a play based on
Southern Oral History Program interviews with North Carolina tobacco and textile
workers; and background consultant to playwright Nancy Pahl Gilsenan, "Mill Mother's
Lament: The Story of Ella May Wiggins," a television script based on the life of Ella
May Wiggins, balladeer and martyr of the 1929 textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, Summer 1984.
50
Local planning consultant, North Carolina tour of "Echoes in America," a play based on
interviews with British cotton mill workers, Spring 1984.
"The Workers' World in Piedmont Mill Villages, 1880-1930," North Carolina Museum of
History, Raleigh, North Carolina, May 21, 1989; Catawba County Historical
Association, Newton, North Carolina, September 17, 1987; and Cary Jaycees, Cary,
North Carolina, January 12, 1988.
"Like a Family: Life in North Carolina Mill Villages," Tar Heel Junior Historian 26 (Fall
1986): 15-19. The Tar Heel Junior Historian is a magazine for eighth- graders in the
North Carolina public schools.
"Oral History and Local History," University of South Carolina at Lancaster, November 11,
1986.
"Learning by Listening: An Introduction to Oral History," Durham Academy, Durham,
North Carolina, November 20, 1985.
"Labor in the New South," YMCA Faculty-Student Dinner Discussion Series, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, November 8, 1985.
Planning consultant and panelist, "The Charlotte Country Music Story," a two-day festival
and conference presented by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources,
Charlotte, North Carolina, October 25-26, 1985.
Research consultant, Legal Defense Fund, National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, and Chambers and Ferguson, Attorneys at Law, Charlotte, North
Carolina, October-December, 1981. Conducted research for an historical brief in
Gingles v. Edmisten.
TEACHER EDUCATION AND PUBLIC SCHOOL OUTREACH
Lead scholar, "The Culture of Textiles in North Carolina: Past, Present, and Future," North
Carolina Humanities Council Teachers Institute, University of North Carolina, June 2127, 2009.
"The Built Environment as a Source for Teaching History," Project for Historical Education,
Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, December 6, 2008.
Administrative Board, Project for Historical Education, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, 1994-2002.
"Oral History and Southern Labor," University of North Carolina Summer Institute in the
Humanities, a program for alumni of the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program,
Chapel Hill, July 12, 1994.
51
"Teaching North Carolina History," a weekend workshop for public school teachers,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, May 2, 1992.
Instructor, Workshop on Industrialization, "Critical Issues in History," a seminar for public
high school teachers, North Carolina School of Mathematics and Science, Durham,
North Carolina, July 11, 1989.
"The Workers' World in Piedmont Mill Villages, 1880-1930," North Carolina History
Institute for Public School Teachers, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North
Carolina, June 28, 1987.
"Strategies for Effective Lecturing," Institute for Public School History Teachers, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, June 24, 1987.
Teaching Workshop, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
1986, 1987, 1990, 1993, and 1994.
52
EXHIBIT B
Reliance Materials
Government Documents
1898 Wilmington Race Riot Report. 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission, May 31, 2006.
http://goo.gl/oxKQiS.
Constitution of the State of North Carolina, 1868. Raleigh: Joseph W. Holden, 1868.
Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Session of 1900. Raleigh: Edwards and
Broughton, and F. M. Uzzell, 1899.
Public Laws of the State of North Carolina, Sessions of 1865-66, and 1861, 62, 63, and 1864.
Raleigh: Robt. W. Best, 1866.
Public Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Session of 1893. Raleigh: Josephus
Daniels, 1893.
Public Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Session of 1895. Winston: M. I. and
J. C. Stewart, 1895.
Public Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Session of 1897. Winston: M. I. and
J. C. Stewart, 1897.
Public Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Session of 1899. Raleigh: Edwards
and Broughton, and F. M. Uzzell, 1899.
Revised Code of North Carolina, 1854. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1855.
Session Laws and Resolutions, State of North Carolina, 1955. Winston-Salem: Winston Printing
Company, 1955.
Session Laws and Resolutions, State of North Carolina, Extra Session of 1956, and Regular
Session, 1957. Winston-Salem: Winston Printing Company, 1957.
Session Laws and Resolutions, State of North Carolina, Extra Session of 1965, Extra Session of
1966, and Regular Session of 1967. Winston-Salem: Winston Printing Company, 1967.
Session Laws and Resolutions, State of North Carolina, 1971. Winston-Salem: Winston Printing
Company, 1971.
Statutes at large, Treaties, and Proclamations of the United States of America from December,
1865 to March, 1867. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1868.
U.S. Census Bureau. "State Poverty Rates by Sex and Race: 1989." http://goo.gl/n9qWM8
Court Cases
Drum v. Seawell, 249 F. Supp. 877 (1965).
Dunston v. Scott, 336 F., Supp. 206 (1972).
Gingles v. Edmisten, 590 F. Supp. 345 (1984).
United States v. North Carolina, Civil Action No. 13-cv-861, U.S. District Court for the Middle
District of North Carolina.
Newspapers
The Atlanta Constitution
Raleigh News and Observer
Wilmington Messenger
Wilmington Morning Star
Books and Articles
Abrams, Douglas Carl. Conservative Constraints: North Carolina and the New Deal. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1992.
Ali, Omar H., In the Lion's Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
Anderson, Eric. Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872-1901: The "Black Second"
Congressional District. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1978.
Ashby, Warren. Frank Porter Graham, a Southern Liberal. Winston-Salem, N.C.: J. F. Blair,
1980.
Beckel, Deborah. Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
Beeby, James M. Revolt of the Tar Heels: The North Carolina Populist Movement, 1890-1901.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
Bernstein, Leonard. "The Participation of Negro Delegates in the Constitutional Convention of
1868 in North Carolina." Journal of Negro History 34 (October 1949): 391-409.
Browning, James B. "The North Carolina Black Code." Journal of Negro History 15 (October
1930): 461-73.
Bump, Philip. "A State-By-State Look at the Record Black Turnout in 2012," The Atlantic Wire,
http://goo.gl/aa9fUX.
Carlton, David L., and Peter A. Coclanis. Confronting Southern Poverty in the Great
Depression: The Report on Economic Conditions of the South with Related Documents.
Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996.
Carter, Dan T. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and
the Transformation of American Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Connor, Robert D. W., and Clarence H. Poe, eds. The Life and Speeches of Charles Brantley
Aycock. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Page and Co., 1912.
Covington, Howard E, and Marion A Ellis. Terry Sanford: Politics, Progress, and Outrageous
Ambitions. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
54
Crow, Jeffrey J. "Cracking the Solid South: Populism and the Fusionist Interlude." In The North
Carolina Experience, edited by Lindsey Butler and Alan Watson, 333-54. Chapel Hill:
UNC Press, 1984.
Crow, Jeffrey J., and Robert F. Durden. Maverick Republican in the Old North State: A Political
Biography of Daniel L. Russell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Daniels, Josephus. Editor in Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941.
Dunn, Susan. Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Durrill, Wayne K. War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Earls, Anita S., Emily Wynes, and LeeAnne Quatrucci. "Voting Rights in North Carolina, 19822006," Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice. 17, no. 2. [Los Angeles,
Calif.]: University of Southern California, Gould School of Law, 2008.
Escott, Paul D. Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850-1900.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper
and Row, 1988.
Frey, Donald E. America's Economic Moralists: A History of Rival Ethics and Economics.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.
Gershenhorn, Jerry. "The Rise and Fall of Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1880-1900."
Unpublished paper in author's possession.
Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Goldfield, David. Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.
Goodwyn, Lawrence. Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1976.
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and
Christopher B. Daly. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
Hanchett, Thomas W. Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in
Charlotte, 1875-1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Hamilton, Joseph Gregoire de Roulhac. Reconstruction in North Carolina. New York: Columbia
University, 1914.
Hasen, Richard L. "Race or Party?: How Courts Should Think About Republican Efforts to
Make It Harder to Vote in North Carolina and Elsewhere." Harvard Law Review 127
(January 7, 2014): 58-75.
Heberling, Eric S., Peter L. Francia, and Steven H. Greene. "The Conditional Party Teams of the
2008 North Carolina Federal Elections." In Change Election: Money, Mobilization, and
55
Persuasion in the 2008 Federal Elections, edited by David Magleby, 108-39.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010.
Herron, Michael C., and Daniel A. Smith. "Race, Shelby County, and the Voter Verification Act
in North Carolina." Draft – Version 2. February 12, 2014. In author's possession.
Justesen, Benjamin R. George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
Keech, William R., and Michael P. Sistrom. "Implementation of the Voting Rights Act in North
Carolina." Pasadena, California: Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences,
California Institute of Technology, 1992.
Korstad, Robert Rodgers. Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for
Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2003.
Korstad, Robert R. and James L. Leloudis. To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund
and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Kousser, J. Morgan. The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the
Establishment of the One-Party South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.
Larkins, John R. The Negro Population of North Carolina: Social and Economic. Raleigh, N.C:
North Carolina State Board of Charities and Public Welfare, 1944.
Lawson, Steven F. To Secure These Rights: The Report of Harry S Truman's Committee on Civil
Rights. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004.
Leloudis, James L. Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina,
1880-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Leighley, Jan E., and Jonathan Nagler. Who Votes Now? Demographics, Issues, Inequality, and
Turnout in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Luebke, Paul. Tar Heel Politics: Myths and Realities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1990.
López, Ian Haney. Dog-Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism
and Wrecked the Middle Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
McLaughlin, Mike, with Robert Buschman, Roberto Obando, Tim Saintsing, Margaret Smith,
and Trip Stallings. "Improving Voter Participation and Accuracy in North Carolina's
Elections." North Carolina Insight (April 2003): 2-57.
Manderson, Marge. "Review of the Patterns and Practices of Racial Discrimination." Manuscript
in author's possession.
Moore, John Robert. "Senator Josiah W. Bailey and the 'Conservative Manifesto' of 1937."
Journal of Southern History 31 (February 1965): 21-39.
O'Connor, Paul T. "Reapportionment and Redistricting: Redrawing the Political Landscape,"
North Carolina Insight (December 1990): 30-49.
56
Orr, Oliver Hamilton. Charles Brantley Aycock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1961.
Orth, John V. "North Carolina Constitutional History." North Carolina Law Review 70 (19911992: 1759-1802.
Patterson, James T. "The Failure of Party Realignment in the South, 1937-1939. The Journal of
Politics 27 (August 1965): 602-17.
Pearce, Gary. Jim Hunt: A Biography. Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, Publisher, 2010.
Petty, Adrienne Monteith. Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the
Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Pleasants, Julian M, and Augustus M. Burns. Frank Porter Graham and the 1950 Senate Race in
North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Raper, Horace W. William W. Holden: North Carolina's Political Enigma. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
Shin, Eui Hang."Black-White Differentials in Infant Mortality in the South, 1940-1970,"
Demography 12, 1 (February 1975): 1-19.
Stephens, George. Locke, Jefferson, and the Judges: Foundations and Failures of the U. S.
Government. New York: Algora Publishing, 2002.
Thuesen, Sarah C. Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship
in North Carolina, 1919-1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Towe, William H. Barriers to Black Political Participation in North Carolina. Atlanta: Voter
Education Project, 1972.
Trelease, Alan W. "The Fusion Legislatures of 1895 and 1897: A Roll-Call Analysis of the North
Carolina House of Representatives." North Carolina Historical Review LVII (July 1980):
280-309.
Watson, Harry L. "North Carolina Redistricting Process, 1965-1966." Manuscript in author's
possession.
Watson, Thomas E. "The Negro Question in the South." The Arena XXXV (October 1892): 54050.
Woodward, C. Vann. Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel. New York: The Macmillan Company,
1938.
Wright, Gavin. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil
War. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Other Sources
Josiah William Bailey Papers. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Duke
University. Durham, North Carolina.
Civitas Institute Blog. http://goo.gl/6kHHnU.
Finding Sources. http://goo.gl/fUPJok
57
John Locke Foundation Blog. http://goo.gl/RNQ7nV.
King Encyclopedia Online, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute,
Stanford University. http://goo.gl/NU1YT5.
Our Campaigns. http://goo.gl/O3U8AK.
Textile Heritage Museum. http://goo.gl/s2CnTD.
WBTV.Com. http://goo.gl/xS9EH.
WRAL.Com. http://goo.gl/OKlrMZ.
58