Josephus Daniels’ Wilson Advance was not subtle.
Wilson Advance, 8 September 1882.
white supremacy
Do you stand with the white men or the Negroes?
Josephus Daniel’s Wilson Advance was not subtle. Just ahead of Election Day 1888, he ran an edition frothing with white supremacy, racist slogans interspersed in bold type between alarmist articles.
And this nasty bit — an editorial cartoon depicting a white woman with a bewildered child hauled by a black constable before a court with a black judge, black complainant, a jury of twelve black men, and several black onlookers. This, it urged, was the peril of “Radical Rule in the Eastern Counties” of North Carolina, i.e. the Black Second.
Wilson Advance, 1 November 1888.
Recommended reading, no. 16: “Black Tip, White Iceberg.”
For an in-depth understanding of the context and significance of Samuel H. Vick‘s service as Wilson postmaster, please read Benjamin R. Justesen’s “Black Tip, White Iceberg: Black Postmasters and the Rise of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1897-1901,” published in The North Carolina Historical Review, Volume 82, Number 2 (April 2005), pp. 193-227. (If you don’t have a JSTOR subscription, you can sign up for 100 free article views.)
The Ku Klux Klan: too weird to even contemplate.
Wilson Daily Times, 21 June 1922.
White supremacy made permanent.
On 2 August 1900, in the wake of the Wilmington Massacre, North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment that effectively disenfranchised its African-American voting population. This disenfranchisement was the point, not a by-product. For more than a year prior to the vote, politicians and press across the state made that point clear in speeches and editorials, including this one that the Wilson Daily Times ran 123 years ago today.
First, the text of the Suffrage Amendment:
Then, a breezy — and nakedly racist — explanation of the amendment’s purpose and impact. The literal bottom line: “The white people are determined to make white supremacy permanent in North Carolina.”
Wilson Daily Times, 10 April 1899.
Local heroes Josephus Daniels and Charles B. Aycock were central figures in North Carolina’s white supremacist campaign and the physical and political violence it engendered. The Suffrage Amendment, whose passage was as much their legacy as anyone’s, long outlived both of them, standing until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Ku Klux Klan marches in Elm City.
The Mirror published this favorable account of a Klan rally in Elm City in 1924:
Wilson Mirror, 6 December 1924.
Negro white supremacist given 24 hours to leave.
Wilson Daily Times, 24 January 1925.
I’m not sure what to make of this. Who was Socrates A.E. O’Neil of Wilson? What was the Ethiopia International School? And what was the “wrong sort of propaganda”?
A search for information about O’Neil primarily yielded newspaper articles, all remarkably consistent in tone over the span of more than twenty years. The first reference I found was in a 1918 Baltimore Sun ad Rev. Socrates O’Neil of God Charitable International Ethiopian Organization, Inc., Baltimore, Maryland, placed touting his 37-cent pamphlet, “Negro Problem Solved.”
Baltimore Sun, 5 November 1918.
In 1922, the Shreveport Journal published a partial transcript of one of O’Neil’s speeches, presumably delivered to a white audience. It’s eye-popping. (The piece also resolves one question: O’Neil’s Ethiopian School was 60 miles north of Wilson in Weldon. Whew.) Asserting that he aspired to fill the late Booker T. Washington’s shoes, O’Neil declared that “southern white people are better to negroes than northern white people,” Black people “need to be educated with [his] common sense ideas or driven on old boss’s farm to learn common sense,” he was “representative of white supremacy and teach it in my school with Biblical authority,” and “[t]he lynching question will be abolished, if science is accurate, when the negroes, men and women, morally live in their own places.”
Shreveport Journal, 8 December 1922.
Shreveport Journal, 4 January 1923.
A 1925 New York Age piece took O’Neil apart.
New York Age, 8 August 1925.
Finding North Carolina Negroes insufficiently grateful, Bishop O’Neil headed south, but ran into trouble. He was arrested for theft in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1931.
Baltimore Afro American, 29 August 1931.
In November 1932, O’Neil was convicted of larceny in Savannah, Georgia, and sentenced to two months on the chain gang.
He bounced back. A year later, O’Neil delivered a speech in Biloxi, Mississippi, in which he described the Ku Klux Klan as “a help to the negroes.”
Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.), 13 November 1935.
In 1939, O’Neil — whose real name may have been Abelard E. O’Neil — was sent to prison in Indiana on an intoxication charge. This is the last I found of him.
Palladium-Item (Richmond, Ind.), 18 April 1939.
First clipping courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III; City Court Criminal Minute Books, Savannah, Georgia, Court Records, 1790-1934, database online, http://www.ancestry.com.
Take it down.
From The News and Observer, today’s headline: “Daniels family removes statue of racist ancestor in Raleigh“:
“Frank Daniels Jr. of Raleigh, retired president and publisher of The News & Observer, said in a statement Tuesday that his grandfather’s bigoted beliefs overshadowed his other accomplishments, including, Daniels said, ‘creating one of the nation’s leading newspapers.’”
“’Josephus Daniels’s legacy of service to North Carolina and our country does not transcend his reprehensible stand on race and his active support of racist activities,’ Daniels said. ‘In the 75 years since his death, The N&O and our family have been a progressive voice for equality for all North Carolinians, and we recognize this statue undermines those efforts.’”
The article glancingly mentions Daniels’ ownership of the Wilson Advance. It was in this newspaper that he cut his teeth as an unabashed white supremacist, using the paper as a platform for his relentless drumbeat for the suppression of civil rights for African-Americans.
In two columns of the same issue, published 31 October 1884, Daniels published editorial comment ranging from the snide:
… to the unvarnished:
… to the grotesque:
Wilson Advance, 31 October 1884.
The Wilson County Historical Association erected a marker for Josephus Daniels near the county courthouse. It makes no mention of his most efficacious role — spearhead of the disenfranchisement and general subjugation of North Carolina’s African-American citizenry. Despite repeated calls for its removal, notably led by the indefatigable Castonoble Hooks, the marker stands.
I amplify Mr. Hooks’ voice here: TAKE IT DOWN.
——
Update, 18 June 2020: Today, the city of Wilson quietly removed the historical marker honoring Josephus Daniels today and returned it to the Wilson County Historical Association.
“Wilson removed Josephus Daniels marker: Family cited his ‘indefensible positions on race,” Wilson Daily Times, 18 June 2020.
Save the county from negro rule.
In the 1890s, the Wilson Times resorted unabashedly to racist tropes and appeals to white supremacy to exhort white men to vote the Democratic ticket.
Wilson Times, 18 September 1896.
Wilson Daily Times, 16 October 1896.
Wilson Times, 16 October 1896.
Wilson Advance, 3 November 1898.
Your father probably taught you to do this.
In 1924, “White Barbers of Wilson” placed an ad in the Daily Times complaining of white customers — women, even — patronizing African-American barber shops. Hair-cutting had long been dominated by black men, and white barbers keenly felt the loss of caste that their trade entailed. After chastising “the public” for going to “dark skin shops,” they shook a challenging finger: “Ladies and gentlemen, we believe when you see the thing the way we do you will be a full blooded Southerner, and join the ranks of a true born American citizen.”
Wilson Daily Times, 5 September 1924.