The rules governing North Carolina elections still show signs of the state’s history, a history in which black voters were denied the right to vote for decades after the official end of slavery. Lee Craig, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Economics at North Carolina State University, lectured on the topic “Home Rule and the Disenfranchisement of African-American Voters in North Carolina” for the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society earlier this year. Craig discussed themes from that presentation with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: This is a topic we could discuss for many, many programs, but we’re only going to hit the highlights. So let’s start, in North Carolina, people will remember from history lessons the Civil War, then Reconstruction. At the end of Reconstruction, the middle of the 1870s, where do things stand in North Carolina?
Craig: Politically and socially, the state was in a bit of a disequilibrium because the exact terms of how the political spoils would be divided had not yet been settled after the Union troops withdrew. The group that ultimately seized control of the statehouse and the governor’s mansion was referred to as the Bourbon Redeemers. So the “redeemer” part meant that they had redeemed the South from Republican and Union domination following the Civil War.
Kokai: You mentioned during the course of your presentation that this process ended up leading to African-American voters — who for a time had a very important role in North Carolina politics — losing their ability to participate. How did this happen?
Craig: Right. Let’s work backwards. I think a lot of listeners would be familiar with the ultimate disenfranchisement of North Carolina voters by the 1900 amendment that instituted the poll tax and the literacy test. This was the disenfranchisement that we know from the Jim Crow era in the 20th century. But what’s less well-known and understood [were] the efforts to disenfranchise voters beginning with the end of Reconstruction. And basically what happened there was, in order to get back in the Union, North Carolina was required to do two things: one was to ratify the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the other was to write a new state constitution. In that state constitution of 1868, local rule — this would be largely in the unincorporated areas, the nonmunicipal areas of the state — was granted to African-Americans by popular vote. In 1875, the now white-dominated legislature amends that 1868 constitution, specifically the article on creating municipal corporations — local government, in short — and allows the legislature, by a simple majority, to take away that home-rule right in the unincorporated areas of the state.
Kokai: And at some point, then, the legislature did this.
Craig: Exactly. Then they followed immediately after amending the constitution that allows them to pass the legislation to end local home rule, they do that. And in place of popularly elected officials, the now white-dominated state legislature appoints the local government officials.
Kokai: One of the reasons that you know a lot about this topic is that you have been working on a biography of a name that a lot of people, especially readers of the News and Observer, will know: Josephus Daniels. What was Josephus Daniels’ role in this whole process?
Craig: Daniels was born in 1862, so in the initial revocation of the home-rule clause in the state constitution, he played no role in that. But what that meant was that, for a generation, the state government was dominated by the white-dominated Democratic Party. It was during that generation that Daniels came of age and emerged as one of the leaders of the North Carolina Democratic Party. In the 1890s, when he was in his 30s and was situated in Raleigh, a coalition of Republicans — which were numerically dominated by African-Americans — and white populists fused politically, creating the Fusionist Party. That party, numerically, had the power to take control of the state legislature and eventually the governor’s mansion. Daniels was a leader … was probably the most important leader of the group that seized back power from that Fusionist coalition in the 1890s.
Kokai: You mentioned that probably the main point that people who are well-versed in North Carolina history will remember — the 1900 amendments, or sort of the start of what ended up being the Jim Crow legislation. How important was the period from the mid-1870s up to 1900 in determining what would happen in 1900?
Craig: Well, I think what that period from 1875 to 1894 did was, it vested in white Democrats the notion that they were the rightful heirs of the pre-Civil War state power structure. In short, they were supposed to control the state. And there was very little political give-and-take between Republicans and Democrats. The disputes, at the state level, were largely … disputes within the Democratic Party itself. So the election of 1894, when the Fusionists seized control of the state legislature, is really a shock to the white power structure in the state. And they spend the rest of the decade trying to figure out a way that they can regain control of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion that they had lost. And it’s important to remember, during this period, before the constitution was subsequently amended, that the legislature also appointed senators to the U.S. Senate. So those were two more important seats that, if you got control of the legislature, you controlled.
Kokai: Some people will look back on the history and say much of what happened, happened because these white guys who were in charge were a bunch of racists. You pointed out in your presentation that while, yes, many of them, if not most or all, were racists, that wasn’t the only factor.
Craig: Right. I think by any reasonable standard that we might apply today, we would label these individuals racist. But their objectives, ultimately, were political and economic objectives. The political ones were the narrowest of political objectives: They wanted control. And in order to do that, they had to take that control back from the Fusionists. And in order to do that, they somehow had to split the Fusionist coalition. In order to do that, they used race as the wedge issue.