Reverend Dr. William Barber is president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. He serves as pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church Disciples of Christ in Goldsboro. He successfully campaigned for same-day registration and early voting in North Carolina and helped win passage of North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act. The act allows North Carolina death row prisoners to reduce their sentences to life in prison without parole in certain circumstances when race played a factor in their trial or sentencing.
Reverend Dr. William Barber talking:
it’s an important place to start, because so much of our conversation politically today is ahistorical myth or often mythical. It doesn’t really deal with where we really come from to understand where we are. One of the best places to start, Amy, is right after the Civil War in 1868, all over the South, but let me talk about North Carolina. Blacks and whites came together in what was called “fusion politics.” Now, it wasn’t white women, but it was black men and white men.
This is right after the Civil War. The first thing they did in North Carolina was they rewrote the Constitution. And when they rewrote the Constitution, they put several things in that constitution—the Equal Protection Clause—in fact, language in our constitution that was not in many of the other Southern constitutions. They guaranteed the right to education for all people, and they protected voting rights. In essence, you had this fusion politics. You had more African Americans serving in the North Carolina legislature between 1868 and 1898 than we have today. Throughout the South, most legislatures now were controlled by this new fusion politics, this broad electorate, and some of them were controlled by majority black legislators.
Now, what did they do immediately? As a part of what we call “Reconstruction,” they passed voting rights, educational rights, labor rights, progressive tax policy, and they kept that coalition together. But within four years, it was under attack. The old planters, the people that had been a part of the slave system couldn’t stand it. They rolled out campaigns of hate. They rolled out campaigns of violence and political propaganda. And what did they immediately try to do? Roll back voting rights roll back educational rights, roll back labor rights, roll back progressive tax. By 1898, there was a massive riot in Wilmington. Three to 5 percent of the entire population was killed. The whole attempt of the riots in Wilmington was to roll back all of these progressive ideals that blacks and whites, through this coalition of fusion politics, had put in place. That ended the first Reconstruction.
Wilmington riot. there was this backlash of those who wanted a more homogeneous society, did not want to see this kind of fusion, and so there was this vicious backlash. In 1896, there was a plan launched by three—the Charlotte Observer, Raleigh News Observer, the media—a guy by the name of Furnifold Simmons organized it, you know, politically. And Charles B. Aycock led an effort to spread propaganda, that if you don’t stop this coalition of blacks and white fusion, his argument was, it’s going to hurt white women, that your daughters will be under attack. So the Wilmington riots was November the 10th.
The families of those newspapers led the propaganda. Remember, a lot of people didn’t write, read at that time. So what they did were political cartoons that would show blacks and whites who were joined together as vampires, and then it would be like little white girls, you know, in the corner. And it was a suggestion that this coalition, that was actually promoting progressive ideals, was dangerous to North Carolina and dangerous to America.
On November 10, 1898, the riots begun. Blacks and whites who were fusionists, coalitionists, were driven out of the city, taken out of office, and 3 to 5 percent of the city was killed. And after the Wilmington riots, it was sent all over the country: this is how you keep the government in the permanent hands of the white man. These riots preceded the Springfield, Illinois riots. And after that, that basically ended Reconstruction in North Carolina. And similarly, it happened around the South.
You get another period around the 1950s and ’60s. Again we see a coalition coming together—blacks, whites, Jews, Christians, milling together—the civil rights movement. And what do we get? Focus on voting rights, labor rights, educational rights, a progressive tax policy, through coalition. But remember, by 1968, the leaders have been attacked, the policy has been attacked, Nixon is now running. And what does he implement? A new Southern strategy. The basis of that Southern strategy is to go after voting rights, educational rights, labor rights, progressive tax policy, and anybody in the leadership that was trying to move this nation forward. So, in a nutshell, to understand where we are now, we have had, at every point when we’ve tried to reconstruct this country, a series of attacks that always have four attacks. They attack voting rights, labor rights, educational rights, and progressive tax policy, and the leaders of the coalition.
Charlotte lunch counter sit-in, inspired by the other sit-ins, in Greensboro, Charles Jones talking:
“I was driving back from Washington, D.C., at about 5:00 in the morning and heard a news report that four students have gone to Woolworth’s in Greensboro, sat there, did not move, and insisted on service. And I said, “Yes! That’s the handle we need. That’s what we’ll do.” So I came on to Charlotte and went to the student council meeting—I was vice president of the student council, Johnson Smith University—and announced that “Tomorrow, gentlemen and ladies, I’m going down to Woolworth’s. I’ll be well dressed, if anybody wants to join me. We’re going to be nonviolent. We’re going to be everything our grandparents have taught us to be, and parents—polite, intelligent. But we’re not going to give up until we open the lunch counters.” I thought perhaps a handful of people would join me. The next morning, there were more than 200 Johnson Smith University students waiting when I got there. And from that point, we went downtown, went into Woolworth’s and opened—and sat at all those lunch counters. Then the group spilled over to Kress and Belk’s and one or two other places. And leadership emerged, and they were coming to me for guidance. And we occupied all of the lunch counters in downtown Charlotte on that first day and caught Charlotte off guard.”
Reverend Dr. William Barber talking:
Remember, we had the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Then you had a massive campaign. In fact, the North Carolina NAACP filed more suits during that period of time than any other state conference in the country to desegregate schools. You had the sit-ins, which marked the young people coming in, again marking a kind of fusion politics, blacks and whites. You not only had Charlotte, you had Durham, you had Greensboro, you had the students at A&T, the students at Bennett, you had High Point. You had SNCC coming and being formed in the 1960s at Shaw University. There was extraordinary activity. My own parents—I came back to North Carolina in the 1960s, late 1960s, because my parents were recruited back to help integrate the school system in Washington County, because, as of 1968, 14 years—excuse me, yeah, 14 years after Brown, the school systems in eastern North Carolina were still not desegregated, though the law had been in place for 14 years.
So, again, what the sit-in movements represent, like in the 1868, in the 1960s this new fusion, this new way of seeing politics, this coming together of people and diversity, trying to get us, if you will, to this second Reconstruction, the fulfillment of the things that had been aborted in the 1800s. And—but at every turn, Amy, what you get was a massive reaction—people getting arrested, people getting killed, the politics becoming more conservative, an attempt to push back toward states’ rights. So at each turn where we’ve tried to move toward reconstructing this nation, there’s been a massive pushback. And if you understand that history, you understand why right now, after the election of President Obama in 2008, the most diverse coalition-based electorate we’ve seen in this state ever, and across this country, then you understand why there is such a pushback by those who tend to want a more homogeneous reality, because any time you broaden and deepen and widen the electorate, we have the possibility of moving a little bit closer to the noble ideas that we have listed. So, what are we seeing now? The most regressive, race-based attack on voting rights since the 19th century. If you understand the attempts throughout history to always turn back coalition politics and move this nation forward, you understand what’s happening now.
Apology that was written by the editors of the Raleigh News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer in 2006.
“Again we confront the role played by the press in firing the hatreds that led white vigilantes to overthrow Wilmington’s elected municipal government and wantonly to kill black residents. This newspaper was a leader in that propaganda effort under editor and publisher Josephus Daniels. Although the paper no longer is owned by Daniels’ heirs, an apology for the acts of someone whom we continue to salute in a different context on this page and for the misdeeds of the paper as an institution is perfectly in order, and so we offer that apology today.”
Josephus Daniels was a former secretary of the Navy. Give him a cup of joe, the coffee line, you know. But I wish my friend Dr. Tyson was here, as well, Tim Tyson, who’s written on this, because that’s an apology, but what we’ve asked for, the civil rights community, and we presented before the Wilmington Riot Commission, and there’s a commission that made a bunch of recommendations beyond just apology, because, number one, Wilmington was the closest port to Europe and Africa controlled by blacks and whites working together. Wilmington was what Atlanta is today. It would have been an Atlanta in North Carolina. All of that was destroyed, when that Gatling gun came in and people were killed and 3 to 5 percent of the population—some say more per capita than on 9/11, if you look at the stats back then. It tore apart, you know, voting rights.
So, Josephus Daniels becomes secretary of the Navy, but Charles B. Aycock becomes governor. And part of what they do then is bring back poll taxes and grandfather clause, and the participation of the black vote drops to nearly zero in many places in eastern North Carolina and across North Carolina, and the last African-American congressman of the Reconstruction era, George White, virtually was run out of office. And we did not have another African-American congressperson until 1990, which was 25 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. There’s never been a discussion about even economic reparation—not to individuals, but the kind of reparations that ought to go into that area, because all that was lost—the businesses, the economic structures—none of that has ever been dealt with.
And by the way, Amy, most of your readers may not know that all of those counties that were affected by the Wilmington riots are still not covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, because the Wilmington riots was not official history. It was not included in the testimony that talked about disenfranchisement in North Carolina. So when the counties were decided on, which counties in North Carolina would be under the Voting Rights Act, only 40 out of a hundred. Only 40 counties out of a hundred are covered in North Carolina, despite this ugly, mean, violent history of disenfranchisement.
In 2006, when I became president of the North Carolina NAACP, along with others who joined, we recognized that we needed to push a 21st century form of fusion politics, that in the South, if you’re going to organize, you’ve got to have an anti-racist, anti-poverty, anti-militarism agenda that can draw people from multiple areas. You’ve got to help educational advocates under—with environmental advocates who understand the same people voting against educational equality are voting against environmental justice, are voting against labor rights. We formed a coalition called Historic Thousands on Jones Street in 2006. We also came to understand, if you’re going to work in the South, you’ve got to target the state capitol, because most of the regressive things that hurt us, in terms of voting rights and labor rights, come out of state capitols. So we formed a coalition, then 60 organizations, now 140, representing nearly two million people in the state.
And the first thing we passed in that coalition, working with North Carolina Fair Share, Democracy North Carolina, was same-day registration and early voting. We had been pushing it for years. But when we pushed this coalition together, we won, with the help of progressive legislators. Now, people said it couldn’t happen. They said in a Southern state you would never get this kind of broad same-day registration, early voting, Sunday voting and Saturday voting. We won. Now, here’s the notion of that. In the 2008 election, North Carolina’s voting participation grew greater than any other state in the nation. Sixty-one percent of North Carolinians used the same-day registration and early voting. Nearly one million black and brown people participated in same-day registration and early voting.
– source democracynow.org