Raleigh, Remove Racist Josephus Daniels from His Position of Honor
- by: Susan V
- recipient: City of Raleigh, North Carolina
North Carolina newspaper editor Josephus Daniels received many honors during his lifetime and beyond - despite his leading role in the most vicious white supremacy campaign in the South.
After the Civil War, many freed slaves worked hard to get an education, buy land and start their own businesses. Even though Ku Klux Klan terrorism impeded further progress and voting rights, in 1894 poor whites and blacks in NC set aside their racial differences and joined into a Fusion party to defeat the Dixiecrat elites' hold on state politics.
By 1898, Daniels knew it would take more than the Klan to put an end to this movement that had already begun to benefit the majority of citizens. So he used his influential Raleigh News and Observer to target mostly uneducated whites with inflammatory editorials, demonizing cartoons depicting blacks as sexual predators and fabricated reports of black on white crimes. His campaign incited such intense fear and hatred, it culminated in a race massacre and coup in Wilmington and the notorious and violent decades-long reign of Jim Crow.
Even worse, Daniels’ propaganda created a ripple effect that continues to color race relations today. But despite his outrageously racist and destructive actions, Daniels is still honored by a statue standing in downtown Raleigh and a number of landmarks bearing his name.
Insist that the City of Raleigh take Daniels down from his pedestal and remove him from his position of honor.
We, the undersigned, say Josephus Daniels’ crimes against humanity must be fully exposed and his position of honor either modified or removed.
As owner/editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, Daniels launched a vicious propaganda campaign aimed at breaking up a newly-formed racial bond. The goal was to usher in Jim Crow rule, restore the Dixiecrat (old Southern Democrat) monopoly, remove all blacks from office and send them back into virtual slavery to provide cheap labor for the South’s budding industrial revolution.
Brief mentions here and there of Daniel’s role in bringing Jim Crow to the South and keeping it in power severely downplay the extent of the physical, emotional, and political harm his propaganda incited against blacks and its long-lasting effects on “race” relations in America.
His tactics included what today could be called subliminal brainwashing - ones that rival those used by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Daniels published cartoons carrying demeaning nuances, often of sexual nature, to enhance his hate-inciting and racially denigrating editorials and similar statewide orations by his cohorts in this campaign - Charles B. Aycock and Furnifold Simmons.
Daniels not only abused his First Amendment freedom. he impeded others’ ability to exercise there’s by not only using his paper to demonize blacks, but also to destroy the careers of any white person who held African Americans and their accomplishments in esteem. Examples are his attacks on professor Spenser Bassett for noting Booker T. Washington’s accomplishments and those against other editors who dared disagree with his tactics or politicians who challenged his views.
Although later in his career Daniels backed off from his previous support of the Ku Klux Klan, by then he had accomplished his goal of white supremacist rule, and he apparently did so for political reasons. And even though, late in life, Daniels apologized for the vicious tactics he used during the 1898 campaign, he never denounced white supremacy or thoroughly acknowledged or apologized for the lives and careers of countless blacks and whites he destroyed.
Many may point to his good side and what are considered to be his positive accomplishments, but we could say the same about scientific advances Hitler’s war effort created or how Hitler improved Germany’s decadent infrastructure with dams, railroads and “the world’s first national highway system (the Autobahn).”
Yet you won’t see any monuments to Hitler or Goebbel’s in Germany or schools, roads and other places named after them.
The City of Raleigh should either remove the Josephus Daniels Momument or else erect a plaque alongside it fully exposing Daniels’ crimes. By honoring Daniels, the state has honored radical racism for over a century.
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