U.S. Navy, Remove Josephus Daniels from his Position of Honor and Expose his Racist Deeds

  • by: Susan V
  • recipient: United States Navy

Josephus Daniels is best known as Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy and the battleship named in his honor. But he received that honor despite his despicably racist acts as a North Carolina news editor.
Before 1894 the old Southern aristocracy didn't worry about keeping blacks "in their place" and out of politics. The Klan handled that. But as elites enacted more and more laws oppressing poorer whites, many left the old Southern Democrats and joined blacks to form a new and victorious Populist Party that put blacks in office and enacted reforms for the majority. To break up this effective bond, Daniels led a scheme to drive a new wedge between the races and trick poor whites into backing a system contrary to their own interests.

Daniels’ propaganda consisted of auditory, wrtten and visual brainwashing that demonized blacks as sexual predators and fabricated reports of black on white crime. The campaign incited such intense fear and hatred, it culminated in a race massacre in Wilmington in 1898 and ushered in the violent reign of Jim Crow. 

Today's racism can be largely attributed to Daniels’ vicious campaign. To borrow from Goebbels, one could say Daniels won whites over to a racist ideology “so vitally, that in the end they succumb[ed] to it utterly." And as with Goebbels, no good deeds Daniels might have done can cover the crimes he committed against humanity. Insist the U.S. Navy remove Daniels' name from its place of honor and fully expose his decadent past.

We, the undersigned, agree that Daniels’ extremely radical racists acts should disqualify him from honors bestowed upon him by city, state or federal government.


Considering the extent and long-lasting repercussions of Daniels’ propaganda campaign leading up to the 1898 election and his control over the Southern press in the years afterward that kept Jim Crow alive and well, it would not be unreasonable to compare Daniels' acts to those committed by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.


But not only did Daniels not face public outrage, shame or punishment for his crimes against humanity and his abuse of the freedom of the press, but he lived a life of relative luxury and honor until his death, and his name and his home remain in places of honor in his state, the US Navy, and the country.


It is said that Daniels lived on to do good, including championing women’s rights, but would Goebbels have done the same had he lived a long life and toned down his racist views? If so, would that have excused the harm he did to millions of Jews and other victims of the holocaust?


Daniels was not only not publicly shamed or punished for initially supporting the Klan, for inciting the Wilmington massacre and numerous lynchings in North Carolina, if not throughout the South, he went on to bully other editors into keeping their papers free of any mention of black accomplishments, and he even used his paper to destroy any white man who tried to do so, like John Spence Bassett, or politicians who didn’t agree with his views. He as much as got Charles B. Aycock, the well-known racist orator, elected as governor, and he is partly responsible for President Wilson’s election as well. Afterward he made sure Wilson got a private viewing of the new film based on his friend Thomas Dixon’s “The Clansman” - W.D. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” which, like Daniels, portrayed all Southern women as paragons of purity and subject to being raped by any black man who came near them. That film incited such violence it had to be banned from theaters in Georgia, and in 1906, soon after the film’s release, another race riot broke out in Atlanta similar to the massacre in Wilmington.


All in all, an untold number of deaths of innocent African Americans can be traced back to Josephus Daniel’s racist and highly publicized rhetoric and other acts he committed.


Ironically and sadly the battleship that carries his name has also killed a number of Navy servicemen and women because of asbestos exposure.


The ship was decommissioned in 1994. However, Daniels’ name continues to hold a place of honor in US History, and a memorial to him still stands in Downtown Raleigh’s Nash Square, with no mention of the dastardly deeds he committed against humanity.


Although it is said he apologized for the cruelty of the 1898 campaign, Daniels never renounced his stand on white supremacy, even though as a man who had widely traveled, he knew very well that he supported a lie.


If Daniels’ monuments and other honors are to remain in place, then they should at least fully expose his decadent past and the great harm he did to people of color by pushing them backward into virtual slavery after they’d fought so hard and come so far. It is a name that should stand for shame, not honor.


We insist the U.S. Navy remove Daniels from his place of honor.

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