Campaign ploy: ‘numerous exposures of Negro insolence…’

“As Furnifold Simmons kicked off the [1898] campaign, his cohort Josephus Daniels used the Raleigh News and Observer to spread wildly exaggerated accounts of interracial clashes between average citizens on the streets of eastern North Carolina cities. Simmons recalled later that they ‘filled the papers… with portraits of Negro officers and candidates….The newspapers carried numerous exposures of Negro insolence and violence.

‘”At first some eastern North Carolinians laughed openly at the tactic. The New Berne Journal quipped: ‘The “outrage” editor  of the News and Observer is getting “slow.” He has not reported a case in Craven County in three days.’

“Simmons collected contributions from industrialists across the state to reprint Daniels’ article as broadsides….”

— From “Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920” by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore (1996)