In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers
Edenton. I visited that fine old house when Josephine toured me through what seemed the entire eastern third of the state to stand inspection by her relatives—the equivalent of sniffing a strange dog. Of course, I was shown the famous Edenton Tea Table, an unpretentious piece of furniture that still resides at Greenfield. It was upon that table in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the first church built in the state, that fifty-one Edenton ladies on October 25, 1774, held the famous Edenton Tea Party—following the more-publicized December 1773 Boston Tea Party. The spunky group resolved: “We, the Ladys of Edenton, do hereby solemnly engage not to conform to the Pernicious Custom of Drinking Tea,” or that “We, the aforesaid Ladys will not promote ye wear of any manufacturer from England until such time that all acts which tend to enslave our Native country shall be repealed.” Despite the family’s distinguished past, I kept hearing from them during our “inspection tour” a self-conscious phrase: “North Carolina is a vale of humility between two mounds of conceit.” It finally dawned on me that Tarheels are mighty cocky about their humility. North Carolina, as Jonathan Daniels and others have suggested, is Mediocrity, Militant.
Having lost relatively little in the war, North Carolina went briskly about the business of building a better state for all its people. Alabama—Ashley Wilkes with an attitude—moped about, plotting revenge. Leaders in both states recognized that newly enfranchised, illiterate former slaves were being manipulated at the polls. Both set about constitutional reforms—reforming black citizens out of the political life of the South in 1900. North Carolina sent its black citizens to wander in the political wilderness with kind words. Alabama banished them with a vengeance, and tried to get rid of poor whites, too. Alabama’s aristocracy reserved noblesse for itself and gave the burden of oblige to lesser sorts.
Unlike Alabama, illiterate whites were exempted from Carolina’s 1900 literacy law, but it wasn’t deaf to the siren call of racial prejudice. Even one of North Carolina’s icons, its first “education governor,” Charles Brantley Aycock, was swept into office as leader of a White Supremacy movement. White Democrats with ferocious determination set out to recapture state government from “Fusionists” (Republicans and Populists), which included a number of black office-holders. The Fusion ticket won a majority in the legislature in 1894 and elected a governor in 1896 with a significant black vote in both elections. During the legislative races of 1898, Aycock winked at the activities of the hundreds of mounted and armed Red Shirts who intimidated black voters in the heavily black counties along the South Carolina border. Democrats won two-thirds of the General Assembly and promptly passed a constitutional amendment disenfranchising blacks. In the governor’s race of 1900, the Red Shirts were out again. A Colonel Waddell in black-dominated Wilmington illustrated the temper of the times in an election-eve speech. The Colonel advised white men to go to the polls armed “and if you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns.”
Once in office, Aycock governed with exceptional vision and liberality for the time. In and out of office, he was a passionate advocate of public education. As governor, he persuaded the voters to pay the taxes to create universal education and prevailed in getting increased appropriations for the state university over the opposition of denominational colleges. He planted the seed from which grew a first-class state university system. And, though elected in a great racial upheaval, Governor Aycock proved to be a defender of the black man. He was a vigorous opponent and prosecutor of lynch mobs. In a speech opposing a plan to limit support for Negro schools to taxes collected from black property owners, the governor said: “The proposal is unjust, unwise and unconstitutional. It would wrong both races, would bring our state into condemnation of a just opinion elsewhere and would mark us as a people who turned backward. Let us not seek to be the first state in the Union to make the weak man helpless.” No such benign words accompanied the 1901 Alabama Constitution, which banished blacks and eliminated as many poor whites as possible through a cumulative poll tax.
Once set in motion, historical inertia holds fast and steady, rolling through the decades. Alabama fought integration with bombs, blood and frenzy, while its “better” class preserved its favored tax status in the Constitution and cowed the white majority with fear of property taxes and hints of black domination. History bred into too many Alabamians a bitter resignation that says: “Our lousy schools were good enough for me and my kids. I don’t want none of your progress, race-mixin’, taxes and home rule. I’m all right, just don’t mess with me.” In North Carolina, by contrast, forward historical forces prepared Carolina to build the wealth-fountain that is Research Triangle Park, for peaceful integration, and a consolidated university system with top-ranked research programs.
All that would become clear to me in time. But the gubernatorial campaign going on when I arrived had all the elements of a traditional no-party election of that time, the only question being which one of the segregationist candidates was the better man—whether conservatives or progressives would govern. Those were the two wings of the Democratic Party, the arena and the contrasting ideologies, which would have divided the two parties, if there had been a competitive Republican Party. The first primary was a culling process, which discarded the lesser candidates and chose the two prime contenders for governor.
It would become apparent to me in later years that a far bigger story was going on than the traditional cleavages within the all-segregationist, all-Democratic South. That was the story of progressive Southern governors channeling the churning white waters of racial turmoil into pools of relative peace. The state was also finding ways to accelerate the waves of economic growth that had been unleashed in the South by, among other causes, the end of discriminatory freight rates in 1952. That was the story of Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford who stood at the head of an invisible line of progressive Tarheel governors stretching back to 1900 and before, and who became my models for judging political leaders in Alabama and the rest of the South.
This 1960 runoff election was taking place just six years after Brown v. Board of Education—that first rumbling edge of the approaching civil rights storms. North Carolina had developed a political culture that provided some sanctuary from the storm fronts. The march of progressive education governors included Charles Brantley Aycock in 1900; the more conservative, J. C. B. Ehringhaus in 1932; and the populist-progressive, W. Kerr Scott, in 1948. It would certainly have to include Luther Hodges, who saved the public school system in the immediate aftermath of the Brown decision and Terry Sanford, who blunted race as a political issue and rationalized the state’s higher education system.
Sanford was to be part of the North Carolina continuum of education governors. Ironically, his runoff opponent was himself an educator, a racist with a Phi Beta Kappa key, Dr. I. Beverly Lake. Dr. Lake was no shirttail demagogue. He was Harvard-trained, had studied utility law at Columbia, won a reputation as a consumer advocate as a state assistant attorney general, and had taught law at Wake Forest College. In short, he was a bigot with refinement. Dr. Lake would have been an ideal candidate for Alabama, reminiscent of former Alabama Governor Frank Dixon, east coast-educated, with the dignified good looks of a Methodist bishop. Governor Dixon gave a fighting keynote address at the Democratic breakaway “Dixiecrat” Convention in 1948, damning the Democratic Party and asserting that the States’ Rights movement would defend “against those who would destroy our civilization and mongrelize our people.” Later, Governor Dixon muted the racial themes, putting a high-minded gloss on the Dixiecrat movement in order to attract allies from outside the South. In private correspondence, he was more candid, lamenting that “the Huns have wrecked the theories of the master race with which we were so contented so long” and referring to blacks as “apes” and “gorillas.”
The flame of demagoguery, which would roar to life in the flammable Alabama atmosphere, was banked by the determined common sense of North Carolina leaders. Within weeks of the May 1954 Brown decision, a mortally ill Governor William B. Umstead had appointed a commission to study the state’s response, headed by a distinguished former North Carolina Speaker of the House, Thomas J. Pearsall. Before the year was out, Governor Umstead had died and was succeeded by the lieutenant governor, Luther Hodges, a former textile executive and Marshall Plan administrator in Germany. Hodges retained the Pearsall commission, which by December reported a plan to transfer pupil assignment from the State Board of Education to city and county boards. It was a local-choice