When race has been used as an instrument of exclusion from political life, the result has been a society in which vast numbers of citizens are denied the elements of meaningful freedom: a living wage and access to quality education, health care, and housing.

"THE RIGHT OF CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES TO VOTE SHALL NOT BE DENIED OR ABRIDGED BY THE UNITED STATES OR BY ANY STATE ON ACCOUNT OF RACE, COLOR, OR PREVIOUS CONDITION OF SERVITUDE." – Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

The worst violence erupted in Wilmington, where armed whites marauded through Black neighborhoods, killed as many as thirty Black citizens in the streets, and, in America's only municipal coup, forced the city's Fusion government from office. A local photographer produced this souvenir postcard to mark the occasion.

On Election Day, Democrats took back control of the legislature. In festivities across the state, they celebrated a "glorious victory" for white supremacy.

In the 1899 legislative session, the new Democratic majority passed North Carolina's first Jim Crow law. They also reversed Fusion election law reforms, purged the voter rolls, and required that all voters register anew. Then, in 1900 – as their gubernatorial candidate, Charles B. Aycock, threatened – Democrats used force and fraud to win popular approval of an amendment to the state constitution that required a literacy test for voter registration. In practice, the amendment gave election officials wide discretion in deciding who to test and what constituted literacy, effectively disenfranchising the vast majority of Black men and a considerable number of whites as well.

Most Americans – certainly most white Americans – think of Jim Crow simply as an expression of prejudice and discrimination. But it was much more than that: Jim Crow was a system of power and plunder that concentrated wealth in the hands of a small white minority and mobilized racial animosity in defense of that accumulation. Segregation trapped most blacks on the land as a semi-bound workforce and held their earnings to near-subsistence levels, dragged down white wages by devaluing labor in general, and advanced the interests of landlords and employers by threatening dissenting whites with the loss of racial privilege. This regime immiserated Black people and vast numbers of whites as well.

Over the next century, Black North Carolinians fought persistently to hold America accountable to its democratic ideals. They did so not only to advance their own interests but also to promote the general welfare and to make government responsive to the needs of all its people.

At the War's End, W. E. B. Du Bois declared, "We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America."

Such convictions gave Black North Carolinians the courage to step back into electoral politics. In 1919, Raleigh physician Manassa T. Pope (below) joined two other Black candidates to run for seats on the city council. "We knew we wouldn't win," they confessed, "we just wanted to wake up our people politically."

That same year, educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown (below) joined the campaign for women's right to vote. Although some white suffragists argued that the same devices that kept most Black men from voting could also be used against Black women, the prospect of Black women casting ballots so unsettled Democratic lawmakers that they voted against ratification. That refusal stuck until 1971, when the North Carolina state legislature finally ratified the 19th Amendment.

A new era in the struggle for the ballot began when Black North Carolinians joined the Great Migration out of the South during the 1920s. They found job opportunities in the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest, and in the absence of literacy tests, they also gained access to the ballot box. During the 1930s, these migrants led a broader Black exodus out of the party of Lincoln in support of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal.

America's entry into World War II in 1941, posed fresh challenges to Jim Crow's regime. Millions more Blacks left the South for jobs in northern defense industries, and the ranks of the NAACP swelled from 50,000 to 450,000 members. Black activists rallied for a double victory, against fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home. The federal government, concerned that racial conflict not impede the war effort, acted to limit employment discrimination and white violence.

These developments emboldened the more than 8,000 black men and women who labored in the R. J. Reynolds tobacco factories in Winston-Salem. When they and a small group of sympathetic white workers sought to organize a local of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers Union (FTA), federal mediators defended their right to organize and compelled Reynolds to improve working conditions and pay higher wages.

"The dangerous disease of race hate, which bears so heavily upon Negro citizens . . . at the same time drags the masses of southern white citizens into the quagmire of poverty and ignorance and political servitude. . . . Jim Crow divides white and Negro for the profit of the few. It is a very profitable system indeed." – Henry Wallace, 1948

The price exacted by Jim Crow was measured not just in dollars, but also in lives. Wallace made that point with a "single grim fact": "A Negro child born this day has a life expectancy ten years less than that of a white child born a few miles away."

"These ten years are what we are fighting for," Wallace declared. "I say that those who stand in the way of the health, education, housing, and social security programs which would erase that gap commit murder. I say that those who perpetuate Jim Crow are criminals. I pledge you that I shall fight them with everything I have."

The Progressive Party's defeat was a foregone conclusion. Henry Wallace’s position on race and calls for peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union alienated too many voters. But the electorate was restless, and gave the keys to the governor's mansion to W. Kerr Scott, a racially moderate New Dealer who, like the Populists of the 1890s, appealed to white farmers and factory workers by promising to raise wages, invest in farm-to-market roads, and bring telephone and electric service to rural communities.

In the next election, Graham ran for a term of his own. In the Democratic primary, his chief rival was Raleigh attorney Willis Smith. The contest was so close that a run-off was required to choose a winner. Graham, who had been close to President Roosevelt, ran as a New Dealer who promised to improve the lives of North Carolina's working people, black and white. Smith answered by characterizing him as a radical proponent of racial equality.

On election Day, a majority of voters rallied to the defense of white supremacy and rejected Frank Graham's vision for a just and equitable society. Willis Smith won the run-off election and went on to claim a seat in the U.S. Senate.

In the aftermath of the 1950 election, Frank Graham's supporters were distraught. But newspaper editor Louis Austin found cause for hope. He reminded his readers that more than 260,000 voters – the vast majoirty of them white – had cast their ballots for Graham, and in doing so had refused to bow to "race hatred." Appeals to justice and decency had loosened Jim Crow's grasp and created room for civil rights activists to maneuver.

Leaders and ordinary folk in Black communities across North Carolina took up that challenge. In 1951, a "rush" of thirteen candidates stood for election in eleven cities, from Rocky Mount in the east to Winston-Salem in the west. Three of them won seats on their municipal councils. Two year later, twenty-four black candidates ran in nineteen cities, and six bested their white opponents.

Lake, a respected professor of law at Wake Forest College and a staunch segregationist, had served as North Carolina's assistant attorney general. In that role, he appeared before the U.S. Supreme during hearings on implementation of its 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board. Lake argued that local judges and government officials should have "wide discretion" in deciding the pace of school desegregation. The court adopted that view in 1955, when it ordered in decidedly vague language that Jim Crow education should be dismantled with "all deliberate speed."

Sanford, who had served as a paratrooper in World War II, represented a new generation who had come out of that conflict with an eagerness to break with the past and build better lives for themselves and their children. When Lake tried to bait him on race issues, Sanford answered by calling for a "New Day," built on better jobs, better education, and better health for everyone. That appeal worked. Sanford won the Democratic nomination and then easily defeated his Republican opponent in the general election.

Wheeler was forthright. "North Carolina," he insisted, "cannot enjoy the bright sunshine of a New Day in industry, agriculture, education, and democratic living unless it frees each one of its citizens to develop to the maximum of his capabilities."

Sanford took that advice to heart. In early 1963, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, he delivered a remarkable speech before a gathering of the North Carolina Press Association. Sanford called for an end to Jim Crow. It was the right thing to do, he said, and also a practical necessity. Future growth and prosperity required that North Carolina fulfill the promise of freedom that was made at the end of slavery and then gutted by the white supremacy campaign of 1898-1900.

As he spoke, Sanford must have had another southern governor on his mind. Four days earlier, George Wallace had declared in his inaugural address on the steps of the Alabama state capitol, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!"

To defeat Jim Crow, Terry Sanford declared war on poverty. Racial segregation and the low-wage economy it sustained inflicted hardship and suffering on millions of North Carolinians. In 1960, 37 percent of the state's residents – twice the national average – lived below the poverty line, and in eastern counties Black impoverishment was so deep and pervasive that outsiders referred to the region as North Carolina's "little Mississippi."

The Fund's objective was to create nothing less than an army of the "organized and articulate poor." The effectiveness of that effort was readily apparent in the work of the People's Program on Poverty, which organized more than 3,000 Black sharecroppers and domestic workers in eastern North Carolina. Under the leadership of Rev. James A. Felton (below), a Marine veteran, the program sponsored a poor people's conference; helped Black families apply for low-interest, federally-backed home mortgages; and secured federal funds to build neighborhood water systems that replaced shallow, often polluted wells.

In Durham, the North Carolina Fund pulled together a confederation of neighborhood councils called United Organizations for Community Improvement (UOCI). The group supported rent strikes against Durham's most notorious landlords and created a tenants' association to represent residents of public housing. It also demanded better wages for support staff in the city's public schools, and pressed officials to pave streets and pick up trash in neglected low-income neighborhoods.

Through these efforts, members of UOCI came to understand that making change required participation in party politics. They began attending Democratic Party precinct meetings, and in some instances did so in large enough numbers to displace white power brokers. In 1968, the organized poor elected Ann Atwater – a forceful, outspoken leader of the UOCI councils – as vice chair of the Durham County Democratic Party.

Across the South, civil rights other activists were also working toward political empowerment. In 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sent hundreds of volunteers to Mississippi to staff its Freedom Summer voter registration campaign and to teach in Freedom Schools for Black children. Whites answered that work with frightful violence. Klansmen, in coordination with local law enforcement, ambushed and murdered three civil rights workers in Neshoba County: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

In the aftermath of these events, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a televised address to Congress in which he called white Americans to task for their century-long refusal to make good on the promise of equal citizenship. "Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote," he declared.

"TheRe Is No constitutional issue here," Johnson avowed. "The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue here. It is wrong – deadly wrong – to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights."

Congress subsequently passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This legislation – together with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in employment, education, and public accommodations – destroyed the legal foundation of Jim Crow's regime.

The struggle, however, was far from complete. In many ways, the situation in North Carolina resembled the post-Civil War years. The federal government had passed laws protecting civil rights, but like their brethren a century before, conservatives in the 1960s had no intention of surrendering their power and privilege. In the state legislature, they fought a determined battle to limit additional Black gains and to assure white constituents that the Democratic Party would never become the "Negro party."

This was the same strategy for disadvantaging Black candidates and voters that had been in place since the 1950s in county and municipal governments.

To compound the effect, lawmakers added numbered seat plans to many eastern districts. Under this scheme, each seat in a multimember district was teated as a separate office. When citizens went to the polls, they no longer voted for a set number of candidates in a larger field of contenders – for instance, three out of five. Instead, their ballots listed separate races within the district, and they had to vote for only one candidate in each race. This allowed Democratic Party captains to ensure that a Black candidate in a multimember district would always face the strongest white opponent.

As one lawmaker explained, the goal was to guarantee that "no Negro could be elected to the General Assembly."

In two critical legal decisions, federal courts largely dismantled the barriers to Black political participation that Democrats built in the 1950s and 1960s. Ruling in Dunston v. Scott in 1972, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina struck down both the numbered seat plans attached to multimember legislative districts and the anti-single-shot laws that applied to elections in certain counties and municipalities. Twelve years later, in Gingles v. Edmisten, the same court ordered that most multimember legislative districts be broken into new single-member districts.

The consequences were startling. By 1989, nineteen Black lawmakers served in the General Assembly. Two years later, members elected Daniel (Dan) T. Blue Jr. (below) Speaker of the House, the highest legislative office ever held by a Black politician in North Carolina's history. Blacks also made substantial gains at the local level, largely as a result of legal challenges to at-large elections and multimember districts that followed the Gingles decision. By the early 1990s, more than 400 Black elected officials served in city and county governments across the state.

As Black gains mounted, a growing number of white North Carolinians began to abandon the Democratic Party rather than fight within it. They were encouraged by the Republican Party's embrace of a "southern strategy." Barry M. Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, spoke plainly. He believed that the Republican Party should "stop trying to outbid the Democrats for the Negro vote" and instead "go hunting where the ducks are" – that is, seek support among whites who resented Black gains in civil rights.

Goldwater lost to President Lyndon Johnson in a landslide defeat, but Sim A. DeLapp, former chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, saw promise in his advice. He urged "members of the [white] majority" to "rise up and turn against the minority groups." The key, he said, was to revitalize the Republican Party by “us[ing] the race issue . . . to regain power."

James (Jim) C. Gardner, an upstart young Republican from solidly Democratic eastern North Carolina, rode that strategy to Congress in 1966. His supporters voiced fears of black domination like those that white supremacists stoked in 1898.

Hunt was also committed to inclusive government. When he left office in 2001, 22 precent of his appointees to state agencies and commissions were minorities, a figure that matched North Carolina’s demography.

In the state legislature, Democrats sought to secure these achievements by expanding minority citizens' access to the ballot box. Key legislation permitted early voting; allowed voters who went to the wrong precinct on Election Day to cast a provisional ballot; permitted same-day registration; and created a system to pre-register sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, so that they could have their names placed on the voter rolls when they turned eighteen.

The net effect of these reforms was increased political participation by minority populations. Black registration grew by more than 50 percent between 2000 and 2012, as compared to just 16 percent among whites, and Black turnout followed apace. Between 2000 and 2008, it soared from 42 to 72 percent.

Astute observers noted that Latinx voters were also indispensable to Obama's North Carolina victory. They represented only 1.3 percent of total registered voters, but in a tight election, even that small number could change the outcome. Latinx voters, most of whom favored Democrats, cast 20,468 ballots in 2008, a figure larger than Obama's winning margin.

The 2008 presidential election cut two ways in North Carolina. It was the culmination of generations of struggle for equal citizenship and a sign of how profoundly the state had changed. But Obama's win was also part of a cascade of events that led quickly to coordinated efforts to restrict voting rights and roll back decades of progressive social policy.

When Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, a near collapse of the banking system was threatening to plunge America and the rest of the world into a second Great Depression. North Carolina was one of the states hardest hit. Within a year, the unemployment rate soared to 10.9 percent. The crisis stirred the resentments of white voters who viewed the loss of jobs through a racial lens. They blamed Blacks, immigrants, and liberals rather than global capital.

Its supporters' grievances echoed a century of conservative thought and politics. They railed against Obama, whom some described as the "primate in chief," and denounced the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) as a socialist violation of individual liberty. Tea Partiers also criticized social welfare programs as a waste of taxpayers' money and launched xenophobic attacks on immigrants, who they claimed were stealing American jobs and committing heinous crimes.

Republican leaders embraced white anger and presented themselves as the party that would defy the Black president and his supporters. Ron Unz, publisher of the American Conservative, described their reasoning.

"As whites become a smaller and smaller proportion of the local population in more and more regions, they will naturally become ripe for political polarization based on appeals to their interests as whites. And if Republicans focus their campaigning on racially charged issues such as immigration and affirmative action, they will promote this polarization, gradually transforming the two national political parties into crude proxies for direct racial interESts, effectively becoming the 'white party' and the 'non-white party.'"

Unz predicted that since white voters constituted a majority of the national electorate, "the 'white party' – the Republicans – [would] end up controlling almost all political power and could enact whatever policies they desired, on racial and non-racial issues."

That assessment read like a script for North Carolina politics in the next decade. Voter discontent offered Republicans an opportunity to extend their success in presidential and senatorial elections down into campaigns for legislative seats.

Pope invested millions in conservative politics. He established the John Locke Foundation and the Civitas Institute – modeled closely on the national Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise and Cato Institutes – to engage in public policy research and advocacy around issues such as taxation, public education, and social welfare.

In 2010, Pope and other conservative strategists targeted twenty-two Democratic lawmakers who were up for re-election. Racial appeals figured prominently in that effort. For instance, the executive committee of the state Republican Party mailed thousands of copies of a flier (below) that attacked state senator John J. Snow Jr. and representative L. Hugh Holliman for their support of the 2009 Racial Justice Act, a law that allowed people on death row to present evidence that racial bias played a role in their death sentences. Those who could prove discrimination would be resentenced to life in prison.

The fliers warned voters that thanks to liberals like Hollimann and Snow, Henry McCollum, a Black man convicted of raping and killing a child, might soon be released into their neighborhoods. As it turned out, McCollum was exonerated four years later, when DNA evidence linked the crime to another man who lived near the victim and had confessed to a similar rape and murder.

The Republican executive committee also distributed a flier (above) that attacked Democrat Chris Heagarty by appealing to ani-immigrant sentiments. It pictured “Señor” Heagarty - a sombrero atop his head and his skin darkened by photo editing - exclaiming, "Mucho Taxo,” a reference to policies that Republicans charged were destroying jobs.

Judge Thomas D. Schroeder of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina upheld House Bill 589, but in 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed his decision. The appellate court justices concluded that the law had targeted minority voters "with almost surgical precision."

A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court declined Republican legislative leaders' request to review the Fourth Circuit decision. Even so, Senate President Pro Tempore Philip (Phil) E. Berger (below) and Speaker of the House Timothy (Tim) K. Moore vowed that they would "continue to fight."

Republicans narrowed their focus and, in 2018, drafted a constitutional amendment to require voter photo ID. They presented the amendment as a "common sense" reform needed to safeguard elections from widespread fraud. In point of fact, there was no evidence to support that claim. In a 2016 audit, the State Board of Elections had found that questionable ballots accounted for only 0.01 percent of the 4,769,640 votes cast that year.

That fact notwithstanding, voters approved the constitutional amendment in the November election. Republicans carried the day, in part, by convincing voters that fraud was rampant but remained invisible because there were no laws to expose it. Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the state Republican Party, put it this way: "Millions of North Carolinians believe (emphasis in the original) that there is voter fraud. Now, somebody can disagree with them, but they believe it. So, adding confidence into the system is a very important thing."

As we approach the 2020 election, Senate Bill 824 is tied up in court. Implementation has been enjoined by both the North Carolina Court of Appeals and the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina. Judge Loretta Biggs, who wrote the district court's decision, noted there was sufficient cause to question whether Senate Bill 824 had been "impermissibly motivated, at least in part by discriminatory intent." After all, "the same key legislators who championed House Bill 589 [in 2013] were the driving force behind Senate Bill 824's passage just a few years later."

Though she knew nothing of the man, Judge Biggs echoed J. R. Gleaves, a Black civil rights activist in Winston-Salem during the 1940s, who expressed frustration with whites' determination to block Black advancement, however meager it might be.

"IF YOU BEAT THE WHITE MAN AT ONE TRICK," Gleaves Lamented, "HE WILL TRY ANOTHER."

The contest over the photo ID amendment is the latest chapter in North Carolina's long and cyclical history of struggle over minority voting rights. Many observers have described the amendment as a "solution in search of a problem." That is a reasonable enough observation, but it can obscure an important historical lesson. Modern Republicans, like other conservatives before them, have been trying to solve what they believe is a very real problem – it is not fraud, but rather the ramifications of expanded minority political participation. Throughout North Carolina's history, when minority citizens have built alliances with progressive whites and gained access to the ballot box, they have cast their votes to advance an enduring agenda for equal citizenship, civil rights, and economic justice. Like the authors of North Carolina's 1868 constitution, they have sought to establish a government that serves the "good of the whole."

Martin Luther King Jr.s captured the essence of that agenda in a 1961 address to an interracial audience of labor leaders. He described for them a radically inclusive understanding of the American Dream. His words bring to mind those spoken by James Harris and other North Carolina delegates to the Colored National Labor Convention in 1869.

King Described "a dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. . . . a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are not held for ourselves alone but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and Worth of human personality."