If we desire to move forward as a university, we must be ready to acknowledge and actively condemn our racist past. To view this past, we unfortunately don’t need to look far. All we need to do is take the short walk over to North Campus and look upon Daniels Hall.
Like many students, I’ve attended classes, studied and went to student organization meetings in this building, constructed in 1926, without the slightest idea that this building was named after the notorious white supremacist Josephus Daniels.
If you do a quick Google search on Josephus Daniels, you’re likely to find a mixture of glowing praise, such as discussion of his career as the editor of The News and Observer and key government positions, and slight discussion of his racist undertones. NC State’s buildings page, discussing Daniels Hall and its history, completely fails to mention Daniels’ white supremacy, instead choosing to focus on his involvement in the university and his N&O editor role.
When we look deeper into Josephus Daniels’ actions, we see a powerful white supremacist intent on disenfranchising African-American voters by any means necessary. Daniels supported the KKK, was highly influential in a 1900 suffrage amendment that disenfranchised most black individuals in the state, was key in a late-1890s campaign to appeal to racist sentiment among white voters and was known as an instigator of the Wilmington race riots. He actively utilized the N&O as a white supremacist tool to push white voters against black Americans.
To highlight the horrific actions of Daniels, it is worth looking at the 1898 campaign and the Wilmington race riots that followed, during which white supremacist leaders forced multiple key city officials, including the mayor and police chief, out of office.
As the 1898 election drew near, according to the N&O, a small group of key Democrat leaders met to discuss their strategy for the upcoming campaign. They decided to create a strategy built around a “new social order rooted in white supremacy.”
This strategy was centered on Daniels’ propaganda machine which, among other acts, depicted black men as beasts who would attack and rape Southern white women. Over time, this propaganda strategy, mixed with the efforts of other racist leaders, led to white supremacist vigilantes in the streets of Wilmington and a terrifying number of North Carolinians pushing against the rights of African-American citizens.
On Nov. 10, 1898, these vigilantes engaged in a coup, throwing out a democratically elected government and murdering somewhere between nine and 300 people.
Josephus Daniels and his legacy stand directly in opposition to the principles of equal opportunity, diversity and inclusion that we value as a university and a student body. We must be active in our opposition to this building name and to preserving Daniels’ racist legacy.
Racism and hate have no place at our university, and an individual who epitomizes these values should not be honored by having their name affixed upon a building where students learn and scientific progress is made.
Let’s work together, regardless of political affiliation, to remove this stain from our campus legacy by advocating for a building name change.
