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In 1922, UNC’s Board of Trustees honored alumnus William Laurence Saunders by naming this building for him. The board cited his service in the Confederate army; his contributions as a journalist, politician, historian, and fellow trustee; and his leadership of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina during the post-Civil War years of Reconstruction.

In 2015, the trustees withdrew that honor and renamed this building Carolina Hall. They did so on grounds that their predecessors made a grave mistake in celebrating Saunders as the head of a “violent terrorist organization.”

Removing Saunders' name was a vital step toward righting that error, but there is more to be done. This building is a place of scholarship and learning. It has been home to the departments of History, Economics, Commerce, Rural SocialScience, Sociology, Public Welfare, English, Germanic Languages, Dramatic Art, Geography, and Religious Studies. Generations of students have gathered in these classrooms to learn about the past, grapple with contemporary problems, and prepare for responsible citizenship. The story told here is part of that work. It invites a frank examination of our past and points to the value of historical study in making a better university for today and tomorrow.

The Carolina Hall Story

The trustees' citation of Saunders' service to the university and the state

After Slavery — Race, Citizenship, and Democracy

TWO CIVIL WARS

The story of this building and the controversy over its name begins in the second half of the nineteenth century, when not one but two civil wars were fought in North Carolina. The first, 1861 to 1865, pitted a southern rebellion against the government of the United States. It took the lives of more than 35,000 North Carolinians who fought for the Confederacy, plus those of another 2,000 who died for the Union.

The second was an internal civil war that arose from the Confederacy’s defeat and ground on until 1900. It set North Carolinians against one another in a battle over citizenship and equality in a society no longer built upon racial slavery.

During the late 1860s, at the height of Reconstruction, and again in the so-called Fusion era of the 1890s, fragile alliances of blacks, whites, and American Indians attempted to create an inclusive democracy in North Carolina. Their opponents stood firmly for the preservation of white rule.

By 1900, the self-styled champions of white supremacy were victorious. They won by stealing elections through fraud and violence, codifying racial segregation, and stripping black men and large numbers of poor whites of the right to vote.

NORTH CAROLINA PEOPLE

1,263,603 Whites

624,469 Blacks

5,687 American Indians

51 ChineseThe 1890 federal census recorded a total state population of 1,893,810: 1,263,603 whites, 624,469 blacks, 5,687 American Indians, and 51 Chinese. Residents with other ethnic identities – all of whom the census classified as white – were few. White rule kept blacks in poverty, drove down the value of all labor, and made North Carolina an unappealing destination for immigrants.

North Carolina soldiers in the 35th Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry, liberating slaves in New Bern, Harper’s Weekly, January 23, 1864

(right) Parker David Robbins, soldier in the 2nd U.S. Colored Cavalry and delegate to the 1868 North Carolina constitutional convention

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“Worse Than Slavery,” by Thomas Nast, a searing depiction of repression by the Ku Klux Klan and, later, the White League, Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1874

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RIGHT TO VOTE

After the war, Saunders and fellow Conservatives (later, they called themselves Democrats) watched with mounting anger as pro-Union whites, former slaves, and American Indians formed a political alliance within the state’s newly-established Republican Party. In 1868, that coalition crafted a new state constitution that granted all men the right to vote, regardless of race, and for the first time in North Carolina's history mandated a statewide system of public schools. On Election Day, voters ratified the constitution and rewarded Republican candidates with both the governor's office and control of the state legislature.

The Late 1860s — William Saunders, Reconstruction, and the Ku Klux Klan

WILLIAM LAURENCE SAUNDERS (1835-1891) was one of the most powerful men in North Carolina during the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction. Born in Raleigh, he was educated at UNC (Class of 1854), served in a number of Confederate regiments, and eventually rose to the rank of colonel.

DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS, THEN AND NOW

Political parties change over time. After the Civil War, Republicans stood for equal citizenship. Conservative Democrats in North Carolina and throughout the South championed white supremacy.

Two major developments reshaped the parties during

the twentieth century.

In the 1930s, the progressive policies of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal persuaded black voters outside the South to shift their loyalty away from the Republican Party and to vote Democratic.

Then the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reopened the polls to disenfranchised southern blacks and helped to redefine the Democratic Party as the party of civil rights. Many white southerners who once had been faithful Democrats switched their allegiance to the Republican Party. 1868 ballot for Republican

candidates and ratification of the new state constitution

William Saunders

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TERROR

William Saunders and other Conservative leaders organized local bands of the Ku Klux Klan to reverse this political revolution. They found support among men who were struggling to recover from the devastation of war and feared losing the racial privilege that slavery had afforded even the poorest whites.

Klansmen perpetrated a reign of terror. In Graham, they lynched Wyatt Outlaw, a black constable, andhung his body from a tree in the center of town. In Yanceyville, they murdered state senator John Walter Stephens, a white Republican, and left his body on a woodpile in the county courthouse.

Klan violence frightened large numbers of voters from the polls and enabled conservative Democrats to regain control of the state legislature. In 1871, they impeached and removed from office Republican governor William Woods Holden, who had attempted to suppress the Klan. Democrats celebrated victory over what they called the “unwise doctrine of universal equality.”

“I DECLINE TO ANSWER”

Saunders never publicly acknowledged his role in the Klan, even when called to testify before Congress. He was a successful newspaper editor and, from 1879 until his death in 1891, served as North Carolina’s secretary of state. While in that office, Saunders compiled a ten-volume collection of North Carolina’s colonial records, which he believed would “rescue the fair fame and good name” of the former Confederate state. Saunders also was a member and officer of UNC's Board of Trustees from 1874 to 1891.

(left) Broadside illustrating the attempted lynching of Republican loyalist John A. Campbell, Moore County, 1871

(right) North Carolina Klan costume, ca. 1871

Broadside for an anti-Klan rally in Randolph County

Republican Governor William Woods Holden

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ALLIES ACROSS THE RACE LINE

White was a leader in the political movement called Fusion – a multiracial alliance that joined Republicans with debt-ridden white farmers who bolted the Democratic Party in favor of a new national Populist (or People’s) Party. Fusion politicians won control of the state legislature and the governor's office in the mid 1890s, and, like their predecessors during Reconstruction, enacted progressive reforms. They increased funding for public education and revised the state’s election law to make it easier for poor and illiterate citizens to vote.

The 1890s — George White, Fusion, and White Supremacy

GEORGE HENRY WHITE (1852-1918) was born into slavery. During Reconstruction, he attended a freedmen’s school set up by the federal government and studied at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He then returned to eastern North Carolina, where he taught school, practiced law, and ventured into politics.

White lived in North Carolina’s Second Congressional District – often called the “Black Second” because of its black majority population. Voters in the district had elected three black congressmen since 1874. White became the fourth in 1896.

“The issue confronting the American people to-day is the liberty of the laboring people both white and black, an issue of vastly more importance than the enslavement or freedom of the negro ever was.” Fusion ediorialist, 1896

Republican Congressmen from the Black Second:

1. George Henry White, 1897-1901

2. John Adams Hyman, 1875-1877

3. James Edward O'Hara, 1883-1887

4. Henry Plummer Cheatham, 1889-1893

Souvenirs from the white supremacy campaign of 1898

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A MUNICIPAL COUP

In the election of 1898, conservative Democrats set out to break the Fusion alliance and end multiracial politics once and for all. They again made white supremacy their rallying cry and used violence to suppress the vote.

The worst violence occurred in Wilmington, where white insurrectionists set fire to the office of the Daily Record, the city’s black newspaper, and ousted the Fusion board of alderman in the only municipal coup d’état in American history.

News and Observer, August 13, 1898

Josephus Daniels (law student, 1884-1885), editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, described his paper as “the militant voice of White Supremacy.” On its front page, he ran political cartoons that warned of an inverted racial order.

Souvenir postcard of the burned-out Daily Record office, Wilmington, 1898

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Write from memory Article III of the U.S. Constitution. You don’t recall the words or even the branch of government that Article III established? You are illiterate and unqualified to vote.

WOULD YOU HAVE PASSED THE LITERACY TEST?

1899-1900 — Securing White Rule

Back in control of the legislature in 1899, Democrats drafted a disfranchisement amendment to the state constitution that imposed a literacy test designed to take the vote away from their black opponents. In order to register to vote, male citizens would be required to prove their ability to read and write any section of the U.S. Constitution.That barred the 64 percent of black North Carolinians who were illiterate, along with many others who faced the whims of hostile white registrars.

“PERMANENT GOOD GOVERNMENT BY THE PARTY OF THE WHITE MAN”

In 1900, Democrat Charles Brantley Aycock (Class of 1880) campaigned for ratification of the disfranchisement amendment and election to the governor's office. He and party leaders appealed to white racial unity and tried to undercut the voting power of American Indians. They barred members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee from the polls and attempted to win over skeptical Lumbees (then called Croatans) by promising protection from disfranchisement. Democrats also employed fraud and intimidation. Their victory established a system of whites-only politics that lasted until the Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reopened the ballot box to all citizens.

After his death in 1912, Aycock was memorialized as North Carolina's "Education Governor." Supporters pointed out that he more than doubled school spending, opposed lawmakers who tried to prohibit the use of white tax receipts for black education, and launched a program to build thousands of rural schoolhouses. But many North Carolinians remembered that the Fusionists Aycock defeated had also valued education, and in the mid-1890s had funded white and black schools on a near-equal basis. That contrasted with sharp disparities under the Aycock administration. In 1905, the state spent less on rural black schools than in 1895, and during the years 1902 to 1905 annual school construction for whites outpaced that for blacks five- to eight-fold.

“These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people [who] Phoenix-like will rise up some day and come again.“

GEORGE WHITE’S FAREWELL

Shortly after Governor Aycock’s inauguration in January, 1901, George White delivered a farewell address in which he urged fellow members of Congress to “obliterate race hatred”:

White was the last black North Carolinian to serve in Congress until 1992, when Democrats Eva Clayton and Mel Watt were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

White suprempacy and black disfranchisement stifled the political life of the state. Total Voter turnout, which had peaked at 84 percent in 1896, dropped to 50 percent in 1904, and by 1912 had declined to less than 30 percent.

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30%

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VOTER PARTICIPATION 50%

1912

(above) Certificate of appreciation for funders of the Aycock Memorial on the State Capitol grounds in Raleigh,1924

(right) A Fusion view of Aycock’s candidacy, Raleigh Caucasian, June 21, 1900

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UNEASY DOMINANCE

Black North Carolinians did not give up their claim to equal citizenship. Across the state, they established chapters of the NAACP and organized politically. In 1919 a group of prominent black men in Raleigh backed the mayoral candidacy of Dr. Manassa Thomas Pope, a veteran of Fusion politics. "We knew we wouldn't win," one of Pope's supporters later recalled, "but we wanted to wake up our people politically."

At UNC, a new generation of white faculty and students also questioned Jim Crow. Sociologist Howard Odum and playwright Paul Green treated black life with empathy and respect. The student staff of the Carolina Magazine struck at “race-prejudice” by showcasing the work of Langston

Hughes and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance. And from his office in Saunders Hall, history professor Howard Beale declared that the time had come “to cease lauding those who ‘restored white supremacy.’”

Though forward-looking, these UNC figures did not call for an immediate end to Jim Crow. That would await a new wave of black activismin the 1950s and 60s.

Howard Odum, outside Saunders Hall, 1925

Howard Beale, revisionist historian of Reconstruction

Making Memory, Making White Supremacy

JIM CROW

Leaders of Aycock’s generation worked to make white supremacy seem natural and unremarkable by writing it onto the landscape. They erected Confederate monuments in courthouse squares across the state and marked public and private spaces with Jim Crow signs that separated ‘white’ from ‘colored.’ In some places, American Indians, too, were set apart – or offered no accommodation at all.

“We were bottled up and labeled and set aside – sent to the . . . back of the bus, the side door of the theater, the side window of a restaurant,” recalled civil rights activist Pauli Murray.

NAMING SAUNDERS HALL

When UNC’s trustees attached Saunders’ name to this building, they contributed to memory-making that sought to vindicate the Confederacy and reconcile North and South. Together with whites throughout the nation, they set aside moral questions of slavery and justice, celebrated the common valor of men who had once been enemies on the battlefield, and made heroes of the Klansmen who had “saved” the defeated South from the “tragedy” of Reconstruction.

"On both sides . . . we fought for the cause which we believed to be right, as God gave it to us to see the right," said John Bryan Grimes (student 1882-1884), chairman of the North Carolina Historical Commission and a UNC trustee who helped make the decision to honor William Saunders. "There are many things in common between the people of the North and the people of the South, and the glory of the soldier who wore the blue and the valor of the soldier who wore the gray are a common heritage to all Americans."

White and colored water fountains in a tobacco warehouse, 1949

Popular postcard depiction of reconciled Confederate and Union veterans

“We came to understand that no matter how neat and clean, how law-abiding, submissive and polite, how studious at school, how churchgoing and moral . . . we were, it made no essential difference in our place.”

Pauli Murray, 1938. She was twice denied admission to graduate study at UNC on account of her race.

Langston Hughes (right),with Chapel Hill bookstore owner Tony Buttita, 1932

Dr. Manassa Pope

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Learning from the Past, Seeking a Just Future

CAROLINA HALL

On May 28, 2015, UNC's Board of Trustees voted to remove William Saunders’ name from this building and to rename it Carolina Hall. They explained their reasoning:

CONFRONTING OUR HISTORY

Students had voiced concerns about Saunders Hall as far back as 1975, but found little support. That changed in 2014, when a number of campus organizations – including the Black Student Movement, Real Silent Sam Coalition, and Campus Y – brought together students, alumni, faculty, staff, and local townspeople to petition the trustees to take down Saunders’ name. The various groups also organized teach-ins, rallies, and social media campaigns that connected UNC’s past to contemporary issues of equity, justice, and inclusivity.

This movement built on earlier efforts to re-examine the history of the university and the state. In 2005, UNC became one of the first universities in the nation to offer a public account of its ties to slavery, and in that same year a state legislative commission issued a candid report on the 1898 Wilmington coup. In 2006, the Raleigh News and Observer published an apology and special supplement on its role in that tragic event. State lawmakers followed in 2007 with an apology for slavery and segregation.

The trustees took up the students’ challenge, studied the history of Saunders Hall, and held open forums to consider a range of opinions. Some speakers warned against “rewriting history” and erasing memory of the violent era that Saunders did so much to shape. Others countered that selective forgetfulness had been the purpose of the decision to memorialize William Saunders. Now, they said, the university had an opportunity to make the past plainly visible.

Whatever their differences, all of the parties involved in the Saunders debate agreed on one point: the ways we think about the past will define the university we imagine for the future.

"Telling both the good and the bad makes an unequivocal statement about Carolina's values. We will be reminded of progress that has been made and progress that must continue." W. Lowry Caudill, Chair UNC Board of Trusteees

“The Klan was a violent terrorist organization that sought to overthrow duly elected state governments and reverse rights granted to newly-emancipated African Americans. Membership in and the activities of the KKK were illegal at that time and their activities would be illegal today. Leadership of the KKK as a qualification for the honor of a building name is inconsistent with UNC's values of Lux Libertas.”

"We cannot stand idly by as our history goes unquestioned, and as our silence serves as a blaring memorial to the wrongdoings of our past. We have a responsibility to our peers and ourselves to not only unveil, but confront the past we have inherited." Real Silent Sam Coalition

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DESIGNER—x3625—STATE EDITION—FILMX

The Ghosts of 1898WILMINGTON’S RACE RIOT AND THE RISE OF WHITE SUPREMACY

BY TIMOTHY B. TYSON

On Nov. 10, 1898, heavily armed columns of white men marched into the black neighbor-hoods of Wilmington. In the name of white supremacy, this well-ordered mob burned theoffices of the local black newspaper, murdered perhaps dozens of black residents — theprecise number isn’t known — and banished many successful black citizens and their so-called “white nigger” allies. A new social order was born in the blood and the flames, rootedin what The News and Observer’s publisher, Josephus Daniels, heralded as “permanent good

government by the party of the White Man.” The Wilmington race riot of 1898 stands as one of the most important chapters in North Carolina’s

history. It is also an event of national historical significance. Occurring only two years after theSupreme Court had sanctioned “separate but equal” segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, the riot markedthe embrace of virulent Jim Crow racism, not merely in Wilmington, but across the United States.

Despite its importance, the riot hasremained a hidden chapter in ourstate’s history. It was only this year thatNorth Carolina completed its official in-vestigation of the violence. In additionto providing a thorough history of theevent, the report of the WilmingtonRace Riot Commission recommendedpayments to descendants of victims.And it advised media outlets, includingThe News & Observer, to tell the peo-ple the truth about 1898.

Those truths include that what oc-curred in Wilmington on that chillyautumn morning was not a sponta-neous outbreak of mob violence. Itwas, instead, the climax of a care-fully orchestrated statewide cam-paign led by some of the leading fig-ures in North Carolina’s history toend interracial cooperation and builda one-party state that would assurethe power of North Carolina’s busi-ness elite.

The black-white coalitionAt the end of the 19th century,

Wilmington was a symbol of blackhope. Thanks to its busy port, theblack majority city was North Car-olina’s largest and most importantmunicipality. Blacks owned 10 of thecity’s 11 eating houses and 20 of its 22barbershops. The black male liter-acy rate was higher than that ofwhites.

Black achievement, however, wasalways fragile. Wealthy whites werewilling to accept some black advance-ment, so long as they held the reins ofpower. Through the Democratic Party,whites controlled the state and localgovernments from 1876 to 1894. How-ever, the party’s coalition of wealthy,working class and rural whites beganto unravel in the late 1880s as Amer-ica plunged into depression.

North Carolina became a hotbed ofagrarian revolt as hard-pressed farm-ers soured on the Democrats becauseof policies that cottoned to banks andrailroads. Many white dissidents even-tually founded the People’s Party, alsoknown as the Populists. Soon theyimagined what had been unimagin-able: an alliance with blacks, who

shared their economic grievances. As the economic depression deep-

ened, these white Populists joinedforces with black Republicans, form-ing an interracial “Fusion” coalitionthat championed local self-govern-ment, free public education and elec-toral reforms that would give blackmen the same voting rights as whites.In the 1894 and 1896 elections, the Fu-sion movement won every statewideoffice, swept the legislature and electedits most prominent white leader,Daniel Russell, to the governorship.

In Wilmington, the Fusion triumphlifted black and white Republicansand white Populists to power. Hor-rified white Democrats vowed to re-gain control of the government.

Race baiting fuels voteAs the 1898 political season loomed,

the Populists and Republicans hopedto make more gains through Fusion.To rebound, Democrats knew theyhad to develop campaign issues thattranscended party lines. Democraticchairman Furnifold Simmons mappedout the strategy with leaders whosenames would be immortalized in stat-ues, building names and street signs:Charles B. Aycock, Henry G. Connor,Robert B. Glenn, Claude Kitchin,Locke Craig, Cameron Morrison,George Rountree, Francis D. Winstonand Josephus Daniels.

They soon decided that racist ap-peals were the hammer they neededto shatter the fragile alliance betweenpoor whites and blacks. They madethe “redemption” of North Carolinafrom “Negro domination” the themeof the 1898 campaign. Thoughpromising to restore something tra-ditional, they would, in fact, create anew social order rooted in white su-premacy and commercial domination.

At the center of their strategy laythe gifts and assets of Daniels, editorand publisher of The News and Ob-server. He would spearhead a pro-paganda effort that would incite whitecitizens into a furor that led to elec-toral fraud and mass murder. It usedsexualized images of black men andtheir supposedly uncontrollable lust

for white women. Newspaper storiesand stump speeches warned of “blackbeasts” who threatened the flower ofSouthern womanhood.

The Democrats did not rely solelyupon newspapers, however, but de-ployed a statewide campaign of stumpspeakers, torchlight parades and phys-ical intimidation. Aycock earned hischance to become North Carolina’s“education governor” through hisfiery speeches for white supremacy.

Issue of race and sexAs in the rest of the state, Wilm-

ington Democrats founded their cam-paign upon propaganda, violence andfraud. Their efforts to persuade whitemen to commit wholesale violencewas made easier in August 1898 whenAlexander Manly, the black owner ofThe Daily Record, answered a speechsupporting lynchings. Not all interra-cial sex is rape, he noted; many whitewomen willingly sleep with black men.

For Democrats, Manly’s editorialwas a godsend, allowing them to sup-port their lies about predatory blacks.And no one was better at spreadingthat message of hate and violencethan Wilmington’s Alfred Waddell.

The former Confederate soldier wasa passionate speaker, who riled crowdswith his famous line: “We will neversurrender to a ragged raffle of Ne-groes, even if we have to choke theCape Fear River with carcasses.”

As Waddell spoke, the Red Shirts, aparamilitary arm of the DemocraticParty, thundered across the state onhorseback, disrupting African-Amer-ican church services and Republicanmeetings. In Wilmington, the RedShirts patrolled every street in thedays before the election, intimidatingand attacking black citizens.

Through these efforts, the Demo-crats won resounding victories acrossthe state on Nov. 8, 1898.

Stealing the election would not beenough for the conservatives. For onething, Wilmington’s local Fusionistgovernment remained in office. Manylocal officials — the mayor and theboard of aldermen, for example —had not been up for re-election in

Destruction of The Daily Record of Wilmington, said to be the only black-owned daily newspaper in the United States at the time, by white supremacists.COURTESY N.C. ARCHIVES AND HISTORY

1898. And Wilmington remained thecenter of African-American economicand political power, as well as a sym-bol of black pride. White Democratswere in no mood to wait.

The day after the election, Waddellunfurled a “White Declaration of Inde-pendence” that called for the disfran-chisement of black voters.

The following morning, Nov. 10,Waddell and a heavily armed crowd ofabout 2,000 marched to Love and Char-ity Hall, where the Record had beenpublished. The mob battered down thedoor of the two-story frame structure,dumped kerosene on the woodenfloors, and set the building ablaze.

Soon the streets filled with angryblacks and whites. Red Shirts on horse-back poured into the black communityand other white vigilantes rompedthrough the black sections of town to“kill every damn nigger in sight,” asone of them put it.

At the end of the day, no one knewhow many people had died — esti-mates ranged from nine to 300. Theonly certainty in the matter of casual-ties is that democracy was gravelywounded on the streets of Wilmington.

While the violence raged, white lead-ers launched a coup d’etat, forcing themayor, the board of aldermen, and thepolice chief to resign at gunpoint. By 4 p.m. that day, Waddell was Wilm-ington’s mayor.

Still, they were not done. The whitemob gathered at the city jail to watchsoldiers with fixed bayonets march Fu-sionist leaders to the train station, ban-ishing at least 21 successful blacks andtheir white allies from the city.

Effects of 1898 lingerWhen the new legislature met in

1899, its first order of business was todisfranchise blacks. In the years that fol-lowed, the leaders of the white su-premacy campaign were largely re-sponsible for the birth of the Jim Crowsocial order and the rise of a one-partypolitical system.

More than a century later, it is clearthat the white supremacy campaignof 1898 injected a vicious racial ide-ology into American political culturethat we have yet to transcend fully.Our separate and unequal lives attestto the fact, though much has changedfor the better and a few things havechanged for the worse.

But if 1898 has saddled us with itslegacy, it also suggests how we mightovercome it. Its central lesson is this:Human beings make history. So themistakes that North Carolinians madein 1898 can be overcome, if wechoose.

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CHARLES B. AYCOCK

Charles Brantley Aycock gradu-ated from the University of NorthCarolina in 1880, practiced law inGoldsboro and became involved inDemocratic Party politics. AsNorth Carolina’s governor from1901 to 1905, he championed edu-cation and white supremacy. Hedied in 1912 while delivering aspeech on education.

JOSEPHUS DANIELS

After studyingat the Universityof North Car-olina’s lawschool, JosephusDaniels was ad-mitted to the barin 1885, thoughhe never prac-

ticed. He purchased The News andObserver in 1896, making it apivotal instrument of the whitesupremacy campaign. PresidentWoodrow Wilson named him secre-tary of the Navy in 1913. PresidentFranklin Roosevelt appointed himambassador to Mexico in 1933.

ALEXANDER MANLY

Alexander Manlywas editor of TheDaily Record,believed to be theonly daily newspa-per in the countryowned by anAfrican-Americanat the time. His

editorial attacking whites’ hypocriti-cal attitudes toward interracial sexwas used by Democratic leaders tosupport their anti-black scare tactics.

FURNIFOLD SIMMONS

After losing statewide elections in1894 and 1896, the North CarolinaDemocratic Party turned to Furni-fold Simmons. As party chairman,the former congressman orches-trated the campaign of 1898 thatrestored Democrats to power. Ingratitude, the legislature appointedhim in 1900 to a seat in the U.S.Senate that he held for 30 years.

ALFRED MOORE WADDELL

Alfred Moore Waddell served fourterms in Congress (1871-1879). Agifted orator, he championed whitesupremacy in the 1898 election andwas installed as Wilmington’s mayorduring the coup that occurred dur-ing the riot.

MORE ONLINE

Read Tim Tyson’s full report at www.newsobserver.com (key word: 1898)

THE COMMISSION REPORTRead the state report atwww.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/1898-wrrc.

Trustees’ plaque mounted outside the south entrance to this building

Members of the Real Silent Sam Coalition urged the trustees to rename Saunders Hall for African American novelist, anthropologist, and playwright Zora Neale Hurston, who taught at the North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in 1939-1940 and attended a class that met at the home of UNC professor Paul Green.

In 1999, Students Seeking Historical Truth hung KKK banners on Saunders Hall