Sally Greene asks, "why is the truth so hard?"

The Democratics used to be bad guys on racial issues in the South, and the News & Observer once pushed the segregationist agenda. These institutions helped make terrible things happen in Wilmington 109 years ago, and the role of institutions is critical to the story.

Pretending to address historical reality while scrubbing the record is a chickenshit move. The Democrats should own the history of the party, and point proudly to the changes over the last century. Today's N&O is not the paper of the Jim Crow era, either.

Tell the whole story.

Comments

[John D. Young]

The Wilmington Race Riot was not the only event in which an elected government was forcefully ousted by Democrats. Nicholas Lemann's "Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War" is about the armed White Line (Democratic Party) organizations who battled Reconstruction in Mississippi and Louisiana. It is a powerful and chilling story of the brutal tactics used by Southern Democrats to rip apart elected governments controlled by blacks and Republicans.

Quoting from "Redemption's" inside cover: "Lemann's extraordinary narrative starts with the horrific events of Easter Sunday 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes raised a militia to oust the elected black town government and in a gruesome killing spree, massacred dozens of people. That was only the beginning: white Democrats then activated an organized campaign of political terrorism and intimidation that aimed to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution and challenge President Grant's support of the emerging structures of black political power."

[Anonymous]

The article at Wikipedia about the News & Observer has a lot of information about Josephus Daniels' role in the segregationist South and the Wilmington race riots in case you would like more information than the News & Observer articles provide. The article has citations to various sources if you need further research.

Here is the link to the article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_News_&_Observer

[Bubba]

So whens is the first installment of the Democrats' reparations program scheduled to begin?