CASE STUDY: An important look back
Special Citation: The Charlotte Observer and the (Raliegh) News and Observer
In 2006, two North Carolina newspapers, the Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer of Raleigh, published a 16-page special section that detailed the 1898 Wilmington race riot and the influence the event had on the segregationist South that was a product of it.
The section was a byproduct of the state’s 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission, which issued a report earlier in 2006 calling on newspapers that played roles in the riot—principally the Raleigh and Charlotte papers—to acknowledge their complicity and publicize it. The papers, in an effort to ensure that the report was unbiased, hired Timothy Tyson, a visiting professor at Duke University, to write “The Ghosts of 1898.”
The papers admittedly were instrumental in instigating a white supremacy campaign that led to driving blacks from power and a subsequent purge of elected officials that is now considered to be the only successful coup d’etat in U.S. history. The riot in Wilmington, then the state’s largest city, led to the death of an estimated 300 blacks and another 1,000 being forced to leave the city.
Tyson believes that the event’s legacy was the birth of the Jim Crow culture, termination of black voting rights and the beginning of a one-party political system that paralyzed the South for more than half a century until the civil rights movement eventually led to segregation’s demise.
Because the healing continues, publication of the section was controversial for both races. Interviews of community members before and after the section’s publication indicated, not surprisingly, a definite split among the races about the section. Whites had a tendency to say racism was the norm 100 years ago and should be put in context because such actions would not be acceptable today. The victims of that racism, however, were not so forgiving.
The newspapers believe the mere telling of the story was important because most people—of both races—knew very little about the riot, primarily because authors of textbooks chose to avoid writing about the event and its aftermath. It also could be argued that the papers’ current managers wanted to print the section in an effort to separate their current attitudes toward race from the men who published the papers at the turn of the 20th century.
CASE STUDY QUESTIONS
- Do you think less of the papers because they initiated the project only after a state commission suggested that they should own up to their own checkered past?
- The papers chose not to discuss reparations for the victims of the riot, something that the commission encouraged the state to address. Should they have?
- Do you think newspapers should take on more of these types of projects?
