Josephus Daniels’ deeds drowned his noble words

BY STEVE FORD

Every day of the year, The News & Observer’s editorial page used to print a high-minded exhortation ascribed to founding editor and owner Josephus Daniels. So were we kidding our readers, and ourselves?

Yes, there’s a disconnect between Daniels’ lofty words and his white supremacist past. But from my perspective, the quotation from his will set honorable standards that the newspaper in recent decades sought to uphold. It was a touchstone for values of equality and fair treatment regardless of race.

Daniels’ reputation, already tainted by earlier reviews of his actions, has taken a deeper plunge as the scourge of systemic racism is being confronted across the nation. The removal of his statue last week from Raleigh’s Nash Square – at his descendants’ request – signaled the end of public honors for a career spanning seven decades and reaching the highest levels of the national government.

Using his newspaper as a partisan goad, Daniels stoked a climate of white resentment culminating in the 1898 white supremacist uprising in Wilmington in which black residents were gunned down and the lawful city government was forced out. It had taken far too long, but those events were chronicled by a state commission and then by The N&O in a special section published on Nov. 17, 2006. An accompanying lead editorial (I wrote it) offered the company’s apology for our founder’s misdeeds.

Having seized the state’s levers of power, Daniels’ Democratic allies proceeded to impose the racist regime known as Jim Crow, mocking the Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment under law. Daniels’ incitement of the Wilmington violence was bad enough. What came after arguably was worse.

But on the same day we published that apology, and each day thereafter up until sometime last summer, the editorial page showcased the same quote from Daniels’ will that it had been showcasing since … who knows when? There’d be no surprise if the tradition originated not long after his death in 1948, at age 85.

“I advise and enjoin those who direct the paper in the tomorrows never to advocate any cause for personal profit or preferment,” he declared in what we thought of as his creed.

“I would wish it always to be ‘the tocsin’ and to devote itself to the policies of equality and justice to the underprivileged. If the paper should at any time be the voice of self-interest or become the spokesman of privilege or selfishness it would be untrue to its history.”

Perhaps there was a leap of faith in hoping that Daniels, some 50 years after Wilmington, had come around to the view that “policies of equality and justice to the underprivileged” should apply to blacks as well as whites. The evidence suggests he never abandoned his belief in white superiority.

And did the history with which we were supposed to keep faith not include some culpability for one of the nation’s worst outbreaks of anti-black violence? Perhaps we became parties to a hypocrisy which the paper’s subsequent advocacy for civil rights – under leaders such as Jonathan Daniels, Frank Daniels Jr., Claude Sitton and Orage Quarles III – couldn’t entirely overcome.

Josephus Daniels lived a long life amid complicated times, neither full-fledged saint nor full-fledged vil-lain. He’s gone from his pedestal, appropriately enough, and his family no longer is involved with The N&O. His creed has disappeared from the editorial page. Yet if its principles endure they will continue to serve a purpose – so long as “justice and equality” are construed to be the goal for all, no matter the color of their skin.