At first glance, Norman Jennett, a country boy born in 1877 and hailing from the woods along the Black River outside Fayetteville, N.C., might not seem relevant to the pivotal election that is barreling toward us.
But the shy Jennett liked to whittle, and that landed him a spot at the local newspaper making woodblock prints and drawing cartoons. His cartoons, in turn, caught the attention of Josephus Daniels, the editor and publisher of North Carolina’s most influential newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer.
Daniels made no concessions toward journalistic impartiality, and in the fall of 1898, he led a full-throttle attempt to overthrow what he called “Negro rule.” His target was the Fusion Party, a populist alliance of poor White farmers and African Americans that had come to dominate state politics, particularly in eastern North Carolina.
This was especially true in the thriving port city of Wilmington, North Carolina’s most populous metropolis, with more than 20,000 people, the majority of whom were African Americans. The cosmopolitan city featured a growing Black middle class and a vibrant Black newspaper, the Daily Record. Reflecting its demographics, Wilmington had an integrated government with Black officials, as well as many Black policemen and firemen.
Daniels found this intolerable. He huddled up with Furnifold Simmons, the state Democratic Party chairman — at that time the party of White supremacy in North Carolina. Daniels and Simmons knew that if everyone voted their side would lose. That meant ensuring that everyone did not vote, by fearmongering about the calamitous results if the other side won, gerrymandering, spreading misinformation about the rights of citizens to vote and direct intimidation at polling places.
Throughout it all, there was a consistent message: If you don’t vote for us, you won’t be safe. They argued that chaos would reign if African Americans were allowed to vote. The News and Observer was particularly effective in spreading this message. David Zucchino, whose recent book, “Wilmington’s Lie,” tells the story of 1898, writes that “More than a century before fake news attacks targeted social media websites, Daniels’s manipulation of White readers was perhaps the most daring and effective disinformation campaign of the era.”
This campaign wasn’t subtle. It upheld the racist message that the African American threat could lead to a reign of terror. Black rapists, they suggested, were coming after White women. You had better arm yourself and be ready.
Although this racist propaganda was effective, Daniels had another hurdle to clear to pry apart the budding alliance between Black North Carolinians and less-educated and less-affluent White people. Many of his poor White readers actually could not read.
This was where Jennett, and his gift for caricature, came into play. Every day that fall, the News and Observer featured a new front-page cartoon by the 21-year-old Jennett, and if the paper’s editorials, written by Daniels, could not drive home their crude points to his illiterate nonreaders, the cartoons could.