Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. He was only 39 years old but had won the Nobel Peace Prize and was probably already the most famous African American in U.S. history. His death cemented his legacy and reputation as one of the country’s greatest leaders.
King visited North Carolina numerous times during his career. At the time of his assassination, it was a very different state than it is today. We were in the midst of a political and social transition. The Democratic Party that had ruled with virtually no opposition since the turn of the 20th century was fracturing along racial lines. The Jim Crow era was quickly coming to end as schools were on the brink of desegregating.
While North Carolina avoided much of the violence that defined the deep South, our state leaders resisted desegregation, too. While governors in other states were standing in the school house door, North Carolina politicians created legal and bureaucratic obstacles to desegregating North Carolina public schools. Their delaying tactics worked for almost 20 years.
By 1968, though, the delaying tactics were failing. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited federal money from being spent on any public agencies that discriminated, and that meant schools. North Carolina responded with a “freedom of choice” option that allowed for voluntary integration. However, the Supreme Court found the tactic unconstitutional unless the program actually resulted in desegregation. That hadn’t happened so public schools were left with a choice between desegregating or foregoing federal money. Integration began in earnest across North Carolina with the beginning of the 1968 school year, though it would take another few years and another few court battles to complete.
On the political front, the modern Republican Party in North Carolina began to emerge. Pro-segregation white voters started abandoning the Democratic Party. In the presidential race, they supported Richard Nixon, with George Wallace stealing a healthy number of white votes. In the governor’s race, Democrat Bob Scott, who was lieutenant governor and son of governor Kerr Scott, defeated Republican Jim Gardner who ran on a segregationist platform and came closer than most people expected. In the US Senate race, incumbent Democrat Sam Ervin, who had pro-segregationist credentials, crushed his Republican opponent who ran as staunch segregationist.
Four years later, desegregation would be complete and the backlash against it would propel Republicans into the Governor’s Mansion and a US Senate seat for the first time in the 20thcentury. In 1968, at the time of King’s death, North Carolina was still in transition. His movement, though, set into motion the changes that restructured the political and social order of North Carolina and led to the state we know today.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
And how many communities, like Charlotte, never desegregated their housing and when busing ended, found their schools largely segregated again? I am impressed by NC’s actions only in comparison to those of other parts of the South, which is not a very high standard. I am also very aware that these issues are not unique to the South, but they are far more socially and politically acceptable to far too many of the old South. Poverty, fear and white pride combine here in a toxic mix, especially with a racist in the WH.
Jim Aycock’s comments capture accurately and fairly not only the complexity and paradox of the role of his kinsman but of the history of North Carolina and of North Carolina Democrars. We took much too long to come down on the right side of history but when we finally made our choice we in the main moved away from our neighbors and towards the better side of our nature. We can take some pride that the only governor in the nation who was praised during Dr. King’s march on Washington was the Governor of North Carolina who as he abandoned the shameless politics that had brought Aycock to office felt comfortable in invoking the commitment of Aycock to education for all our children – Black and White – that Aycock had been first to declare and defend as a North Carolina imperative.
Another prominent man died on today’s date. On April 4, 1912, former NC Gov. Charles Aycock fell dead of a heart attack at the speaker’s podium in Birmingham, Ala., while calling on the Alabama Education Association to educate all its children, black and white. Civil rights workers were still being murdered in that part of America half a century later, but Charles Aycock was there in 1912. In 1901 he threatened to resign his office when the legislature made plans to defund schools for black children. Whatever his faults (Dr. King was not perfect either), Aycock was as much a part of the solution as he was part of the problem.
Jim Aycock, Asheville
Jim, if you are the same Jim Aycock I remember in Asheville years ago, I send greetings. Just wondering if you are related to the great North Carolina Gov. Charles Aycock.
He was my great grandfather’s brother. Probably the man you knew, I retired as publisher of the Black Mountain News, please refresh my memory. Note how closely Aycock’s word and those of Dr. King say the same thing 62 years apart.
Charles Aycock in 1901 on school funding: “The negro’s destiny and ours are so interwoven that we cannot lift ourselves up without at the same time lifting him.”
Words from Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963: “Many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.”
Jim Aycock