Civil War-era history crucial to understanding modern NC

By Christopher Gergen and Stephen Martin - Correspondents
02/14/2015 5:00 PM | Updated: 02/14/2015 4:52 PM

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A symposium co-hosted by UNC Wilmington on Feb. 27-28 will explore the sacrifices and legacies of the war, which stretched from The war concluded with the emancipation of 3.5 million slaves in the Confederacy, an event that “fundamentally reshaped Southern society in ways we’re still coming to grips with,” says Starnes, who serves on the academic advisory board for the state’s sesquicentennial commemoration. From 1865 until the 1890s, African-Americans in North Carolina saw their civic rights and economic opportunities expand immensely, with the state’s 2nd Congressional district sending a black representative to Washington for 25 years. Prolonged opposition by conservative whites, fueled by the Ku Klux Klan, erased those gains by 1900, forcing blacks to fight anew for rights that would take another 60-plus years to reclaim.

When North Carolina’s legislature approved a sweeping voter ID law in 2013, Gov. Pat McCrory called it “a common-sense idea” that could prevent fraud. It could also be viewed, though, as a dangerous idea for the voting rights of minorities with a very real history of losing them. Indeed, a study last year by the independent U.S. Government Accountability Office found that voter ID laws have a greater impact on black voters than other racial groups – and in North Carolina those laws helped spark a massive wave of protests that can only be fully understood through the lens of Civil War-era history.

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These students might take heart, or at least gain valuable perspective, by studying North Carolina’s Reconstruction era immediately following the Civil War. With the KKK terrorizing blacks and their supporters in the late 1860s, N.C. Governor William Woods Holden sent state troops into Alamance and Caswell counties to restore order. Conservatives later got their revenge by impeaching Holden for illegally declaring martial law – making him the first governor in the U.S. to be impeached and removed from office and accelerating the decline of blacks’ newly won rights.

“People think Fox and MSNBC are poisoning American politics,” Starnes says. “They should read North Carolina newspapers from the 1870s.”

The lesson: Politics in this state have rarely been pretty, but critical causes – including civil rights – have eventually prevailed when enough people got involved on their behalf. We can also lose ground if we stay on the sidelines. It’s no different today. But to truly understand that and to realize our potential as a state, it helps to remember important lessons from our past.

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