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This chapter analyzes North Carolina's decision to disfranchise all free blacks at its 1835 state constitutional convention. The push for disfranchisement of free blacks in North Carolina was led not only by white egalitarians seeking ideological consistency but also by some conservatives eager to free their election districts from the influence of free black voters. These conservatives, who generally opposed constitutional reform, couched their public arguments against free black suffrage in terms of drawing a bright line between white citizens and black denizens much as egalitarians did, though conservatives also expressed the more elitist notion that black disfranchisement would free their election districts from the “corruption” and tendency to mobocracy they associated with free black voting.

Chapter 3 examines how the legal phase of the civil rights movement came together as World War II ended. It highlights Wheeler’s postwar activism and involvement in the battle for black educational equality in North Carolina and the South more broadly. He believed education to be one of the most essential ingredients for achieving the expansion of economic rights. This chapter argues that it was during the postwar period that he articulated his economic vision of New South prosperity to bankers in the Tar Heel State. During the world conflict, M&F Bank purchased war bonds, loaned black farmers money for equipment to support the war effort, and then helped returning black war veterans take advantage of the GI Bill through providing home loans. His embrace of legal tactics helped challenge an unjust educational system that effectively stifled black schoolchildren from learning the skills needed to obtain jobs later. This chapter also explores how Wheeler and others argued for immediate school desegregation directly following the Brown decision.

Thomas Dixon dedicated The Clansman, his fictionalized account of Klan Activity on the North–South Carolina border, to Leroy Mangum McAfee. McAfee's largest claim to fame today comes from Dixon's brief description of him, noted in several histories of the Reconstruction period. Fictionalizations of McAfee and his Klan coconspirators were once part of the prevalent view of Reconstruction in the early twentieth century because of the popularity of The Clansman and another Dixon novel, The Leopard's Spots. The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots both reveal that, to Dixon, the main preservers of American civilization during the Reconstruction came from the hills, not the piney woods or the flat, sandier tidewater soil usually associated with the plantation South.

It is difficult to measure mobilization by denomination in the eighteenth century because enlistment records do not indicate recruits' denominations; nonetheless, evidence indicates that dissenters supplied the support sought as part of the negotiations for religious freedom. While Anglican ministers tended to hold more prestigious posts on Committees of Safety and more high‐ranking appointments to the military, dissenting ministers enlisted and preached mobilization at least as effectively. Indeed, many Baptist ministers who had been personally persecuted mobilized to support the patriot effort. Enlistment data by counties support the conclusion that dissenters mobilized at least as effectively as Anglicans. The situation in Virginia differed dramatically from substantial loyalism demonstrated by North Carolina and Maryland dissenters who had significantly less reason to oppose local patriot leaders; the lack of loyalism in Virginia relates, in part, to the efforts of the establishment leaders to engage dissenters in the political dialogue.

Why did the KKK's “rebirth” emerge most fully in precisely the state whose progressive reputation presumably would best “counter” the Klan's militant appeals? To address that puzzle, this chapter focuses on the politics of KKK mobilization, in particular state officials' orientation to civil rights mandates and the policing of segregationist vigilante action. Through a detailed account of North Carolina's political development and extended comparisons to Mississippi and Florida, the chapter argues that a combination of racial moderation and laissez faire policing provided the KKK with considerable organizing latitude in the Tar Heel State, enabling the Carolina Klan's rapid growth and its significant influence on state politics.

This is a reproduction of William Byrd II' account of the surveying of the border between the U.S. states of North Carolina and Virginia in 1728. This account of the journey to survey the contentious border with chief surveyor William Mayo include details such as the origin of the name of “Matrimony Creek,” a name coined because of its observed choppy constitution. Surveyors and technicians for the team came from both colonies. William Byrd was the chief representative from Virginia, and Edward Moseley was the chief representative from North Carolina.

This chapter provides a test of relative advantage theory at the substate level. Specifically, the growth of Republican identification is analyzed at the parish level in Louisiana and the county level in North Carolina annually from 1966 to 2008. The results indicate that black political mobilization is a statistically significant predictor of Republican registration rates in both post-Voting Rights Act (VRA) Louisiana and North Carolina. The findings in this chapter again provide empirical confirmation supporting the theory of relative advantage as a key explanation for the political transformation of the South over the last half-century. This chapter ends with a brief discussion of where the current politics of the region fits into U.S. national politics.

Peles’s chapter considers whether the refuse of specific households of historic Native Americans of the North Carolina Piedmont can be identified from densely occupied village sites. She notes that on sites with well-documented histories, different occupations can be more easily identified than on sites with few to no associated historic records. Peles takes a community perspective on the concept of household, and while the features from which she draws her zooarchaeological and ethnobotanical data cannot necessarily be connected to individual households, a theoretical perspective ordered around households provides opportunity to look at village-wide data as a result of the collective decisions of households within the community. Using correspondence analysis, Peles looks to see if there are relationships between certain plants and animals among six village sites and if the assemblages are similar to each other. Peles finds that there are distinct differences in the foods different communities exploited during a period of growing uncertainty marked by pressure from European intrusions. She is able to show that study of food remains at multiple scales, coupled with firm contextualization of the deposits, supports exploration of and sound hypotheses about the agency of households and the individuals who compose them.

This chapter traces the history of judicial independence in North Carolina. The North Carolina Constitution of 1776 contained all three of the central tenets of judicial independence: the judiciary was a separate institution of government; judges served for life during good behavior; and they received adequate salaries. It had come a long way from the days in which the lords proprietors were conferred “full and absolute power” by the crown—including judicial power—for the “good and happy government of the said province”.

This chapter explores the vital paradoxes in Baptists' understanding of the relationship between religious and political authority. It begins by examining the debates over church and state in Virginia. In North Carolina, disestablishment occurred relatively quickly and with much less public debate. In Virginia, however, the process of disestablishment involved a complicated negotiation among different civil and sectarian factions that carried on for years and ultimately resulted in a far-reaching statement for religious liberty. The chapter then turns to Baptists' involvement in political debates and political culture in the early republic.

This chapter illustrates how, as early as 1924, the hard-drinking textile millhand Charlie Poole was already broadcasting his high-spirited, percussive dance music throughout the mountains of southwestern Virginia even before he appeared on radio or records. Besides performing for paying audiences at formal stage shows, the renowned five-string banjoist and his brother-in-law, fiddler Posey Rorer, often entertained in private homes for parties and dances around Franklin County, Virginia, where Rorer had been born and raised. Sometimes the duo “broadcast” using their host's hand-crank telephone, thereby sharing their music, via the telephone party line, with avid listeners in the community. During the mid- to late 1920s, even after he became one of Columbia's best-selling recording stars, Poole and his revolving ensemble of stringband musicians, the North Carolina Ramblers, regularly spent weeks playing the towns and villages of southwestern Virginia and southern West Virginia, sometimes for paying audiences but most often just for the sheer pleasure of making music.

This chapter examines how North Carolina has responded to the Connected Age in one area where citizens can have a collective voice: government policies. Government's impact on the economy is realized in two major ways. One is in how government collects public revenues, what mix of taxes and fees are used, and how both the total size of public revenues and the particular types of public charges affect private economic decision making. Second is how those revenues are spent, what programs are used, and the impacts of those programs on the functioning of the economy, and on the behavior and choices of households and businesses. Changes associated with the Connected Age have affected both of these public fiscal functions, while several fiscal changes have been enacted to attempt to alter the course of the Connected Age's trends.

Raising funds was one of the difficulties faced by hospital reformers in their aim to support black hospitals. Given the lack of financial capabilities of the patients and the increasing expense of operating these hospitals, black reformers recognized that no movement for the improvement of black hospitals could succeed without the white's cooperation and financial assistance. This chapter studies the activities of three white philanthropic foundations—the Duke Endowment, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and the General Education Board—with regard to black hospital reform. In particular, this chapter illustrates how the Rosenwald Fund maintained a broad-based black health program that supported programs in professional education, public health, outpatient services, and hospital care; the Duke Endowment's substantial financing for the operation and construction of black hospitals in North and South Carolina; and the General Education Board's (GEB) donation of funds for educational programs at selected hospitals.

Chapter 2 pivots away from NC Mutual by more closely examining M&F Bank after its establishment and its survival amid the catastrophic collapse that precipitated the Great Depression decade. The chapter argues that because M&F Bank followed an ethos that engendered a deep commitment to the overall prosperity of the black community, it was in a much better position than most black-owned banks to advocate a return to political participation for the black community. In this way, Durham’s black businesspeople served as stalwart community leaders, which provided a training ground for a younger cadre of well-educated and ready activists. Moreover, they embraced a multidimensional strategy of reciprocity—complicated by gender, class, and intergenerational tensions.