What is in a name?

By D. G. Martin
Posted Monday, October 29, 2007

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Chapel Hill, NC - The North Carolina Democratic Party has sent me back to the books to study my state’s history.

The history question raised among Democrats is whether the name of Charles Aycock, the Democratic governor from 1901 to 1905 should continue to be a part of the title of their annual Vance-Aycock celebration in Asheville. Old-time Democrats just say, “See you at Vance-Aycock.”

Democrats, and other North Carolinians, have long found lots to reasons to be proud of Aycock. My eighth grade teacher, Miss Currie, taught us that Aycock was our education governor. He was responsible for expanding and improving public education in our state and for the construction of hundreds of new school buildings.

As Democrats try to claim the education issue for their own, they have proudly (or Republicans might say, shamelessly) exploited the connection.

Aycock explained his loyalty to his party in terms that most modern Democrats would endorse: “What is a Democrat? He is an individualist. He believes in the right of every man to be and to make of himself what God has put into him. He is a man who believes and practises the doctrine of equal rights and the duty and obligation of seeing to it as far as he can that no man shall be denied the chances in life which God intended for him to have. He is a man who believes in the Declaration of Independence, and who is filled with that spirit of equality which has made this country of ours the refuge of the oppressed of all the world and the hope of this age and of all ages to come. . . .Equal! That is the word. On that word I plant myself and my party — the equal right of every child born on earth to have the opportunity ‘to burgeon out all that there is within him.’”

Back in 1960 when Vance-Aycock got started, some Democrats remembered with partisan appreciation Aycock’s decisive political victory in 1900, the beginning of a long period of uninterrupted Democratic dominance of North Carolina government.

Why would anyone suggest that Democrats abandon Aycock now?

The problem has to do with the way Aycock won that 1900 election. He ran on a “good government” platform, but his idea of good government was to remove blacks from participating.

During the 1900 election he championed a constitutional amendment that added a literacy requirement for voter registration. It was, he explained without apology, “drawn with the deliberate purpose of depriving the negro of the right to vote, and of allowing every white man to retain that right. …[I]ts passage will mean peace to the land, it will mean an end to an era of crime and lawlessness, security to property and purity of politics. There will be no more dead negroes on the streets of Wilmington, no more rule of the incompetent and corrupt.”

Illiterate whites were protected by a “grandfather clause.” But Aycock’s grandfather clause did not apply to voters who would first register in or after 1908. So, everyone, white or black, who registered after that date would have to pass a literacy test. Many whites objected, but Aycock held firm, insisting that with the increased educational opportunities he would provide, every child could grow up to be an educated and literate voter. There would be other advantages: “. . .[A]fter 1908 there will be no State in the Union with a larger percentage of boys and girls who can read and write and no State will rush forward with more celerity or certainty than conservative old North Carolina. The miserable demagogue who seeks to perpetuate illiteracy in the State will then have happily passed forever.”

For his commitment to public education that ultimately gave a boost to all North Carolinians, Aycock still deserves the gratitude of all of us. His inspiring words about equality reflect core values that would have made him comfortable today in a political party that has rejected “white supremacy,” in a party that includes many descendants of people he fought to exclude from political life, and in a party that may decide to erase his name from an honored place in an important party event.

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D.G. Martin is the host of UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Fridays at 9:30 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m. www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/. Check his blog and view prior programs at www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/

This week’s (November 2, 4) guests are Joe and Terry Graedon, authors of “Best Choices from the People’s Pharmacy.”

November 2nd 9:30pm, encore November 4th 5:00pm
Joe and Terry Graedon Best Choices from the People’s Pharmacy

November 9th 9:30pm, encore November 11th 5:00pm
Fred Hobson Off the Rim: : Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood,

November 16th 9:30pm, encore November 18th 5:00pm
William Powell Encyclopedia of North Carolina