Preliminary Report on Cromartie v. Hunt and Daley v. Leak by Goldfield and Lee

    . 

° 
RECS Fg 12 1099 

  

PRELIMINARY REPORT 

Cromartie v. Hunt; Daley v. Leak 

January 13, 1998 
Submitted by David Goldfield, Ph.D., Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History 

University of North Carolina, Charlotte 

The new First Congressional District in eastern North Carolina responds to two historical 

legacies. First, the District includes counties and towns where black populations have been 

concentrated more than in other areas of the state. This concentration has been the focal point 

both for black political influence since the Reconstruction era and corresponding attempts by 

white leaders to dilute or eliminate that influence. Second, the economies of the counties and 

towns of the First Congressional District have remained relatively static at best in a state that has 

urbanized rapidly and experienced significant economic development during the second half of 

the twentieth century. The economic experiences of District citizens, particularly since the end 

of World War II, have reinforced a community of interest that has existed since the 

Reconstruction era. 

A Legacy of Racial Discrimination 

The boundaries of the new First Congressional District resemble the boundaries of the old “Black 

7) Second.” When the Democratic party regained power in North Carolina in 1872, it immediately 

sought to address the racial “problems” created by the enfranchisement of former slaves in 1868. 

Freedmen were heavily concentrated in the eastern part of the state. In an effort to “pack” the 

black vote, i.e., isolate it, and ensure solid Democratic majorities in other districts, lawmakers 

created the Second Congressional District. The Black Second, as it was known, included 

Warren, Northampton, Halifax, Edgecombe, Wilson, Wayne, Lenoir, Craven, Greene, and Jones 

 



  

2 

counties. All or parts of these counties are included in the new First Congressional District. All 

of these counties, with the exception of Wayne and Wilson, possessed black population 

majorities in the late nineteenth century. Even these two “white” counties, had black populations 

exceeding 45 percent. 

Unfortunately for the Democrats, their political solution worked too well. The creation of a 

political district that gave black politicians a realistic opportunity to win elections energized the 

black electorate; black voter turnout exceeded 80 percent during the early 1870s. Before the 

Constitution of 1900 effectively disfranchised black voters in North Carolina, four black 

Congressmen represented the district, serving a total of seven terms. George White, who ended 

his term in 1901, was the last black Congressman from the South until 1973. Equally important, 

these black Congressmen helped secure political patronage positions for their black constituents, 

such as postmaster, tax collector, and recorder of deeds. During the period 1872 to 1900, almost 

all of the fifty-nine blacks who sat in the state house of delegates, and eighteen blacks who 

served in the senate, were from districts wholly or partially within the boundaries of the Black 

Second.? 

This is not to say that white voters in the Black Second were disfranchised or were 

unsuccessful in achieving political office, especially at the local level. But the emergence of an 

active black electorate required whites to share power with blacks, a prospect most white leaders 

in the district found demeaning or unacceptable. These counties, most of which were located in 

the Coastal Plain, were among the state’s most conservative jurisdictions. 

Before the Civil War, white politicians from these counties dominated affairs in Raleigh and 

were reluctant to share power with counties to the west. Although North Carolina was not a 

 



3 

plantation state on the order of lower South states such as Alabama and Mississippi, areas within 

the Black Second had resembled the Old South more than the Old North State in the pre-Civil 

War era. Here were plantations, large landowners, and the most significant concentrations of 

slaves. It was a relatively homogeneous area, different from the ethnic and religious diversity. of 

the Piedmont, and much more content to adhere to the status duo of low taxes and low state 

expenditures. By the 1830s, North Carolina was known as the “Rip Van Winkle State,” an 

image sustained by the dominance of the eastern elite. Not until the administration of Governor 

John Motley Morehead in the 1840s and the growing influence of Piedmont counties in state 

government, did North Carolina shake its torpor and begin an extensive program to improve 

transportation, communication, and education throughout the state -- programs that probably 

would not have existed if eastern leaders had maintained control of the state government.’ 

The Civil War and its outcome did not change the conservative character of the District. 

While the Piedmont forged ahead with railroad projects and textile and tobacco manufacturing, 

much of eastern North Carolina turned its attention to regaining control over its black agricultural 

workforce and restoring white supremacy. The Black Second gave blacks political influence not 

envisioned by the old aristocracy. It is not surprising that the three leaders of black 

disfranchisement in North Carolina, Charles Brantley Aycock, Josephus Daniels, and Furnifold 

Simmons, all resided in the Black Second. Aycock was a native of Wayne County, Daniels 

hailed from Wilson, and Simmons came from Jones County. 

Responding to white pressure within the Black Second, Democrats began to whittle away 

both at the district boundaries and black voting rights from 1877 until 1900. In 1877, Democrats 

removed county offices from the electoral process; henceforth the state legislature would appoint  



4 

those officials. Democrats also redrew ward lines within the Black Second to either limit black 

influence to one district or disperse the black vote among numerous districts. Finally, the 

Democrats appointed voting registrars sympathetic to their views. The collective result was to 

increase Democratic control throughout the Black Second. Democrats tightened suffrage laws 

over the hor decade further restricting the black vote. By 1886, a white Congressman 

represented the Black Second, even though the legislature had “blackened” the district in 1883 

with the addition of Bertie and Vance counties and the removal of Wayne County. (Bertie and 

Vance are also included in the new First Congressional District.) In 1891, the Democrats 

scrapped the Black Second in all but name, and redrew the state’s Congressional districts, 

seeking “to make compact districts, and also to make them all Democratic.” Jones, Craven, and 

Vance counties were removed from the Black Second and Wayne County put back in.’ 

But an economic crisis that thrust tens of thousands of white landowners into tenantry 

throughout the South, especially in the cotton-growing regions (and the Black Second was North 

Carolina’s major cotton-growing area), inspired white voters to seek out political alternatives to 

the Democratic party. The Populist party responded to the needs of these farmers and, in North 

Carolina, the party fused with Republicans to capture the state legislature in 1894. The “Fusion” 

government undid most of the vote dilution legislation implemented by the Democrats. The 

Fusionists, however, succumbed to a withering white supremacy campaign undertaken by 

Democrats who warned white voters of the political and social chaos that would accompany a 

return of black rule. By 1898, the Democrats had regained control of the state government; a 

bloody race riot in Wilmington that year overthrew the legally elected Republican government 

there; and the 1900 state constitution imitated procedural subterfuges initiated by other southern  



  

states, including an understanding clause, a poll tax, and a grandfather clause. With these 

measures, black political influence in eastern North Carolina plummeted.® By 1940, only 5 

percent of %, state’s eligible black Tn was registered, with most of these voters residing 

in Piedmont jurisdictions.” The heavily-black counties of eastern North Carolina reflected the 

racial exclusion patterns of the lower South in the same way that their economies resembled the 

rural, white-elite-dominated jurisdictions. of the Black Belt in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, 

and Louisiana. 

In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright outlawed the white primary in 

the South and generated renewed interest in voter registration among African Americans 

throughout the region. Negro Voters’ Leagues emerged in the urban South to register blacks; in 

addition, returning black war veterans refused to acquiesce in a Jim Crow society and viewed the 

ballot as the shortest and surest access to full participation in southern life.! The combination of 

these forces contributed to substantial increases in black voter registration, especially in the 

urban Piedmont. By 1960, for example, 62 percent of Durham's eligible black population and 54 

percent of Winston-Salem ’s blacks were registered to vote. But counties in the eastern part of 

North Carolina lagged behind the trend. In majority-black counties (all located in eastern North 

Carolina), fewer than 20 percent of the black population was registered to vote in 1960. And, 

when a few blacks managed to win local elections, as in Wilson in 1953 and 1955, the state 

legislature altered the electoral system from district to at-large representation. The Wilson city 

council reverted to its all-white composition thereafter. The state also resorted to other vote 

dilution techniques during the 1950s to restrict black voter participation including prohibiting 

“single-shot” voting in fourteen counties in the eastern part of the state.’ 

 



  

In 1965, the federal Voting Rights Act ended black disfranchisement in the South and 

rendered vote dilution tactics considerably more difficult to implement. The Act applied to 40 of 

North Carolina’s 100 counties, including all of the counties in 2 old Black Second where the 

most serious instances of disfranchisement and dilution had occurred prior to 1965. But the 

legacy of vote dilution and disfranchisement proved difficult to overcome. Black voter 

registration in eastern North Carolina hovered around 50 percent of eligible black voters by 

1976, compared with roughly 65 percent for black voters in other parts of the state.'” In addition, 

redistricting in the early 1970s and 1980s. though it enhanced the chances of black candidates, 

ultimately failed those candidates who fell victim to the most racially-polarized voting in the 

state.’ 

The addition of white and relatively-liberal Orange County to the Second District in 1971 

proved insufficient to enable black Chapel Hill mayor Howard Lee to unseat incumbent 

conservative Democratic Congressman L.H. Fountain in the 1972 Democratic primary. The 

Raleigh News & Observer noted that the balloting “generally was along racial lines.”'? In 1981, 

after the U.S. Deparment of Justice rejected a congressional redistricting plan that protected 

Congressman Fountain by excluding Durham County from the Second District, conditions were 

even more favorable for a black candidate. But. as one political pundit noted, “Get a black 

candidate against a white in a runoff primary in rural Eastern North Carolina and the white will 

win every time.”"” The analysis was correct as the black candidate lost. receiving only 13.1 

percent of the white vote." After another unsuccessful challenge by a black candidate in 1984, 

no black candidate emerged until a decade later when the legislature created a black-majority 

district that enabled black candidates to compete more effectively in the new district. 

 



  

The efforts to limit or exclude black political participation during the twentieth century in 

eastern North Carolina and within the boundaries of the old Black Second and the new F irst 

Congrestional District, paralleled other discriminatory tactics followed by white lawmakers at | 

the local level. Service levels in black neighborhoods in the towns within the Black Second 

remained rudimentary at best. Paved streets, regular trash pick-up, water and sewer facilities, 

police protection, and educational facilities in black areas lagged behind those in white areas. 

Blacks were invisible as participants in the broader community life; they were primarily a rural 

manual labor force. Local papers up through the 1960s scarcely mentioned blacks outside of 

criminal activities. 

When the civil rights movement exposed conditions in these communities, disruption and 

violence occasionally resulted. Beginning in 1959, black parents in the counties of the old Black 

Second organized protests against deteriorating school facilities, inadequate textbooks, and the 

absence of laboratories, recreational facilities, and libraries. Boycotts occurred in Greene County 

in 1959, Northampton County in 1961, Warren County in 1961, and Granville and Martin 

Counties in 1963. In addition, parents complained about the “harvest recess” that required black 

schools (and only black schools) to open in early August so they could close in September for the 

students to work in the tobacco and cotton fields. Such boycotts did not occur in other parts of 

North Carolina.’ 

Black protesters occasionally met violence. Craven County in the 1960s registered more Ku 

Klux Klan activity than any other county in the state. When Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern 

Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) scoured the South in 1964 for an appropriate location 

to begin its voting rights drive, SCLC leaders narrowed the choice to two particularly-egregious 

 



  

violators of black civil rights, Selma, Alabama and Williamston, North Carolina (in Martin 

County). The SCLC chose Selma, of course, but the fact that King and his colleagues considered 

Martin County as notorious as the Alabama Black Belt reflected the status of race relations in the 

old Black Second during the 1960s. '¢ 

A Community of Interest 

The tragedy of the old Black Second and its successors is that black and white citizens of the 

District share a considerably greater community of interest than their historic antagonism would 

indicate. While a few white landowners have controlled economic and political power in the 

counties of the old Black Second since the eighteenth century, other whites and blacks have 

shared the poverty of subsistence agriculture and, more recently, of low-wage industry. 

The long economic decline in eastern North Carolina set in during the early nineteenth 

century as tired farmlands could no longer compete economically with new territory opening up 

in the Old Southwest (Alabama and Mississippi), and the ionicdllyinos transportation system 

kept marketing costs high. Significant out-migration occurred, with perhaps as many as one- 

third of the white population of eastern North Carolina leaving the state between 1800 and 1840. 

A glimmer of hope appeared during the 1850s, however, with the emergence of the prosperous 

cash crop of bright leaf tobacco in Halifax, Granville, and Warren counties along the Virginia 

border. Also, a railroad-building campaign, begun in the 1840s, improved the state’s wretched 

transportation system. But the Civil War intervened before the railroads could have a significant 

economic impact on eastern North Carolina.’ 

Eastern North Carolina bore the physical brunt of the war, and recovery was slow. With a 

 



  

large black population and with tobacco and cotton the only universally-recognized cash 

commodities in the area, agriculture and a rural lifestyle predicated on racial and class hierarchies 

became more entrenched than ever. When crop prices plunged in the 1880s and 1890s, white 

farmers who had relatively small holdings began to lose their lands and slide into tenantry or, 

worse, sharecropping. Except for a few large landholders, poverty characterized this area of the 

state by 1900." 

But some economic change was occurring by the turn of the century. First, as racial and 

economic conditions worsened, blacks began to leave the counties of the Black Second for 

northern cities or, more likely, for the lumber mills of Mississippi and Louisiana. Also, spurred 

by the entrepreneurial activities of James B. Duke and R. J. Reynolds, tobacco cultivation 

underwent a rebirth and it brought a measure of prosperity to Kinston, Wilson, and Goldsboro. 

Even so, no town in the Black Second exceeded 10,000 in population by 1900; New Bern came 

closest with 9,000 inhabitants.' And, despite the advance of tobacco and the introduction of 

peanut cultivation, cotton still dominated the counties of the Black Second, and its economy 

resembled more that of the Old South than the New South that was emerging in the Piedmont. 

The district remained poor and overwhelmingly agricultural and rural through World War II. 

Drawn by A labor, a surplus of farm workers, cheap land, and a supportive local 

leadership, industries began to move into the counties of the old Black Second during the 1950s 

and after. DuPont’s Dacron plant opened in Kinston, for example, in 1953 and, by 1962, it 

employed 2,000 people and promoted the development of Lenoir Community College. Despite 

this success, Kinston’s population actually declined by 10 percent during the 1960s as talented 

young people, unwilling to settle for low industrial wages, moved to the Piedmont or out of the 

 



  

10 

state altogether. In 1860, Kinston, Wilson, Greenville, and Goldsboro had been among the ten 

most populous towns in the state; a century later none of these communities remained in the top 

ten.” 

But even if the overall economic picture of the counties included in the new First 

Congresston District did not change significantly during the two decades after World War 1 

major transitions occurred for many of the District’s residents. The entrance of DuPont was the 

first of numerous industrial enterprises to make their home in the District. These industries did 

not promote urbanization; most were located in rural areas where cheap and abundant land 

remained a key attraction. In fact, most residents of the new Congressional District today no 

longer look to the towns for shopping, work, or ritertzinment? 

The industrialization of the Coastal Plain owed a great deal to a vigorous road-building 

program after World War II. In 1949 only 5,109 of 52,000 miles of secondary roads were paved. 

Governor Kerr Scott vowed to “get the farmers out of the mud” and significantly expanded the 

state’s highway network. The primary result of this expansion in eastern North Carolina and, 

more particularly in the counties that comprise the new First Congressional District, was to 

improve employers’ access to surplus farm labor. The road system facilitated commuting 

throughout the District.?? 

The new generation that grew up in the 1960s and later, forsook farm work for jobs in the 

factories. The salaries were not great, but they were dependable, at least for a time. But these 

industries did not raise skill levels significantly, nor did the community colleges that trained 

many of these workers prepare them well for jobs in the growing Piedmont, especially in the 

nearby Triangle area. On the other hand, public work enabled some of these families to retain 

 



  

11 

their farms. Commuting throughout the district from farm to factory along such routes as 117 or 

Interstate-95 became common by the 1970s.” The interstate, which was hailed as a generator of 

economic development, has not tiered out that way, at least not to the extent that Interstate-85 

through the Piedmont has attractive a diverse mix of international firms. 

Industrialization also proved insufficient to bolster a weak agricultural economy, a poor 

public educational system, and a legacy of racial polarization. By 1980, Halifax County had the 

highest poverty rate in the state. The chicken-processing plants and the electrical-appliance and 

furniture factories have neither absorbed the surplus rural labor force or boosted consumer 

income sufficiently to generate other enterprises. In November 1982, when Perdue F arms 

advertised for 200 workers for its new chicken-processing plant in Martin County, 1,400 people 

applied. 

Beyond the District’s major roads lay an Old South landscape of weathered country stores and 

filling stations, and housing scarcely worth the name. Perhaps the most imposing building in 

Halifax County is the Department of Social Services. And, although Person, Vance, and Warren 

counties (all in the new First C ongressional District) are in the eastern Piedmont and not in the 

Coastal Plain, they share the economic problems of the coastal counties even though they are less 

than fifty miles from the Research Triangle Park.” To worsen the situation, some of the 

industries that provided much-needed work in this district have closed during the past decade and 

moved off-shore or elsewhere in the United States. 

The picture of the new First Congressional District is acutely different from the image of a 

prosperous, egalitarian North Carolina. These counties and towns are the shadows in the state’s 

Sunbelt economy. They form an economic twilight zone combining a declining agricultural 

 



  

economy with an unstable industrial sector; an area characterized more by the farm and the small 

town than by cities; a place where few newcomers enter and many residents leave. 

Conclusion 

The District’s counties have, historically, held the majority of the state’s black population and 

they have experienced the greatest racial discrimination with respect to voting rights. Black 

residents of this area were subject to wholesale disfranchisement in the early decades of the 

twentieth century and numerous attempts at vote dilution since the end of World War II. The 

significant degree of racial polarization in voting compounds the voting rights issue in the 

District. 

The historical record demonstrates a consistent pattern of voting rights exclusion and dilution 

with respect to black voting power in the jurisdictions included in the new First Congressional 

District. The redrawn District provides a modest protection of voting rights that blacks both 

deserve and require in this part of North Carolina. With black voter registration at 44.89 percent 

of the total, it is by no means certain. given the history of racial voting in the counties within the 

new district, that a black candidate for Congress will be elected. But, perhaps with a more 

competitive situation, it may be possible to reduce the degree of polarization and enable black 

and white citizens to stress their common economic problems rather than their racial differences. 

 



  

NOTES 

1. For a detailed discussion of the Black Second and its importance to African Americans in 
eastern North Carolina, see Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872-1901: The 
Black Second (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Jeffrey Crow, et al., A 
History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, 
1992), pp. 109-118. 

2. William R. Keech and Michael P. Sistrom, “North Carolina,” in Chandler Davidson and 
Bernard Grofman, eds., Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 
1965-1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 156. 

3. David Goldfield, “History,” in Douglas M. Orr and Alfred W. Stuart, North Carolina Atlas 
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, to be published 1999). 

4. Raleigh Daily State Chronicle, March 7, 1891. 

5. Anderson, Black Second, p. 145; Keech and Sistrom, “North Carolina,” pp. 155-56. 

6. Crow, et al., African Americans in North Carolina, pp. 115-17. 

7. Keech and Sistrom, “North Carolina,” p. 159. 

8. David Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to 
the Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 46-47. 

9. Keech and Sistrom, “North Carolina,” p. 160. 

10. Ibid, p. 161. 

11. See Richard L. Engstrom, “Racial Differences in Candidate Preferences in North Carolina 
Elections,” filed as an exhibit in the Shaw v. Hunt case, n.d. 

12. Quoted in J. Morgan Kousser, “After 120 Years: Redistricting and Racial Discrimination in 
North Carolina,” filed as a report for Shaw v. Hunt case, March 22, 1994, p. 33. 

13. Quoted in ibid, p. 49. 

14. Ibid., p. 50. 

15. School conditions and boycotts are discussed in David S. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: 
Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 28. 

 



  

14 

16. Ibid. p. 85. 

17. Goldfield, “History”; William §S. Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries (Chapel 
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 311. 

18. Goldfield, “History.” 

19. Anderson, Black Second, p. 11. 

20. Thomas Parramore, Express Lanes & Country Roads: The Way We Lived in North Carolina, 1920-1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), pp. 55-56. 

21. Linda Flowers, Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 181. 

22. Alfred W. Stuart, “The Demographic and Economic Context of the First and Twelfth Congressional Districts of North Carolina,” filed as a report for Shaw v. Hunt case, December 7. 1993, p. 11. 

23. Flowers, Throwed Away, pp. 103-04, 111. 

24. Ibid., pp. 4, 168, 182. 

25. Paul Luebke, Tar Heel Politics: Myths and Realities (Chapel Hill: University of North 
Carolina Press, 1990), p. 67.