Josephus Daniels

Josephus Daniels (May 18, 1862 – January 15, 1948) was a newspaper editor, Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson, and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He managed The News & Observer in Raleigh, at the time North Carolina's largest circulation newspaper, from the 1890s until his death. Daniels was a vehement white supremacist and segregationist; he and his newspaper "championed the white supremacy cause in frequent news reports, vigorously worded editorials, provocative letters, and vicious front page cartoons that called attention to what the newspaper called the horrors of 'negro rule.'" Along with Charles Brantley Aycock and Furnifold McLendel Simmons, he was a leading perpetrator of the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, in which white mobs overthrew the legitimately elected biracial government in Wilmington, expelled black and white political leaders from the city, destroyed the property and businesses of black citizens built up since the American Civil War, and killed between 60 and 300 black people. He was highly influential in the state legislature's passage in 1900 of a suffrage amendment that effectively disenfranchised most blacks in the state, excluding them from the political system for decades until the late 20th century.