This morning I awoke to the welcome news that Josephus Daniels came down in the wee hours.* His statue is no longer on display in downtown Raleigh. His descendants were there to see it come down and take it away. My first thought was the interconnections between Daniels and North Carolina Quaker history. I often see sources praising the legacy of Nantucket Quaker heritage and the importance of that heritage in abolitionist reform. Descendants of Nantucket Quakers includes such highly lauded abolitionist reformers as Lucretia Coffin Mott and Levi Coffin.

The dominant narrative of North Carolina history is of an exceptionalism greatly influenced by the strong character and values of Nantucket Quaker families who relocated to Guilford County in the 1770s. The creators of this narrative often held up key state leaders who had ancestral ties to Nantucket and Quaker heritage. This narrative is used to promote the idea of Quakers as reformers on the right side of history – as educators and those who opposed slavery. It is important to acknowledge there are also Nantucket Quaker legacy connections to white supremacy, often entwined as part of those same lauded platforms. The Josephus Daniels story provides just one example of privilege and power that can inform us as we reframe our analysis of North Carolina Quaker heritage narratives.

Josephus Daniels had a number of contemporary Quaker fans who saw eye to eye on his political stances and were active members of the Society of Friends. Two worth mentioning are Lewis Lyndon Hobbs and Mary Mendenhall Hobbs, leaders in North Carolina Yearly Meeting of Friends and at Guilford College who, at a crucial time for race relations and potential equality in the North Carolina, supported Daniels and his platforms. Mary’s writings repeatedly praise Daniels. She allied with him politically. Like Daniels, Mary framed herself as a progressive: a Democrat who supported education, prohibition, and women’s suffrage. That all sounds well and good until one digs a little deeper to see what else the North Carolina Democratic Party stood for in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Daniels was a leading figure behind the 1898 white supremacist overthrow of Wilmington and the Democratic Party’s racist takeover of the North Carolina legislature.

Mary Mendenhall Hobbs did not just feel connected to Daniels as a fellow North Carolina Democrat. She also had distant Nantucket Quaker ties through Addie Worth Bagley Daniels. Josephus Daniels married into a family who made claim to both their Nantucket Quaker ancestry and leadership in North Carolina Democratic Party politics. Addie’s middle name honored her grandfather, Jonathan Worth, who served in a number of leading state political roles, including governor from 1865 to 1868. Jonathan’s parents married at Deep River Friends Meeting and were part of Centre Friends Meeting at the time of his birth. While he did not remain an active Friend, most biographical sketches claim him as a Quaker governor and the Nantucket Quaker Worth ties are held up with a sense of pride.

Lest it is presumed that Addie’s Quaker heritage provided a balance to her husband’s role as a media proponent of white supremacy, it is useful to see how she was remembered at the time of her death in the 1940s. According to her obituary published by the Birmingham News on December 20, 1943, “She was the former president of the Raleigh chapter of United Daughters of the Confederacy and was the author of the resolution requesting that figures of Confederate leaders be carved on Stone Mountain in Georgia.”

Today we would not identify Josephus Daniels as a progressive and he is generally condemned for his important role in the 1898 “white supremacy” campaign that is now recognized for the coup d’etat that it was. We might argue that he was misguided but was influenced by his time, and those who supported him did not realize or hold segregationist or white supremacist views. It is much easier to assume a legacy of upholding stated values of peace and equality. But how has the framing of traditional heritage narratives kept us from recognizing not only missed opportunities, but also irrefutable damage done? Antislavery is not the same as antiracist. Just as descendants of the Confederacy must grapple with their legacies, so too must those who assume based on closely held narratives that their heritage was a progressive one of equality. It’s complicated.

I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less racist, or in the “choir,” or already “gets it.” White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice. White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.

― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Gwen Gosney Erickson
June 16, 2020