Daniels's father actively campaigned to disenfranchise black voters
Daniels's father viewed blacks in general as morally loose. This opinion influenced his racist campaign to disenfranchise black voters. Daniels's father used sex as a means to exploit white fears surrounding interracial sex, inciting ideas about the need to protect white femininity.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Jonathan Worth Daniels, March 9-11, 1977. Interview A-0313. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- CHARLES EAGLES:
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Were his attitudes towards sex and toward liquor and toward blacks all
part of one way of looking at the world, do you think?
- JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:
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I wouldn't be surprised. He undoubtedly had a very low opinion of the
morals of blacks. Whether it was justified or not, I don't know. In the
poverty of the blacks at that time there was a lot of loose living and
so forth. I'm sure he felt that if the blacks ruled, there'd be . . .
Well, he brought the element of sex into his campaign in pictures of a
black school board member dictating to a white teacher. Now it didn't go
any further than that, but the implication was clear. In all racial
relationships, there has always been a fear, and a fear related to sex.
I don't know why that's so.
- CHARLES EAGLES:
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It was related with him, too.
- JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:
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I don't mean that he discussed it any, but there's that cartoon by this
man Norman E. Jennett. There was the business of "We've got to
protect our women from lusty black men." This didn't come into
his personal life in any sense; I know it didn't.