By LEE BALLARD

Back in March, the Daily Planet ran back-to-back articles ─ first by Asheville’s Jim Aycock, then by Timothy Tyson, an academic at Duke University.  Tyson has verbally tarred and feathered Aycock’s ancestor, Charles Aycock, North Carolina governor at the turn of the 20th century.  Aycock went to his defense.    

Aycock’s article was standard column length. Tyson responded to Aycock’s criticism with a page and a half.

Timothy Tyson is a tireless advocate for civil rights.  He once took a group from Wisconsin, where he was teaching, on a bus tour of 1960s civil rights battlegrounds in the South.  So I should naturally be his ally.  But in his Daily Planet article, Tyson is condescending, flippant, sarcastic and abusive.  He blows smoke in weak areas of his argument and sweetens some facts to his taste.  He comes off as an arrogant jerk. 

Governor Aycock has been held in high esteem over the decades as North Carolina’s “first education governor.”  He supported public schools, both in office (one new public school, it is said, for every day he was governor) and as a barnstormer for schools after he left office.  Tyson slams him as “fomenting a bloody white supremacy revolution.” 

Before we go further, some background is needed.  In 1892, Democrats had controlled North Carolina politics since 1876, when Federal troops left. They scared voters that Republicans would bring back Reconstruction and “Negro rule.” 

Republicans through this period were about 60-40 black. White Republicans were mostly those who had been longtime Republicans.  For example, in every election between 1876 and 1896, all counties in the western third of the state voted Republican.  White Republicans weren’t necessarily pro-Negro, as the election of 1898 showed.    

Democrats had long ignored the needs of farmers – and farmers organized.  They first asked Democrats for reforms, but only got mostly lip service.  In 1892 their Farmers Alliance formed a third party, the Populists.

Madison County’s Jeter Pritchard, a statewide leader of the Republicans, saw the rise of a third party as a Republican opportunity.  In 1894, Populists and Republicans agreed not to compete against each other, forming a “Fusion” ticket.  And they won big.  And they won again in 1896.  In those four years, the Fusionists passed wonderful reforms in election law and public education. 

The Democratic strategy in the campaign of 1898 was unabashed racism.  They ramped up their fear campaign against “Negro domination.” They used intimidation and violence to suppress the black vote.  And they won big.

Fusion was not exactly “visionary,” as Tyson describes it   It was political opportunism.  And it was not really “interracial.”  Membership in the Farmers Alliance, for example, was open only to white farmers (and Indians with no less than half white blood).  Negroes were explicitly excluded. 

But the overarching question I have is this:  Why did Tyson go to such lengths to disparage Governor Aycock, first in his “The Ghosts of 1898” and then more forcefully in the Daily Planet?  

At the core, Tyson seems to want a New Fusion to happen in North Carolina – as do I – so he glamorizes Fusion of the 1890s as a glorious precedent.  And it is certainly true that the Democratic victory in 1898 doomed Fusion.  And Aycock was certainly a key player in that campaign.  But only a player, an orator.  Others are far more culpable than he in the events of 1898.    

Was Aycock a white supremacist? 

Of course he was.  I grew up in the South 50 years after 1898, and every white adult I knew then was a white supremacist.  My father was progressive for his time in some ways, but he never spoke of overturning segregation.  He served on a grand jury with the president of our local black college, and he was amazed that the man was so intelligent.

Aycock was a man of his time – just like Founding Fathers who owned slaves, just like the Apostle Paul who told slaves to be submissive to their masters.  We give them a pass.  We should do the same for Aycock.  His record deserves it.

Another academic group has this to say about Governor Aycock:  “Charles B. Aycock ─ the same Charles B. Aycock who helped lead the White Supremacy Campaign ─ is generally considered the state’s first progressive governor.

Despite Aycock’s unsavory role as a white supremacist, he is still remembered and honored in the state today as the father of public education, and there are few counties in the state where one cannot find a public school named after him.”

I found Tyson’s vehemence surprising, both against Governor Aycock and Jim Aycock.  He didn’t have to be.  He could have thanked Jim Aycock for helping him refine his thinking, which Aycock did. 

I think he responded like he did as a knee-jerk reaction to criticism. As my friend O.C. Edwards (also a Duke man) has said, “Academics are like other human beings. Some are mature, and some aren’t.”  

Tyson goes from demeaning Jim Aycock to silly pomposity to underestimating the reader.

He might have remembered the motto of the University of Chicago: “Let knowledge grow from more to more.”

Rather than grow his knowledge, Tyson chose to fight. Gross immaturity.

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Lee Ballard lives in Mars Hill.