RALEIGH, N.C. _ The family of Josephus Daniels, former News & Observer publisher, U.S. Navy secretary and lifelong white supremacist, removed a statue of him from Raleigh's Nash Square Tuesday morning.
"The time is right," said Frank Daniels III, a former executive editor of The N&O who drove from his home in Nashville, Tenn., to watch the removal of the monument to his great-grandfather. "I don't think anyone would say that it's not the appropriate time to move the statue of Josephus to a more appropriate location."
A crew arrived before daybreak Tuesday to begin disassembling the statue. Using a small crane, workers from Carolina Stone Setting of Morrisville extracted the sculpture and its granite base from the center of a group of plantings and placed them on a flatbed tractor trailer waiting on Hargett Street. The statue was covered with a blue tarp to protect it during travel.
The process took about 90 minutes.
Workers estimated the statue would tip the scales at between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds, but the weight of history was greater.
"It's time," Orage Quarles said as he watched workers place the statue on the truck. Quarles was president and publisher of The N&O from 2000 to 2016.
The statue, which had stood for more than 34 years, came down after more than two weeks of protests, including in downtown Raleigh, that have followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis after a police officer pressed his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes. Demonstrators have railed against police brutality and systemic racism in nearly every aspect of American society.
Statues of Confederate soldiers and monuments to, or memorializations of, segregationists and white supremacists have been targeted in protesters' speeches and by vandals' spray paint.
The statue of Josephus Daniels had been spared any serious damage, and the Daniels family has been under no direct pressure from the city or from activists to remove the statue, Frank Daniels III said.
But the 8-foot likeness of Josephus Daniels on a 4-foot stone base on the east-facing edge of Nash Square was a portrait frozen in time. Five generations after he bought the News & Observer, Daniels' heirs sold the newspaper to McClatchy, which has since vacated and sold the McDowell Street building the statue faced.
The statue features Daniels in his trademark rumpled three-piece suit, holding his wide-brimmed hat at his left side and raising his right hand in the air as if waving to a friend peering out a second-floor window of the old N&O office. The statue was installed in 1985, 37 years after Daniels' death
That building is expected to be demolished and the site redeveloped, leaving Daniels to stand alone and out of context.
Daniels bought The New & Observer in 1894 with financial help from fellow supremacist Julian S. Carr and used the newspaper to propagandize against what they and others of the day feared as the scourge of "Negro domination." Daniels helped foment the November 1898 race riot in Wilmington that overthrew an elected mixed-race government and resulted in the killings of at least 60 black residents. It is credited with ushering in the Jim Crow era in North Carolina that disenfranchised blacks for decades.
Daniels was born May 18, 1862, in Washington, N.C., to Josephus and Mary Cleaves Seabrook Daniels. Daniels' father, a ship carpenter who worked in the Confederate yards at Wilmington during the Civil War, was killed in 1865 when a steamer in which he was a passenger was fired on by Confederate troops at Washington.
Daniels' mother later moved with the children to Wilson and became a postmistress to support her family. Daniels attended the Wilson Collegiate Institute, a private boarding school, before leaving to become editor of the Wilson Advance. He bought the paper two years later, and by 1885 he was also part owner of the Kinston Free Press and the Rocky Mount Reporter.
In the summer of that year, he enrolled in law school at UNC, and that fall he took and passed the state bar exam.
With Carr's help, he bought a weekly newspaper in Raleigh that had formed from the merger of two separate weeklies. It prospered for a while, then failed. When The News & Observer went into bankruptcy, he and Carr bought it with the understanding that Daniels would be the editor.
In his book released in January called "Wilmington's Lie," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Zucchino of Durham documented Josephus Daniels's role in orchestrating the overthrow of Wilmington's "fusionist" government two days after helping Democratic leaders steal back control of the state legislature.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1898, Zucchino wrote, Daniels had run "race-baiting editorials and newspaper cartoons and sensational, fabricated news stories" to generate fear and anger toward blacks.
On Nov. 10, more than 2,000 heavily armed "Red Shirts," a terrorist arm of the 19th-century Democratic party, descended on Wilmington, setting fire to the newspaper office and other black-owned businesses, "terrorizing women and children and shooting at least 60 black men dead in the streets," Zucchino wrote. Elected city officials were forced to resign at gunpoint.
Lee A. Craig, head of the N.C. State University Department of Economics and author of a 2013 biography of Daniels, said in a phone interview with The News & Observer that Daniels profited politically from his role in the Wilmington coup. Daniels advocated for the nomination of Woodrow Wilson for president and when Wilson was elected, got appointed secretary of the Navy, a job he held until 1921. He returned to Raleigh to work at the paper. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him ambassador to Mexico, where he served until 1942.
Craig said Daniels' writings indicate he believed that black culture was inferior to white culture, and while he believed education for blacks would be the key equalizer, he did not support having white taxpayers pay for that education.
After studying Daniels for several years for his book, Craig said he came to believe that Daniels "came from a more genteel class than, in his view, the people who were responsible for the violence (in Wilmington). I just don't think he fully appreciated the evil forces he was unleashing.
"But another view," Craig said, "could be that he knew all too well what he was doing, but in his correspondence and public pronouncements he was smart enough to distance himself from them."
In Daniels' published memoirs, which ran to five volumes and thousands of pages, Craig said Daniels allowed that his white supremacist tactics were "cruel, too cruel," but he never renounced the beliefs that spawned them.
"He went to his grave as an unreconstructed white supremacist," Craig said.
Daniels died in 1948 at the age of 85. The statue that honored him was paid for by the Josephus Daniels Charitable Foundation, chartered in 1964. The statue's sculptor, Janos Farkas, died in Greensboro in 1994.
Craig argued for taking down the statue years ago, "to demonstrate that there are people of good will who are willing to move on from that period.
"My view is, I don't see any reason why the monuments of previous generations must stand indefinitely."
Josephus Daniels is credited with several important reforms to the Navy during his tenure as secretary, including expanding the force to fight in World War I; the introduction of women into the Navy; and eliminating the officers' wine mess aboard ships. As Franklin D. Roosevelt's Ambassador to Mexico, Daniels executed the president's "Good Neighbor Policy," a diplomatic effort meant to improve relationships with Latin American countries as a buffer against possible invasion by Axis powers.
A New York Times obituary that ran at his death described Daniels as an idealist who attacked privilege and abuse and who still went into the office every day. He had written an editorial 11 days before he died.
But in recent decades, Daniels was most often discussed in connection with the riot and massacre in Wilmington, the generations of harm it caused to families and the way it reshaped North Carolina's trajectory from a place where blacks and whites were setting a national example of how to govern together, to one where Blacks were strategically denied the right to vote.
Frank Daniels Jr. of Raleigh, retired president and publisher of The News & Observer, said in a statement Tuesday that his grandfather's bigoted beliefs overshadowed his other accomplishments, including, Daniels said, "creating one of the nation's leading newspapers."
"Josephus Daniels's legacy of service to North Carolina and our country does not transcend his reprehensible stand on race and his active support of racist activities," Daniels said. "In the 75 years since his death, The N&O and our family have been a progressive voice for equality for all North Carolinians, and we recognize this statue undermines those efforts."
Frank Daniels III said the family will keep the statue in storage until it can find an appropriate place on private property to reinstall it.
