Statue of Josephus Daniels, Publisher of Raleigh N&O, White Supremacist, Democrat removed from Raleigh Public Square

RALEIGH – The statue of Josephus Daniels has been removed from a public park in Raleigh because he was a White Supremacist. On it’s surface, that is par for the course in 2020.

A lot of the mainstream media obviously pander and push toward the Left, and in so doing helping to advance the mob justice campaigns against designated boogeymen, like statues of antebellum era figures associated with slavery and racism. Except, sleuths though they are when it comes to unearthing and erasing symbols of hate when it benefits their political cause, they’re much more hesitant to address the skeletons in their own closet.

The Daniels statue is a prime example.

The News & Observer, in particular, has published plenty to reinforce the anti-racist narrative, celebrating mobs tearing down ‘Silent Sam’ on the UNC campus, while their founder and publisher, a Democrat icon, was himself a White Supremacist that pushed supremacist propaganda in the News & Observer and spurred a militant wing of the Democratic Party to storm the burgeoning town of Wilmington where they burned the black-owned businesses and led a coup to snuff out the emergent black/white fusion happening there. This was decades after the Civil War.

Daniels stellar actions on behalf of White Supremacism got the attention of other leading Democrats, who were documented White Supremacists, like Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson, fond of screening KKK movies in the White House, appointed Daniels as undersecretary of the U.S. Navy.

From the Observer:

“[…] 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. […]”

Wow. Media blowing up a race riot to burn down a town and take over the heretical local government. Sounds like Democrats haven’t changed much.

So, as you can see Daniels was pretty awful in this respect, but for all the stoking of flames the N&O has continued to do with respect to Confederate/Supremacist statues, this statue comes down quietly after having sat right out front of the paper’s offices for years during the social justice statue removal squads. Not a scratch or mark of grafitti on it.

While many of the statues targeted by activists were erected nearly 100 years ago, in the early 1900s, the Daniels statue only went up in 1985.

“[…] 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. […]”

So, everywhere else with suspect statues gets the mob treatment, but the News & Observer hides a prime suspect in the very shadow of their headquarters for years. There was no direct pressure, because there was probably little awareness among the mob, and special treatment by the media, of the paragon North Carolina Democrat & White Supremacist.

How convenient.

At least it does provide an example of removing a statue discretely, lawfully, without making a big riot out of it. Some may have forgotten that is possible. In addition to the Daniels statue coming down, there is a petition for a middle school named after him to adopted a new moniker to disassociate from Daniels’ legacy of racism.

Read more about his life and notable events here.