Charles Brantley Aycock (November 1, 1859 – April 4, 1912) was a white supremacist and the 50th governor of the U.S. state of North Carolina from 1901 to 1905. After starting his career as a lawyer and teacher, he became active in the Democratic Party during the Solid South period, and made his reputation as a prominent segregationist as the lead perpetrator of the Wilmington massacre.
He became known as the "Education Governor" for advocating improvements to North Carolina's public school systems. After he left office, he traveled the country promoting educational causes.
Charles B. Aycock was born in Wayne County, North Carolina, as the youngest of the 10 children of Benjamin and Serena Aycock. His family lived near the present-day town of Fremont, North Carolina, then known as Nahunta. Though his father died when he was 15, his mother and older brothers recognized his abilities and determined that he should go to college. Aycock attended the University of North Carolina (today the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and joined the Philanthropic Society, a debate and literary society at the university. After graduating in 1880 with first honors in both oratory and essay writing, he entered law practice in Goldsboro and supplemented his income by teaching school. His success in both fields led to his appointment as superintendent of schools for Wayne County and to service on the school board in Goldsboro.
His political career began in 1888 as a presidential elector for Grover Cleveland, when he gained distinction as an orator and political debater. From 1893 to 1897, he served as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina.
Aycock married Varina Woodard, daughter of Baptist lay minister and farmer William Woodard and Delpha Rountree Woodard, in 1881. They had three children together: Ernest Aycock, Charles Brantley Aycock, Jr., and Alice Varina Aycock. Ernest and the younger Charles died in childhood, while Alice went on to marry the writer Clarence Hamilton Poe. Varina died on July 9, 1889. On January 7, 1891, he married her sister, Cora Lily Woodard. They had seven children: William Benjamin Aycock, Mary Lily Aycock, Connor Woodard Aycock, John Lee Aycock, Louise Roundtree Aycock, Frank Daniels Aycock, and Brantley Aycock.
In 1898 and 1900, Aycock was prominent in the Democratic Party's "white supremacy" campaigns. Aycock's involvement with the Wilmington massacre of 1898 is chronicled in an official state commission report. "Planned violence to suppress the African American and Republican communities grew into unplanned bloodshed. The frenzy over white supremacy victory, incessantly repeated by orators such as Alfred Moore Waddell and Charles Aycock, simply could not be quieted after an overwhelming and somewhat anticlimactic election victory." Aycock was reportedly not present in Wilmington the day of the insurrection.
In 1899, the heavily Democratic state legislature of North Carolina passed a suffrage amendment to the state constitution. This amendment added a poll tax and literacy test intended to prevent black voting, and a grandfather clause to avoid disenfranchising poor white voters. Aycock supported the amendment, and urged legislatures to submit it to a popular vote in an August election, moved up from November. In that election, Aycock ran for governor against Republican Spencer B. Adams. On the campaign trail, his supporters displayed one of the rapid-fire guns from the Wilmington massacre and Aycock regularly appeared with Red Shirts.
Indeed it has become the fashion among Republicans and Populists to assert the unfitness of the negro to rule, but when they use the word rule, they confine it to holding office. When we say that the negro is unfit to rule we carry it one step further and convey the correct idea when we declare that he is unfit to vote. To do this we must disfranchise the negro. This movement comes from the people. Politicians have been afraid of it and have hesitated, but the great mass of white men in the State are now demanding and have demanded that the matter be settled once and for all. To do so is both desirable and necessary – desirable because it sets the white man free to move along faster than he can go when retarded by the slower movement of the negro.
In the 1900 North Carolina gubernatorial election, the suffrage amendment was confirmed and Aycock was elected governor. He reportedly won 60% of the vote, but this was in part due to voter fraud. In several counties, the number of votes for Aycock exceeded the number of eligible voters by several hundred.
As governor, Aycock became known as the "Education Governor" for his support of the public school system. It was said that one school was constructed in the state for every day he was in office. He supposedly dedicated himself to education after watching his mother make her mark, rather than a signature, when signing a deed. Aycock felt that no lasting social reform could be accomplished without education. He supported increased salaries for teachers, longer school terms, and new school buildings: "690 new schoolhouses erected, including 599 for whites and 91 for blacks."
Aycock is credited for adding schools for black students, but noted for advocating that black students be educated through curriculum and care tightly controlled by North Carolina whites, to "benefit the black race to fit them into a subordinate role."
Let us cast away all fear of rivalry with the negro, all apprehension that he shall ever overtake us in the race of life. We are the thoroughbreds and should have no fear of winning the race against a commoner stock. An effort to reduce their public schools would send thousands more of them away from us. In this hour, when our industrial development demands more labor and not less, it becomes of the utmost importance that we shall make no mistake in dealing with that race which does a very large part of the work, of actual hard labor in the State.
Historian Morgan Kousser wrote that Aycock's progressive attitude toward black education was based on white Democrats' desire to ensure that the disfranchisement of black voters would not be reversed by federal government intervention. Kousser wrote, "Some scholars have made a great deal of the opposition of 'progressive' Governor Charles B. Aycock and state school superintendent James Y. Joyner to the movement for a constitutional amendment in North Carolina to limit black school expenditures to the amount paid by Negroes in taxes. It is true that Aycock threatened resignation if such a law passed and that, speaking to the legislature in 1903, he condemned the proposed measure as 'unjust, unwise and unconstitutional.' Yet in the same address he put greater stress on his view that the act was impolitic than he did on its injustice. The law would invite a challenge in federal court, he believed, and 'if it should be made to appear to the Court that in connection with our disfranchisement of the negro we had taken pains for providing to keep him in ignorance, then both amendments [the literacy test and racial separation of taxes] would fall together.' In other words, the disfranchisement of the almost unanimously Republican blacks, which was virtually priceless to the Democrats, would be bartered for the temporary gain of a few extra dollars of the school fund."Aycock presided other progressive measures as governor such as the building of roads, higher taxes on corporations, the creation of new regulations on railroads, and the passage of child labor and temperance laws. Aycock fought against lynching as governor, but expanded the state's convict leasing program, a de facto form of slavery.
On December 18, 1903, Governor Aycock went to Baltimore gave a speech to 300 people at the North Carolina Society. Entitled "The Negro Problem," the speech outlined his thoughts on keeping blacks separate, subservient, and locked out of representative government by circumventing the Fifteenth Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote. Aycock's may have been a response to The Negro Problem, a book by prominent black scholars including W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, that considers the web of economic, political, and social problems faced by blacks in their collective history as slaves and second-class citizens after Emancipation. The book had been released about two months before Aycock's speech.