Furnifold Simmons

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Speaking Of Jim Crow Relics

August 2, 2020 by

The weekly compilation from the Brady Campaign had an attack on the filibuster. Quoting former President Obama, it was called a “Jim Crow relic”.

This week, President Obama called for the elimination of the filibuster: an arcane rule in the Senate that requires a supermajority of 60 votes, instead of 51, to pass nearly any bill. Our movement knows all too well the dangers of this rule. It’s what stopped Congress from passing lifesaving gun reform legislation following the Sandy Hook massacre.

They were 54 votes in favor and 46 against — clearly a simple majority! But the 60-vote rule stopped Congress from acting  even after 26 students and educators were shot and killed. 

Enough is enough. Why do we need a 60-vote threshold to pass a bill that will save American lives? Fifty-one is the majority, and 51 is fair.

We’re not asking for a lot. We’re simply calling for a simple majority vote — fair and square — to pass lifesaving, evidence-based policy solutions to end gun violence. There’s no excuse for senseless gun violence, especially when legislative solutions have been sitting before Mitch McConnell and the U.S. Senate for over 500 days!

We need to let every Senator know that #51IsFair and gun violence is a national emergency.

Actually, the filibuster and its use in the US Senate predates both the origin of Jim Crow laws and the Civil War. According to a history of it as published by the Senate, unlimited debate was allowed in both the House and Senate. The growth in the number of representatives saw it discontinued in the House but unlimited debate continued in the Senate. Its use to block bills came to the forefront in the 1840s when unlimited debate was used to block a banking bill. The concept of cloture or the ending of unlimited debate by a vote only came into existence in 1917 at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson.

The history of Jim Crow laws and black codes began in 1865 with the adoption of the 13th Amendment which ended slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States once and for all. The black codes were laws enacted at the state and local level which restricted former slaves as to where, when, and how they could work and also restricted their compensation. It served to put many blacks into indentured servitude.

Jim Crow laws were a follow-on that served to enforce segregation, to ban inter-racial marriage, to keep blacks disenfranchised, and, for the purposes of my discussion here, disarmed.

Historians like Clayton Cramer and legal scholars like Dave Kopel and Robert Cottrol among others have shown how many gun control laws were aimed at keeping blacks unarmed and vulnerable.

Let’s talk about two of those Jim Crow relics that I’ve written about in the past. The first from Florida and the second from my home state of North Carolina.

After armed black men using their Winchester repeating rifles prevented a lynching in Jacksonville, Florida, the Florida legislature enacted a law that required a permit for Floridians to carry a handgun or a “Winchester rifle or other repeating rifle.” It was the first law nationwide that treated repeating rifles differently than any other firearm. It was the antecedent to modern day “assault weapons” (sic) bans in states like California and New York (among others).

One need only look to the official proclamations of the Democratic Party and their standard bearer Joe Biden to see that support for such Jim Crow relics as a ban on repeating rifles lives on. In their ideological blindness, neither the Democrats nor the Brady Campaign suffer any cognitive dissonance in pushing Jim Crow originated gun control while attacking the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic”.

I have written often on this blog about North Carolina’s pistol purchase permit and its role in perpetuating white supremacy in the early 20th century. It was enacted in 1919 soon after a race riot in Winston-Salem. There was a great fear of black veterans returning from World War One. The co-primary sponsor of the bill was Sen. Earle A. Humphreys (D-Goldsboro). Humphrey just happened to be the brother-in-law of US Sen. Furnifold Simmons who was the architect of the Democrat’s white supremacy campaign. The goal was to make it difficult if not impossible for blacks as well as Populists and union organizers to be armed outside the home.

Every time in the last decade a repeal of the pistol purchase permit system in North Carolina is tried, it ultimately fails. Part of that failure is due to recalcitrant sheriffs who don’t want to give up the power or money and the obsequious nature of Republicans towards law enforcement. The other part is due to the unified nature of Democrats and the gun control lobby in opposition. That includes the Brady Campaign. Current Brady Campaign President Kris Brown characterized the repeal effort as rolling back “our decades of a lifesaving policy requiring a background check and a “permit to purchase” for every handgun sale.”

She was wrong. It was an effort to rid the state of the then-98 years of institutionalized racism in the form of a Jim Crow law to keep blacks unarmed and subservient.

It is the height of hypocrisy on the part of the Brady Campaign to rail against the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic” because it stood in their way of enacting a gun control law. A law that had its very antecedent in a Jim Crow law meant to make it “safer” for racists to lynch innocent blacks.

To be honest, when have politicians or the gun control industry let a little thing like hypocrisy ever get in the way of their pursuit of power.

The answer is never.

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“An Act to Regulate the Sale of Concealed Weapons in North Carolina” – Part II

June 3, 2015 by

In any discussion of the 1919 act regulating the purchase of certain weapons in North Carolina, you have to go back to the state of politics as they existed in the 1890s. Post-Reconstruction, the Democrats had regained power in the state from the Republicans. However, this dominance was threatened in the 1890s by the rise of what was called Fusion politics. The Republicans and the Populist Party in North Carolina, while they differed on a national agenda, agreed on many items including education, voting rights, and the restoration of the charter of the Farmer’s Alliance which the Democrat-controlled General Assembly had revoked.

The guiding principle behind the fusion of the Republicans and the Populists was that they would agree to support the stronger candidate in each race against the Democrat’s candidate. Sometimes this would be the Populist and sometimes this would be the Republican. The elections of 1894 showed the success of the fusion approach. The Fusionists gained six US House seats from the Democrats; two for the Republicans and four for the Populists. They also elected both US Senators and took a super-majority in both house of the NC General Assembly. They repeated this success in the elections of 1896 where they widened their lead in the General Assembly, picked up another US House seat, and Republican Daniel Russell was elected governor. The General Assembly that convened in 1895 had five African-Americans as members and it loosened voting restrictions on blacks. As a result, voting participation of African-Americans increased significantly.

The Democrats had to come up with a strategy to overcome the successful fusion between the Populists and Republicans. They turned to New Bern attorney Furnifold M. Simmons who was appointed chairman of the NC Democratic Party. Simmons organized local party organizations in each county as well as a speaker’s bureau of orators such as South Carolina’s infamous Pitchfork Ben Tillman. The overriding strategy was based upon one thing: white supremacy.

The “white supremacy campaign” was exactly that. The Democrats repeatedly stated that only white men were fit to hold political office. They often accused the fusionists, especially the Republicans, of supporting “negro domination” in the state. Indeed, there were a large number of African American officeholders, some of whom had been elected and many more who were appointed to office. The Democrats referred to themselves as the “white man’s party” and appealed to white North Carolinians to restore them to power.

One of the most significant events of the campaign was the appearance of an editorial in the Wilmington Daily Record on August 18, 1898. The Daily Record was an African American newspaper published by Alex Manly. The editorial was a response to a speech by a Georgia woman who had called for the widespread lynching of African American men in order to protect white women. The Daily Record suggested that consensual relationships between African American men and white women were common and that often the man was accused of rape only after the relationship was discovered. Once the Democratic papers got hold of the editorial there was an uproar. Under headings such as “Vile and Villainous” and “A Horrid Slander,” the editorial was reprinted throughout the state. Some Democratic papers continued to run it in almost every single issue up to election day.

Not only was the election of 1898 built around white supremacy, it featured the intimidation of black voters by the neo-Fascist Red Shirts at the behest of Simmons as well as an actual coup d’etat after the election in Wilmington. Josephus Daniels, publisher of the News and Observer and an ardent white supremacist, said of Simmons that he was “a genius in putting everybody to
work—men who could write, men who could speak, and men who could ride—the last by no means the least important.” (As an aside, the News and Observer is editorializing in favor of keeping Jim Crow laws from that era.)

The role of newspapers such as the N&O, the Charlotte Observer, the Wilmington Morning Star, and the Wilmington Messenger cannot be understated. While their current staff and readership would be appalled by the overtly racist messages they published, they were the essential propaganda arm of the Democratic Party in North Carolina. In an era before the advent of TV and radio, the newspapers were the media. They conveyed the message to their readers through both editorials and through cartoons aimed at the less literate. Norman Jennett’s cartoons for the N&O ran above the fold and were praised by Democrats as “one of the powers that brought about the revolution.” Many of them can be found here.

On the eve of the 1898 election, Simmons wrote an editorial that laid out the reasons to vote for the Democrats and at its heart was the cause of white supremacy. It appeared on the front page of Daniels’ N&O on November 3rd.

Then came the evidence, disclosing the actual condition of affairs, in that section of the State, which astonished and shocked the consciences and moral sensibilities of the people.

NEGRO CONGRESSMEN, NEGRO SOLICITORS, NEGRO REVENUE OFFICERS, NEGRO COLLECTORS OF CUSTOMS, NEGROES in charge of white institutions, NEGROES in charge of white schools, NEGROES holding inquests over the white dead, NEGROES controlling the finances of great cities, NEGROES in control of the sanitation and police of cities, NEGRO CONSTABLES arresting white women and white men, NEGRO MAGISTRATES trying white women and white men, white convicts chained to NEGRO CONVICTS and forced to social equality with them, until the proofs rose up, and stood forth “like Pelion on Ossa piled.”….

The battle has been fought, the victory is within our reach. North Carolina is a WHITE MAN’S State, and WHITE MEN will rule it, and they will crush the party of negro domination beneath a majority so overwhelming that no other party will ever again dare to attempt to establish negro rule here.

They CANNOT intimidate us; they CANNOT buy us, and they SHALL NOT cheat us out of the fruits of our victory.

And victory was what the Democrats got in 1898. They gained back five seats in Congress from the Populists and Republicans and a super majority in the General Assembly (2 Populists and a smattering of mountain Republicans remained). While the fusionists won in Wilmington, then the state’s largest city, that lasted all of two days until white supremacists rioted and took over the city council from the elected representatives in what became known as the Wilmington Massacre.

They consolidated their gains in 1900 with the election of Democrat Charles B. Aycock as governor, the appointment of Simmons as US Senator, and a constitutional amendment that imposed both a poll tax and a literacy test. The amendment contained a grandfather clause enabling anyone whose ancestors were eligible to vote prior to 1867 to vote. Voter turnout dropped from around 85% in 1896 to less than 50% thereafter. A Republican would not be governor of North Carolina again until 1972 and a Republican majority in either house of the General Assembly until 2010.

Not only had the Democrats cemented their power but so had Furnifold Simmons. He would serve in the US Senate for 30 years and would use the power of patronage to maintain his control. Only once in the succeeding years was his candidate defeated for governor in the Democratic primary and then he worked to destroy the man. His organization wrote journalist W. J. Cash reached to “the headwaters of every Little Buffalo and Sandy Run in North Carolina; into every alley of every factory town.” The Democratic Party controlled a segregationist North Carolina and the Simmons Machine controlled the Democratic Party.

Part III will cover the passage of the act through the General Assembly in 1919 with the primary sponsor being none other than Simmons’ brother-in-law Sen. Earle A. Humphrey (D-Goldsboro).

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Jim Crow Law Lives Until 2021

June 3, 2015 by 2 Comments

According to WRAL Raleigh, HB 562 – the Second Amendment Affirmation Act – was postponed for consideration until Wednesday. The House Rules Committee will vote on a committee substitute at 9am tomorrow. A summary of the committee summary can be found here and the actual text here. It does include the elimination of the pistol purchase permit but not until 2021. Dealers, however, would be allowed to sell handguns without a pistol purchase permit if they ran a NICS check on the person.

Come 2021, North Carolina residents would no longer need a permit when buying handguns under a redrafted omnibus firearms bill that circulated among members of the General Assembly Tuesday night.

The House Rules Committee is scheduled to vet the new version of HB 562 at 9 a.m. Wednesday. According to a summary of the bill provided to committee members, the measure still contains measures related to how doctors ask patients about firearms in their homes, although the language is loser than earlier versions of the bill.

Advocates for and against the measure were at the state Capitol on Tuesday. The lobbying group Moms Demand Action pressured lawmakers to turn back the bill, focusing particularly on the pistol permit provision. Meanwhile, the pro-gun lobbying group Grass Roots North Carolina pressured lawmakers to pass the bill.

The most scrutiny has focused on a provision that would repeal North Carolina’s pistol purchase permit system. As originally drafted, the bill would have ended the state’s pistol permit system in 2018. The measure up for consideration Wednesday morning would extend the system’s life until 2021.

Sen. Furnifold Simmons and early N&O owner Josephus Daniels are probably laughing from the grave over this turn of events. They were the architects of the racist white supremacy policies of the North Carolina Democratic Party. The co-sponsor of the Senate bill that eventually became law was none other than Simmons’ former brother-in-law Sen. Earle A. Humphrey (D-Goldsboro).  Simmons’ dominance of North Carolina politics in that era was so far reaching that it was referred to as the Simmons Machine just like Richard Daley’s dominance of Chicago politics was called the Daley Machine.