"Another Species of Race Discord": Race, Desirability, and the North Carolina Immigration Movement of the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

IN THE FIRST DECADE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, southern boosters orchestrated a campaign to attract Europeans below the MasonDixon Line. Immigration advocates identified foreigners as a panacea. As white employers struggled to control African American laborers and blamed them for the region’s underdevelopment, Europeans represented a solution to the so- called “Negro Problem,” ending the region’s dependence on African American workers and altering the demography of the South in favor of its white population. Responding to these arguments, eight southern states, including North Carolina, implemented programs to attract immigrants. White North Carolinians were eager to rid themselves of their recalcitrant black labor force and fulfill the state’s New South ambitions, but they remained wary of the threat some newcomers posed to the color line still under construction. Their wariness, shared by many of their counterparts throughout the region, ultimately shaped the immigration debate in North Carolina. 1 Conservative whites had labored to resolve their Negro Problem for about a decade before the state implemented its immigration program. As Jim Crow spread across the Deep South, black North Carolinians formed a coalition with white Populists and Republicans that won control of the General Assembly in 1894 and the governor’s mansion in 1896. Democrats refused to submit to interracial rule and campaigned vigorously to reclaim the state legislature in 1898. Party leaders manipulated working- class whites’ fears of black political power, which supposedly inspired black- on- white rape across the state. Democrats claimed victory at the polls on November 8, 1898, but the port city of Wilmington remained under Fusion control. A group of elite whites, later labeled the “Secret Nine,” conspired to retake power in the city. On the morning of November 10, 1898, a mob of white men destroyed the office of black newspaper editor Alexander Manly. The