Weeks before McDaniel's death: A Confederate parade
The parade — on Friday, June 7, 1929, some three weeks before the lynching of Willie McDaniel — had packed Charlotte streets with what the Observer called “the greatest mass of people ever assembled in North Carolina, including Sherman’s army.”
The News described the crowd pushing and shoving to get a view, and cheering for the hundreds of veterans and for “carloads of old negro slaves” winding down Tryon.
Coverage leading up to the event — which Observer editor Wade Harris helped bring to Charlotte — repeatedly noted the profound loss and anger expressed by many white people about the Civil War, and what they thought of as Black people’s rightful place: serving white people.
A June 5 Charlotte News story quoted reunion speaker A.T. Goodwyn’s demand for “truth in history”: that the war had been “a veiled economic war of industrial greed against the Agricultural South.” The veterans cheered him, with what the News called “the old dashing spirit.”
Reporter LeGette Blythe’s romanticizing of the parade in his front-page story for the Observer grew increasingly specific, and increasingly clear about race in that era in Charlotte:
“Borne upon the feeble shoulders of a faithful few, the glory and the glamor of a nation founded in deathless principle paraded the streets of Charlotte,” he began.
“Those laughing lads who marched away to war in the ‘sixties and returned to homes desolated, those gay-hearted lassies who waved them off with flutterings of lacy handkerchiefs and discreet kisses and then remained to face horrors more real than any confronted on the battlefield — yesterday they passed proudly before cheering thousands who today acclaim them their greatest heritage.”
Blythe went on to describe a parade car of “old darkies of the antebellum type… With ebony faces lighted up by the joy within and with whites of their eyes shining like jack-o-lanterns in a swamp at midnight, the old fellows were fairly sitting upon the portals of heaven, they were so happy…
“The watchers delighted in cheering the old black uncles. There is something born within every son of the south that makes him love a negro, a sort of paternal feeling of a master race for a race that is yet in its childhood. He wants to take every old negro mammy and every old negro uncle to his heart and protect him. And when the old black vets paraded by, their white ‘nephews’ and ‘nieces’ felt with a keen sense of loss that the race of old time darkies is marching past time’s reviewing stand toward that land wither has gone their beloved ‘marsters.’
“As the car bearing the old black veterans moved past and approached the point out on Hawthorne Lane where the parade was to disperse, those who delight in seeing pictures where there are no pictures and weaving dreams on crowded city streets may have conjured up a vision wherein the relentless tyrant time has been conquered and these old white-haired darkies are permitted in another land to croon lullabies to their little white ‘chilluns’ and serve in their own inimitable way mint juleps to ‘Marse Jack’ and ‘Marse Robert.’”
Watch this Fox Movietone news reel for a glimpse of the parade and Confederate veterans.
— HS
Learn more about racial injustice, and what happened to Joe McNeely and Willie McDaniel here in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, by exploring the rest of this website and EJI’s resources