Expert Report of Orville Vernon Burton
in Community Success Initiative v. Moore, No. 19-cv-15941 (N.C. Superior Court)
May 8, 2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS
I.

Summary of Opinions

II.

Professional Background and Qualifications

III.

Aims, Methodology, and Materials Reviewed

IV.

Introduction: The Struggle for Voting Rights in North Carolina

V.

Antebellum Felony Disfranchisement

VI.

Post-Civil War Felony Disfranchisement

VII.

Felony Disfranchisement in the Twentieth Century

VIII.

Conclusions

1

 I. Summary of Opinions
My name is Orville Vernon Burton. I teach at Clemson University in South Carolina and
am the Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Professor of History. I have been asked by
attorneys for the plaintiffs in this litigation to assist the court in assessing the history and intent
underlying the North Carolina constitutional provision and statutes disenfranchising persons
convicted of crimes. Based on my more than 49 years of experience as a historian focused on the
American South, and my review and research of this question for the purposes of this report, it is
my opinion that:


North Carolina’s authorization of felony disenfranchisement by constitutional amendment
in 1875 was racially motivated, with the end goal being the total disenfranchisement of not
just persons who had committed a felony, but of all African Americans.



North Carolina’s 1877 statutory disenfranchisement of persons who had committed a
felony was motivated by a desire to disenfranchise black voters and maintain white
supremacy in post-bellum North Carolina. At least as early as 1866, white North
Carolinians had disfranchised black North Carolinians by rendering them “infamous”
through corporal punishment, and the codification of felony disfranchisement was a
continuation of that tactic.



The 1875 constitutional amendment and the 1877 statute were importantly different from
the pre-civil war disfranchisement statute. These new post-bellum laws disenfranchised all
people with felony convictions, not just those convicted of “infamous” crimes like
treason. It is no coincidence that after Reconstruction, when felony disfranchisement
turned into a tool to disenfranchise African Americans, it was used much more broadly
than it was before the war when it just applied to whites. Not only did white Democrats
2

 expand the categories of crimes that exposed North Carolinians to disenfranchisement, they
added additional punishments for voting by those with felony convictions.


The latest iterations of North Carolina’s felony disenfranchisement statutes (in 1971 and
1973) represent a compromise between the original aims of black legislators who hoped to
make it easier for North Carolinians to regain the right to vote and countervailing interests
invested in limiting African American’s access to the elective franchise. Furthermore, these
statutes recapitulate the 1875 constitutional felony disfranchisement and the 1876 statutory
felony disfranchisement, both of which were infected by racially discriminatory aims.



Felony disenfranchisement in North Carolina mirrors and intersects with the
disenfranchisement of black voters throughout the state’s history. As black political
activism threatened the power of the white ruling elite, legislators turned not only to felony
disenfranchisement, but also to segregation, suffrage restrictions, and other measures
designed to break the political and economic power of black communities.



While felony disenfranchisement was primarily used as a barrier to black political activism,
it also served to restrict the citizenship rights of all economically disadvantaged North
Carolinians. While the white ruling elite claimed to forge an alliance with less wealthy
North Carolinians, felony disenfranchisement restricted the voting rights of economically
disadvantaged North Carolinians, beginning in 1776 and continuing to the present.
Reformers, from the 1870s to the 1970s, recognized that disenfranchising people who
committed felonies would disproportionately impact working class North Carolinians, who
could ill-afford the expense of having their citizenship rights restored.

These opinions are explained and supported in further detail in the discussion portion of this report.

3

 BACKGROUND AND METHODOLOGY
II.

Professional Background and Qualifications
I received my undergraduate degree from Furman University in 1969 and my Ph.D. in

American History from Princeton University in 1976 and have been researching and teaching
American History at universities since 1974. Currently I am a Professor of History, Pan-African
Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, and Computer Science at Clemson University as well as
the Director of the Clemson CyberInstitute. From 2008 to 2010, I was the Burroughs
Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University. I am
emeritus University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar, University Scholar, Professor of History,
African American Studies, and Sociology at the University of Illinois. I am a Senior Research
Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where I was Associate
Director for Humanities and Social Sciences (2004-2010). I was also the founding Director of
the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the University
of Illinois and currently chair the ICHASS Advisory Board.
I am the author or editor of more than twenty books and two hundred articles. I have
received a number of academic awards and honors. I was selected nationwide as the 1999 U.S.
Research and Doctoral University Professor of the Year (presented by the Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching and by the Council for Advancement and Support of
Education). My book The Age of Lincoln, published in 2007, won the Chicago Tribune
Heartland Literary Award for Nonfiction and was selected for Book of the Month Club, History
Book Club, and Military Book Club. One reviewer proclaimed, “If the Civil War era was
America's ‘Iliad,’ then historian Orville Vernon Burton is our latest Homer.” The book was
featured at sessions of the annual meetings of African American History and Life Association,

4

 the Social Science History Association, and the Southern Intellectual History Circle. Among the
articles I have published are several related to the issues discussed in this report and at least two
law review articles. I was one of ten historians selected to contribute to the Presidential
Inaugural Portfolio (January 21, 2013) by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural
Ceremonies. I have been recognized by my peers and was elected president of the Southern
Historical Association and of the Agricultural History Society and elected to the Society of
American Historians. I edited two academic press series for the University of Virginia Press: The
American South Series and the A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era Series. I was also
elected by my university peers as president of the Faculty Senate at the University of Illinois. In
2007 the Illinois State legislature honored me with a special resolution for my contributions as a
scholar, teacher, and citizen of Illinois, and in 2017, I received the Governor’s Award for
Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities from the South Carolina Humanities Council.
I have extensive experience in analyzing social and economic status, discrimination, and
historical intent in voting rights cases, as well as group voting behavior. I have been qualified as
an expert in the fields of districting, reapportionment, and racial voting patterns and behavior in
elections in the United States. I have served as an expert witness and consultant in a number of
voting rights cases beginning with McCain v. Lybrand (1984) and also as a consultant in state
redistricting matters. My testimony has been accepted by federal courts on both statistical
analysis of racially polarized voting and socioeconomic analysis of the population, as well as on
the history of discrimination and the discriminatory intent of laws. My testimony and reports
have been cited by the courts. For example, in 2012 my report was cited by the Justice
Department as a reason for their objection to the in-person South Carolina Voter ID law. See
Dkt. 118-1, South Carolina v. .United States, No. 1:12-cv-00203-CKK-BMK-JDB (D.D.C. June

5

 29, 2012). My testimony and my report were also cited in 2014 by the U.S. District Court for the
Southern District of Texas in finding that the Texas in-person Voter ID Law was racially
motivated and had a disparate effect on minorities. Veasey v. Perry (2:13-CV-193). I have been
retained to serve as an expert witness and consultant in numerous voting rights cases by the
Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ),
the Voting Rights Project of the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties
Union, the Brennan Center, the NAACP, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) of the NAACP, the
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the California Rural Legal
Association, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil
Rights Under Law, the Legal Services Corporation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other
individuals and groups.
As a scholar, I have had a long-time relationship with North Carolina. I have researched
and written about North Carolina, and I have researched in the archives of the State of North
Carolina, at Duke University, and the University of North Carolina. I spent the 1994-95 school
year at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle and participated in seminars on
Southern and North Carolina history with faculty at the University of North Carolina. I also
keynoted the North Carolina Historical Annual meeting, and was a consultant for the University of
North Carolina library on their Southern History collection as well as for their Mellon digital grant.
I have been invited to present papers and talks and participate in seminars at a number of North
Carolina colleges and universities including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, at
Greensboro, and at Charlotte, Duke University, and North Carolina State University, as well as the
North Carolina Archives. I was one of two outside historians who were hired as consultants for the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro to help develop their Ph.D. program. Following the

6

 Shaw v. Reno North Carolina redistricting decision in 1993, Duke Historian John Hope Franklin
and Judge Leon Higginbotham brought me from the University of Illinois for a workshop and to
consult on how to apply the Voting Rights Act in light of the recent decision on redistricting and
gerrymandering. I was invited to give the keynote for the new North Carolina museum for the
Civil War and Reconstruction which was scheduled for April 21 and 22 in Fayetteville, but which
is now being rescheduled.
I am being compensated at $300 per hour for my work on this case. My compensation is
not contingent on or affected by the substance of my opinions or the outcome of this case.
To the best of my knowledge and memory, in the last five or so years I have given
testimony and/or depositions in the following cases: (i) Perez v. Perry (5:11-CV-00360, W.D.
Tex.) (the first report and deposition was in 2011 and the case continued so that I presented a
second report, deposed again, and testified in 2017); (ii) South Carolina v. United States (1:12cv-00203, D.D.C.); and (iii) Veasey v. Perry (2:13-CV-193, S.D. Tex.). In addition, I testified
on the VRA in a Congressional Briefing on Friday, Dec. 4, 2015. A curriculum vitae and bio are
attached to this report.
III.

Aims, Methodology, and Materials Reviewed
In this report, I have employed the standard methodology used by historians and other

social scientists in investigating the intent underlying the adoption, operations, and maintenance
of election laws. When analyzing political decision-making, historians examine the
circumstantial evidence regarding the political, institutional, and social context in which a
decision is made, as well as direct evidence of the reasons asserted for the decision. We examine
relevant scholarly studies, newspaper coverage of events, reports of local, state or federal
governments, relevant court decisions, and the record in court cases, including expert reports,

7

 deposition and trial testimony, and statistical data. In writing this report, I have examined a wide
range of sources. I have relied on primary and secondary sources available to me at the time of
writing this report. This report makes extensive use of primary sources, especially contemporary
newspapers, which record debates and speeches, and help to provide a barometer of public
sentiment. Where possible, I have consulted newspaper accounts from multiple perspectives, and
checked for accuracy. I have also read the records of both houses of the North Carolina General
Assembly, the journals and debates of the constitutional conventions of 1835 and 1875, bill
histories, and public statutes. I have also used oral histories and videos that have been recorded
and preserved, and have reviewed a declaration from Rep. Henry M. Michaux, Jr. I have also
consulted secondary works on politics and race relations in North Carolina, specifically, as well
as in the South as a whole. This report features extensive footnotes to allow readers to assess the
accuracy and credibility of my evidence and my conclusions.

FINDINGS
IV.

Introduction: The Struggle for Voting Rights in North Carolina
When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) was enacted, less than half of North

Carolina’s one hundred counties were covered. More African Americans (estimated at 46.8
percent of eligible voters) were registered to vote in North Carolina before 1965 than in any of
the other six states covered under the VRA.1 Yet, in spite of North Carolina’s image for years as
more progressive than other southern states, North Carolina “has been most effective in belittling

1

William B. Keech and Michael P. Sistrom, “North Carolina,” in Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the
Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990 Edited by Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman (Princeton: Princeton University
Press), 155.

8

 the voting strength of a sizable black population.”2 William B. Keech and Michael P. Sistrom,
two scholars of North Carolina and the history of the Voting Right Act, suggest that for political
leaders in the state, “projecting the progressive image was a less blatant and therefore more
effective way to maintain a system of white supremacy.” In 1984, one of the most important and
successful voting rights cases, the landmark Thornburg v. Gingles, “was a response to the fact
that rates of black officeholding still lagged, state election law and local government were slow
to reform, and racially polarized campaigns and voting” were still rampant in North Carolina
nearly two decades after passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.3
Felony disfranchisement in North Carolina has to be understood in this context. This
report chronicles the disfranchisement of people convicted of a felony as a tool used to restrict
the political activism of minorities (particularly African Americans) and poor North Carolinians,
beginning with pre-Civil War statutes that established a process to allow those who had been
convicted to have their citizenship rights restored even as those leaders denied those same
citizenship rights to free black North Carolinians. Then, in the 1870s, in the face of the
Reconstruction Act of 1867, which enfranchised black men, and the 14th Amendment (ratified in
1868) and 15th Amendment (ratified in 1870), which protected the right of all men to vote,
Conservative Democrats turned to felon disfranchisement to “legally” deny black North
Carolinians the right to vote. The disfranchisement of people convicted of a felony began a
decades-long campaign to disfranchise African-American voters, which included the felony
disenfranchisement provision added in the 1875 constitutional amendments and culminated in

2

Minion K. C. Morrison, Black Political Mobilization: Leadership, Power, and Mass Behaviour (Albany: State
University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 83; Keech and Sistrom, “North Carolina,” pp. 155-56.
3
Keech and Sistrom, “North Carolina,” p,156.

9

 the passage of the so-called “disfranchisement” amendment authorizing literacy tests and poll
taxes in 1900.
The Civil Rights Movement came early to North Carolina, and Greensboro sit-ins in 1960
sparked student activists throughout the South.4 The 1970s were a crucial juncture in North
Carolina’s history. Following the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the first African American in the
twentieth century was elected to the state legislature and by 1973, black politicians in North
Carolina sought to protect the right to vote for all North Carolinians by liberalizing the state’s
felony disfranchisement statute. As North Carolina was beginning to fulfill the “promissory
note” to which every American could lay claim - the guarantee of the inalienable rights of life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - the forces of conservativism (bolstered by the War on
Drugs and an emphasis on law and order) blunted this revolution and left it unfinished. The
changes in North Carolina’s disfranchisement of people convicted of felonies left significant
hurdles in place from the original racially motivated 1875 statue that made it difficult for people
formerly convicted of a felony, and particularly minorities and the economically disadvantaged,
to have their rights restored even today.
V.

Antebellum Felony Disfranchisement
In North Carolina, “[f]rom statehood (the American Revolution) to RECONSTRUCTION

race and class lines deepened.”5 In the 1830s and 1840s, North Carolina’s legislators made it
easier for people convicted of a felony to regain the right vote, even as they simultaneously
disenfranchised black North Carolinians. Until 1835, North Carolina’s suffrage requirements

4

See especially William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle
for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) and Andrew Walker, The Ghost of Jim Crow: How
Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009), 49-84.
5
Raymond Gavins, “North Carolina,” in Civil Rights in the United States, Vol 2: p p. 566, Edited by Waldo E.
Martin, Jr. and Patricia Sullivan (New York: MacMillian Reference, 2000).

10

 were unclear in two respects. First, North Carolina’s original 1776 constitution had allowed “all
freemen” older than twenty-one years old who met the residency, tax, and property ownership
requirements to vote – this, of course, included free African Americans. Free people of color
were allowed to vote in North Carolina until 1835, even while the General Assembly passed
legislation (in 1827) prohibiting “free negroes and mulattoes” from immigrating to North
Carolina.6 Second, the North Carolina General Assembly had neglected the question of whether
or not “infamous persons” were stripped of their rights of citizenship, and, if so, how they could
have those rights restored.7 As historian Pippa Holloway observes, before 1835 the North
Carolina law regarding felony disenfranchisement was “complicated and unclear,” and until
1835 there is no mention of disenfranchising voters because of crimes.8 Infamy, as Holloway
notes, “could result from the commission of an infamous crime,” such as treason, bribery, or
perjury, “or from the receipt of an infamous punishment such as whipping,” which could be
inflicted for crimes like petty larceny. Between 1789 and 1835, however, the General Assembly
refranchised more than eighty North Carolinians by private legislative act – clearly, North
Carolinians were being disfranchised after committing “infamous crimes,” even though there
was no statewide statute that disfranchised citizens as a penalty for criminal offenses.9
As noted above, until 1835, North Carolina’s legislature answered the problem of how to
restore citizenship rights to “infamous persons” by resorting to “one-off” private legislation. In
the 1830s, however, North Carolinians came to the consensus that private legislation should be
limited, not only because they viewed it as being undemocratic, but also because it wasted

6

“Captions of the Laws,” The Elizabeth-City Star and North-Carolina Eastern Intelligencer (Elizabeth City, NC),
February 17, 1827.
7
. See Pippa Holloway, Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6, 34, 91.
8
Holloway, Living in Infamy, 20, n. 10.
9
“Report of the Commission on Public-Local and Private Legislation Authorized by the 1947 General Assembly,”
Popular Government, February-March, 1949:3,5.

11

 legislators’ time and the state’s money.10 Delegates at North Carolina’s 1835 Constitutional
Convention were fiercely critical of the undemocratic nature, expense, and inconvenience of
private laws. Congressman William J. Gaston, who represented Craven County, argued that
private acts were “needless and pernicious,” and even went as far as to describe them as
“trash.”11 For these reasons, the 1835 Constitutional Convention prohibited private legislation
on a number of issues, including “the restoration of citizenship to persons convicted of infamous
crimes.”12 Legislation to “restore the rights of citizenship to any person convicted of infamous
crime” was one type of private legislation, and curtailing private acts created uncertainty about
how those who were convicted of “infamous crime” could be refranchised.13
While the Constitutional Convention of 1835 only complicated the question of the citizenship
rights of those convicted of felonies, it resolved with crushing finality the uncertainty about the
suffrage rights of free black North Carolinians. Free black voters were explicitly disenfranchised
legislatively during the 1835 North Carolina Constitutional Convention. Article I, section 3,
subsection 3 of the 1835 North Carolina Constitution stated that “no free negro, free mulatto, or
free person of mixed blood, descended from negro ancestors to the fourth generation inclusive”
would be able to vote in state elections.14 White slaveholders, who dominated North Carolina’s

10

In 1833, Hugh Welch, the editor of the Yadkin and Catawba Journal, argued that, by “favouring one person or ten
persons . . . to the exclusion of one Hundred or one Thousand others,” private legislation “is making an unrighteous
and unconstitutional distinction between equals.” See The Yadkin and Catawba Journal (Salisbury, NC), December
16, 1833; “State Convention,” The Fayetteville Weekly Observer (Fayetteville, NC), July 21, 1835.
11
Joseph Gales, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of North Carolina, Called to Amend the
Constitution of the State, Which Assembled at Raleigh, June 4, 1835, To which are Subjoined the Convention Act
and the Amendments to the Constitution, Together with the Votes of the People (Raleigh: Joseph Gales and Son,
1836), 176.
12
William S. Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1989), 280;Harold J. Counihan, “The North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1835: A Study in
Jacksonian Democracy,” The North Carolina Historical Review 46, no. 4 (October 1969), 359.
13
The Charlotte Journal (Charlotte, NC), July 24, 1835.
14
North Carolina Constitutional Convention, Journal of the Convention, Called by the Freemen of North-Carolina,
to Amend the Constitution of the State, Which Assembled in the City of Raleigh, on the 4th of June, 1835, and
Continued in Session Until the 11th Day of July Thereafter (Raleigh: J. Gales and Son, 1835), 98.

12

 legislature until the outbreak of the Civil War, were terrified about a potential violent slave
rebellion, like Nat Turner’s 1831 slave insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia (on North
Carolina’s northeastern border), and the actual threat of black political activism – particularly in
eastern North Carolina – to white supremacy. In addition to disfranchising all black North
Carolinians (free or enslaved), the General Assembly passed statutes that limited enslaved
persons’ economic independence and pathways to freedom. Laws prohibited slaves’ ownership
of domestic animals, hunting, buying and selling with either enslaved persons, free blacks, or
white North Carolinians, and “hiring out” themselves. Laws also restricted African American
potential political independence by banning enslaved persons preaching and making it illegal to
teach enslaved people to read or write.15 Moreover, the law made a clear distinction by race in
the punishment: for whites who might teach enslaved people to read or write, the court had
“discretion” to imprison or fine a convicted white man or woman a minimum of a hundred
dollars and not more than two hundred, but “ a free person of colour shall be whipped …not
exceeding thirty nine lashes nor less than twenty lashes.”16
The outright disenfranchisement of all black voters was justified as a response to fears that,
as articulated by an assembly of the citizens of New Bern in 1831, “when the slave sees him
whom he regards as his associate and equal . . . respectfully treated by men of high character” it
could lead to “the most calamitous of all contests, a bellum servile, a servile war.”17 White North

15

As noted by Paul D. Escott, “In 1860 more than 85 percent of the members of the general assembly were
slaveholders (the highest percentage in the South), and more than 36 percent owned at least twenty slaves (one of
the highest percentages in the South)” (Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North
Carolina, 1850-1900 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 15); Joan R. Sherman,
“Introduction,” in The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry, John R. Sherman, ed.
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 17-18. For more on Nat Turner’s insurrection, see
David F. Allmendinger, Jr., Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
2014).
16
Legislative Papers, 1830–31 Session of the General Assembly see at
https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/slavesfree/slavesfree.html
17

The Sentinel (New Bern, NC), December 7, 1831.

13

 Carolinians, in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s rebellion, claimed that allowing free black North
Carolinians to vote would cause a slave rebellion. Some North Carolinians – like the
pseudonymous “Citizen,” who wrote to New Bern’s Spectator – insisted that since the 1776
North Carolina Constitution stipulated that “all free men” were entitled to vote, and “free persons
of colour certainly come under the denomination free men,” free African Americans were
“entitled to this franchise.”18 It is unsurprising that resistance to free black voting – and
objections to any attempt to disfranchise free blacks – emerged in New Bern. As John Hope
Franklin observes, free African Americans were “active in politics” in New Bern, as well as
other areas of eastern North Carolina.19
Historian Lacy K. Ford contends that the disfranchisement of free blacks in North Carolina
was in part a reaction to the fact that “in eastern North Carolina . . . free black voting played a
significant role in some local elections.”20 The Convention delegates who gathered in June 1835
were unconvinced that free African Americans were truly “free men.” James Bryan, the
representative from Carteret County, raised the specter of political corruption when he contended
that enfranchising black North Carolinians would “make him the corrupt tool of the designing
and ambitious demagogue, and subject him to a slavery ten times more ignominious than that of
the disfranchised private citizen.”21 Jesse Wilson, of Perquimans County, argued that
disfranchising free black voters was essential to maintain the barrier between black and white
North Carolinians. During the Constitutional Convention, Wilson declared that “color is a

18

“Citizen,” “For the Spectator,” The Spectator (New Bern, NC), December 9, 1831.
John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1943), 106-107.
20
Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009), 421.
21
Joseph Gales, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of North Carolina, Called to Amend the
Constitution of the State, Which Assembled at Raleigh, June 4, 1835, To which are Subjoined the Convention Act
and the Amendments to the Constitution, Together with the Votes of the People (Raleigh: Joseph Gales and Son,
1836), 68
19

14

 barrier,” and “if you make it your business to elevate the condition of the blacks, in the same
proportion do you degrade that of the poorer whites,” with the ultimate outcome being “an
increase of mixed breeds [emphasis in original].”22 Delegates from eastern North Carolina
strongly supported disenfranchising free black voters, and, by only five votes, as historian Harold
J. Counihan writes, “by a vote of sixty-six to sixty-one, the right of free Negroes to vote was
abrogated in toto.”23
With the disfranchisement of free black North Carolinians accomplished, North Carolina’s
General Assembly eventually resolved the question of citizenship restoration. In the 1836-1837
legislative session of the North Carolina Assembly, the issue of “restoring to credit persons
convicted of infamous crimes” was referred to the House of Commons Committee on the
Judiciary.24 This effort to pass legislation that would allow North Carolinians who had been
disfranchised for “infamous crimes” culminated in the passage of a “Bill providing for restoring
to the rights of citizenship persons convicted of infamous crimes” during the 1840-1841
legislative session. This legislation established a procedure whereby North Carolinians who had
“forfeited their rights to citizenship” could have those rights restored by petitioning the Superior
Court of Law.25 This process for citizenship restoration made it possible for even those (white)
North Carolinians to lose the taint of “infamy” and regain their rights as citizens. Ironically and

22

“State Convention,” The Weekly Standard (Raleigh, NC), June 19, 1835; Lacy K. Ford, “Making the ‘White
Man’s Country’ White: Race, Slavery, and State-Building in the Jacksonian South,” Journal of the Early Republic
(Winter 1999):732-734. This class argument is consistent with the argument about the origins of colonial slavery
based on race, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal in Colonial Virginia
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1975) argued that class and class conflict led to slavery as the lifetime status for African
Americans.
23
Counihan, “The North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1835: A Study in Jacksonian Democracy,” 347. For
a more detailed discussion of the debate over free black disenfranchisement at the 1835 Constitutional Convention,
see Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 109-116
24
The Weekly Standard (Raleigh, NC), November 30, 1836.
25
The Raleigh Register (Raleigh, NC), December 22, 1840; “Captions of the Laws,” The Greensboro Patriot
(Greensboro, NC), January 19, 1841; Ch. 36, 1840 N.C. Sess. Laws 68.

15

 notably, even as North Carolina’s legislators disenfranchised all free black men, they allowed
white men convicted of “infamous crimes” to regain the right to vote.
VI.

Post-Civil War Felony Disfranchisement
The Civil War changed America and ended slavery, and the Reconstruction Amendments

that followed redefined personal freedom in the United States by assuring that it was protected
by federal law against the states. The 13th Amendment, adopted in 1865, outlawed slavery, and
was soon interpreted in the courts and understood generally to uproot the badges and incidents of
slavery. The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, granted citizenship and, no less momentous, it
also gave all persons sweeping federal protections against the states—privileges and immunities,
due process, and equal protection. The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, granted the right to
vote and prohibited the states from denying or abridging male citizens’ right to vote “on account
of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”
To emphasize the force of the new provisions, all three new amendments added clauses
specifying that “Congress shall have power to enforce” the new amendment. The alteration in
the Constitution was revolutionary, a transformation of a core American belief in the need to
limit federal governmental power, which the historian Eric Foner recently aptly proclaimed a
“Second Founding.26 As a consequence of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, as well as the
Civil Rights Act of 1866, North Carolina could no longer rely on its pre-Civil War strategy of
outright denying the vote to black citizens.
i.

Presidential Reconstruction, Corporeal Punishment, and Black Codes, 1865 – 1867
As president during most of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln espoused reconciliation

along with resolve. Lincoln’s perspective evolved on issues of race, and at various times, he

26

Eric Foner, The Second Founding”: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New
York: W. W, Norton, 2019).

16

 supported the franchise for those African Americans who had fought for the Union, or “the most
intelligent,” and sometimes even hinting more. By the time General Grant accepted Lee’s
surrender, on April 9, 1865, the 13th Amendment had been ratified by 20 states (including four
from the former Confederacy) of the 27 needed to make it part of the Constitution and radically
change that venerable document of 1787. Lincoln delivered an impromptu speech from the
White House balcony to the gathering crowd. He spoke about “some new announcement for the
people of the South.” One listener at this speech, John Wilkes Booth, understood where Lincoln
was leading the nation. He told his companion, “That means Nigger citizenship. Now, by God,
I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.” And it was. The course of
history was changed by a single gunshot that killed Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1865, six days
after Lee’s surrender.27
Lincoln’s successor was Andrew Johnson. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, Johnson had
been a Democratic Senator from Tennessee who had been added to the Republican ticket in 1864
as a “unity” measure. It proved a fateful choice. The two Presidents had very different views
about the Nation, the South, African Americans, citizenship, liberty, and freedom, among others.
Lincoln’s assassination and Johnson’s succession thus changed the nation’s direction. President
Johnson quickly began reversing Lincoln’s policies. President Johnson set out the contours of his
Reconstruction policies with his native state, North Carolina, the first state for which he oversaw
readmittance to the Union. His terms for readmitting the rebel states to the Union were few:
repeal the state’s secession ordinance, repudiate the state’s Confederative war debt, and

27

Lincoln Speech from the Balcony, Last Public Address, April 11, 1865, Letter to Nathaniel P. Banks (Louisiana)
on Reconstruction, Aug. 5, 1863 and Letter to Michael Hahn, March 13, 1864 in Orville Vernon Burton, The
Essential Lincoln, pp. 171-77, 144-46, 162-63; Burton, The Age of Lincoln (Hill & Wang, 2007), pp.238-42, quote
p. 240; ; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 852. Lincoln lived to see ratification by 21 of the required
27 states ratify the 13th amendment, the other 6 came in under President Johnson’s “North Carolina plan.”.

17

 recognize the end of slavery by ratifying the 13th Amendment and amending their own state
constitutions likewise.
Johnson’s view on African American suffrage was made clear to the nation in his May
29, 1865 “Proclamation Establishing Government for North Carolina.” Lincoln’s cabinet had
split on whether to provide African Americans the franchise, but in his call for North Carolina’s
reconstruction, President Johnson mandated that the only eligible voters should be those who
were qualified “before the 20th day of May, A. D. 1861, the date of the so-called ordinance of
secession,” effectively instituting a racial grandfather clause. That told North Carolina, and the
other former Confederate states, that African Americans, who of course were not able to vote in
1861, must not be granted the right to vote. In office just 45 days, President Johnson announced
to the country that the government of the United States of America was committed to making
freedom for African Americans mean as little as possible. Johnson’s achievement and legacy
were to encourage many Southerners to believe that they could change the outcome of the War,
and to spark a determination among enough of them to use fraud and violence to do just that. In
the eyes of Republican Congressional leaders (such as Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner),
President Johnson had, by limiting suffrage to whites, thrown away the prospect of the southern
states creating a more equitable society. Where once the South had seemed ready “to accept the
rule of justice,” Sumner suggested to Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch, they now would
recognize discrimination based on color.28

28

Proclamation Establishing Government for North Carolina, May 29, 1865, The Papers of Andrew Johnson, LeRoy
P. Graf, Ralph W. Haskins, and Paul H. Bergeron, eds. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967-1999), 8:
4, 136-138; Charles Sumner to Hugh McCulloch, July 12, 1865, Hugh McCulloch to Charles Sumner, August 15,
1865, Hugh McCulloch Papers, Library of Congress; On Johnson, see Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and
Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), esp. pp. 216-18, and Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew
Johnson: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1997, reprint of 1989 edition). See also, Dan T. Carter, When the War
Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865-1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1985), 25; Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 183-184; Perman, Reunion Without Compromise, 61-62.

18

 After the Civil War, white Democrats, who were no longer able to use explicitly racial
barriers to disfranchise black North Carolinians, turned pre-emptively to felony disfranchisement
and “Black Codes” as tools to disqualify African-American voters and quash rising black
political activism in North Carolina. In early December 1866, General Daniel Sickles, who took
command of the newly-formed Department of the Carolinas in the spring of 1866, issued an
order to North Carolina Governor Jonathan Worth, a Conservative and the state treasurer during
the Civil War, that prohibited all corporeal punishment by North Carolina courts. Almost
immediately, Worth appealed Sickles’s order to President Johnson.29 The destruction of farms
and disruption of commerce meant that hunger was a daily reality for many North Carolinians
after the Civil War. A poem in the Wilmington Daily Dispatch in February 1866 opined that “the
gaunt fiend of famine now prowls in the sun/To accomplish the ruin that war had begun;/And the
moan of the starving, in unpitied pain,/Pray for mercy to God . . . in vain.”30 For some, theft
became the only alternative, especially during the fall and winter months. Corporeal punishment
– the “crack of the lash” – was justified as an important deterrent for petty theft.31 Thirty-nine
lashes, “the penalty prescribed by the Mosaic law,” was a common penalty for “the paltry crime
of stealing” even food for survival.32
Corporeal punishment also had a more insidious purpose – the disfranchisement of black
North Carolinians. In 1866, Conservative Democrats in the General Assembly passed an “Act
Concerning Negroes and Persons of Color,” colloquially known as the “black code,” which
banned interracial marriages, imposed strict vagrancy laws and gave white sheriffs broad

29

The Wilmington Daily Dispatch (Wilmington, NC), May 26, 1866; “Order from General Sickles to Governor
Worth,” The Wilmington Daily Dispatch (Wilmington, NC), December 9, 1866; Mark L. Bradley, Bluecoats and
Tarheels: Soldiers and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky,
2009), 137.
30
“Results of War in the South,” The Wilmington Daily Dispatch (Wilmington, NC), February 14, 1866.
31
“A Raid on Poultry,” The Weekly Progress (Raleigh, NC), November 1, 1866.
32
“North Carolina Items,” The Weekly Progress (Raleigh, NC), April 14, 1866.

19

 authority to prosecute freedman for vagrancy, and prohibited freedmen from voting.33 Alongside
North Carolina’s black code, white North Carolinians turned to whipping to render freedmen
“infamous” in the sight of the law. In the fall of 1866, reports began to come in from military
headquarters in Charleston and Raleigh that “in all country towns the whipping of negroes is
being carried on extensively,” with “the real motive” being “to guard against their voting in the
future, there being a law in North Carolina depriving those publicly whipped of the right to
vote.”34
Americans – especially in the North – were incensed that white North Carolinians were
attempting to reinstate another form of slavery. Disfranchisement for criminal offenses, as the
Boston Daily Advertiser noted, “may set to work . . . to disqualify the freedmen generally, and
still it may be hard to find a violation of the letter of the civil rights act [of 1866].”35 In a speech
before the United States House of Representatives on January 7, 1867, Thaddeus Stevens used
the situation in North Carolina as an example to support his proposal to prohibit
disfranchisement for any crime “other than for insurrection or treason.” According to Stevens,
officials from the Freedmen’s Bureau reported that “in North Carolina . . . they are now
whipping negroes for a thousand and one trivial offenses . . . and in one county . . . they had
whipped every adult male negro,” the purpose of which was “preventing these negroes from
voting.”36 Harper’s Weekly, in January 1867, reported that “every day during about a month,
while the State court was recently sitting at Raleigh, there was a crowd of nearly five hundred
people outside the court-house witnessing the public whipping of colored men” [emphasis in

33

Roberta Sue Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen: Race Relations During Presidential Reconstruction,
1865-67 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 39-51.
34
The National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York, NY), January 5, 1867.
35
The Boston Daily Advertiser (Boston, MA), December 28, 1866.
36
The Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 2nd Session, 324 (1867); “Congressional Proceedings,” The Charleston
Daily Courier (Charleston, SC), January 8, 1867.

20

 original]. It noted that “this sentence of whipping operates in North Carolina as a civil
disqualification,” meaning that, if African Americans were ever granted the right to vote, they
would be “disqualified in advance.” “Thus,” Harper’s Weekly concluded, “the freedmen are still
pursued and sacrificed by the ancient laws of Slavery.”37 Contemporaries recognized the farreaching consequences of this tactic. As the Atlantic Monthly noted in March 1867, “if equal
suffrage should be imposed upon that State by the [eventual ratification of the] Constitutional
Amendment . . . how much time it would require thus to disfranchise every negro in the State is
a mere arithmetical problem for the consciences of slavery-loving and negro-hating juries.”38
ii.

Disfranchisement Following the 14th Amendment and Congressional Military
Reconstruction Acts of 1867
In March 1867, the passage of the First Reconstruction Act began a new stage of

Reconstruction in North Carolina. As part of the Second Military District (one of five military
districts created by the Reconstruction Act), North Carolina was placed under a military
government first led by Major General Sickles. Furthermore, the Reconstruction Act required
that North Carolina write a new constitution which guaranteed universal manhood suffrage and
ratify the 14th Amendment.39 The scheme to disfranchise black voters through corporeal
punishment appears to have been unimpeded by the Reconstruction Acts. In August 1867, in
Murfreesboro, in Hertford County, “rebel sympathizers” insisted that “a man who had been
whipped at the whipping post was disfranchised” and, even though these claims were “overruled
by the Registrars,” it “deterred” many African Americans from registering to vote.40

37

“Whipping and Selling American Citizens,” Harper’s Weekly, January 12, 1867, 18. See also “Steven F. Miller,
et al., “Between Emancipation and Enfranchisement: Law and the Political Mobilization of Black Southerners
during Presidential Reconstruction, 1865-1867,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 70, issue 3 (1995):1059-1077.
38
“The True Problem,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1867, 374.
39
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988),
276.
40
“Registration in North Carolina,” The Weekly Standard (Raleigh, NC), August 21, 1867.

21

 Disfranchisement via the whipping-post was relatively short-lived. Even though President
Johnson overruled Sickles and ordered him to rescind his order shortly after it was issued,
Sickles issued a new order, General Orders No. 10, which reaffirmed that “the punishment of
crimes and offences by whipping, maiming, branding, stocks, pillory, or other corporeal
punishment” was prohibited.41 Nevertheless, disenfranchising for crimes proved to be a
powerful tool to prevent black suffrage (even in the face of the Reconstruction Acts), and it
provided a key tactic for white North Carolinians who sought to restore again the mastery of the
white elite. As historian Pippa Holloway observes, “disenfranchisement for prior criminal
convictions was among the first strategies employed to block African American suffrage in
North Carolina,” since “white southerners already believed that African Americans were
degraded and infamous” and “whipping restored them to this status.”42
iii.

North Carolina’s 1868 Enfranchisement Constitution
North Carolina’s 1868 Reconstruction-era Constitution did not contain a provision

specifically authorizing felony disenfranchisement, and adopted expansive suffrage provisions
and protections. The 1868 Constitutional Convention was dominated by white delegates (there is
disagreement about how many of the delegates were African Americans, ranging from thirteen to
sixteen, but at least fourteen of the 121 delegates have been identified with certainty as African
American). Albion Tourgée, a white Republican originally from Ohio, played a crucial role in
shaping the suffrage provisions of the new state constitution, to the extent that the convention
would become known as “Judge Tourgée’s convention.” 43

41

“Official – The President Overrules General Sickles,” The Richmond Dispatch (Richmond, VA), December 21,
1866; “General Order No. 10,” Wilmington Journal (Wilmington, NC), April 19, 1867; Bradley, Bluecoats and
Tarheels, 138.
42
Holloway, Living in Infamy, 34.
43
Richard L. Hume and Jerry B. Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of
Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 118; “Daniels Makes An
Appeal for the Tax Amendments,” The Greensboro Daily News (Greensboro, NC), November 2, 1920.

22

 Tourgée later became a nationally renowned white lawyer and writer, publishing in 1879
a best-selling novel, A Fool’s Errand, sharply critical of white supremacy prevalent in the
postwar South, and based on his experiences in North Carolina after the Civil War and during
Reconstruction. The son of a devout Methodist farming family in Ohio, Tourgée had fought for
the Union in the Civil War and was wounded at the first Battle of Bull Run. Since then, in
addition to practicing law, Tourgée made unflinching admonitions against lynching, segregation,
and disfranchisement. Tourgée ultimately went on to argue for the African American plaintiffs at
the Supreme Court in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson segregation case.44
The leadership of black delegates – particularly James W. Hood, a preacher with the
African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination who had presided over the Freedman’s
Convention in Raleigh which called for the franchise for African Americans in 1865 – was also
key in shaping the 1868 Constitution.45 These African-American delegates, with the support of
white Republicans like Tourgée and other native North Carolina whites in this display of early
“fusion governance,” succeeded in making universal manhood suffrage part of the new
constitution. Article VI of the 1868 Constitution guaranteed that “every male person born in the
United States, and every male person who has been naturalized, twenty-one years old or upward”

44

Mark Elliott, “Race, Color Blindness, and the Democratic Public: Albion W. Tourgée’s Principles in Plessy v.
Ferguson,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 67, no. 2 (May 2001), pp. 289-90 and Colorblind Justice: Albion
Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from The Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006); Albion W. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand: A Novel of the South during Reconstruction (New York:
Waveland Press, 1991; initially published in 1879 by Fords, Howard & Hulbert in New York). Quoted in Thomas
Brook, Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford: St. Martins, 1997), p. 128. Otto H. Olsen,
Carpetbagger’s Crusade: The Life of Albion Winegar Tourgée (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1965) and “Albion W. Tourgée and Negro Militants of the 1890’s: A Documentary Selection,” Science and Society
28:2 (1964): 183-208, and “Albion W. Tourgée: Carpetbagger,” The North Carolina Historical Review, vol. 40, no.
4 (October 1963), pp. 434-54; Sidney Kaplan, “Albion W. Tourgée: Attorney for the Segregated,” The Journal of
Negro History, vol. 49, no. 2 (April 1964), pp. 128-33; John David Smith and Mark Elliott, Undaunted Radical: The
Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W. Tourgée (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010)
45
See Leonard Bernstein, “The Participation of Negro Delegates in the Constitutional Convention of 1868 in North
Carolina,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Oct., 1949): 391-409.

23

 would be granted the right to vote.46 As historian Mark Elliott notes in his biography of
Tourgée, the convention’s decision to “adopt universal suffrage” was something of a
compromise, as Tourgée had initially argued for the (temporary) disfranchisement of exConfederates.47 As noted, significantly, the 1868 Constitution had no provisions for the
disenfranchisement based on felony conviction.
iv.

Klan Violence, “Redemption,” and Adoption of Disenfranchisement Based on All Felony
Convictions in North Carolina
Almost as soon as the 1868 Constitution was ratified, however, Democrats began to

agitate against the universal manhood suffrage established by Article VI. Democratic
Conservatives were pejorative in their descriptions of the 1868 Convention, describing it as the
“Gorilla Convention” and the “Unconstitutional Convention.”48 An editorial in The Watchman
and Old North State published in November 1868 observed that “among the many objectionable
provisions which the new Constitution contains the one regulating suffrage seems to be attracting
the most attention.” The Watchman and Old North State despaired that “as the Constitution now
stands tens of thousands of persons will vote who have never paid, and never intend to pay, one
cent of taxes for the support of the State government.”49
The objections to universal suffrage were part of a broad, violent effort to disenfranchise
African Americans in North Carolina. Alongside election fraud, Conservative Democrats and
the Ku Klux Klan turned to vigilante violence to suppress Republican voters, particularly African
Americans. As the famous North Carolina Republican Albion W. Tourgee memorably observed,

46

NC Constitution of 1868, Article VI, Subsection 1.
Mark Elliott, Colorblind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from The Civil War to Plessy
v. Ferguson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 128; Richard L. Hume and Jerry B. Gough, Blacks,
Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, LA:
Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 126-127.
48
“The Gorilla Convention,” The Wilmington Morning Star (Wilmington, NC), January 11, 1868.
49
“The Future,” Watchman and Old State (Salisbury, NC), November 6, 1868.
47

24

 “It is no crime for a white man to cut a colored man open in Alamance [County].”50 In the
spring of 1870, North Carolina erupted into outright civil war, known as the Kirk-Holden War,
between Klansmen and the North Carolina militia. This war was a political disaster for
Governor William W. Holden, who Conservatives successfully impeached, and in the elections
in November 1870, the Democrats, using intimidation, violence, terrorism. and fraud, regained
control of North Carolina’s General Assembly.51
They soon began a systematic campaign to end black political activism and reassert white
supremacy in the Old North State that culminated in the disfranchisement amendment of 1900,
which restricted voting rights through literacy tests and poll taxes. White Democrats, who
according to Duke historian Ray Gavins, “defended the interests of planters and businessmen” in
North Carolina, characterized their fight against “negro rule” as a campaign for the purity of the
ballot box. Democrats began to fashion a false narrative attributing their own methods to regain
political control to the integrated and progressive Republican party. According to white
Democrats, Republican rule in North Carolina was only made possible by fraud and violence. In
1868, the Wilmington Journal argued that “the ballot-box” was “corrupted to defeat the popular
will,” and that Republicans had only achieved power through “the most unblushing rascality.”52
Democrats claimed that the “Radicals” had taught “the negroes to perpetrate frauds upon the
ballot box.”53 In the mind of Conservatives in North Carolina, the “unconstitutional negro rule”
was “backed by the sword” and “by fraud.”54 An announcement from the Conservative

50

Quoted in Rachel Hampton, “The Ku Klux Klan in Reconstruction North Carolina: Methods of Madness in the
Struggle for Southern Dominance,” available at http://history.ncsu.edu/projects/cwnc/exhibits/show/kkk-methods
In Civil War Era NC, last accessed 5-1-2020
51
Jim D. Brisson, “‘Civil Government Was Crumbling Around Me’:The Kirk-Holden War of 1870,” The North
Carolina Historical Review 88, no. 2 (April 2011), 123-124.
52
The Wilmington Journal (Wilmington, NC), November 6, 1868.
53
The Semi-Weekly Raleigh Sentinel (Raleigh, NC), June 15, 1867.
54
The Wilmington Journal (Wilmington, NC), July 3, 1868.

25

 Democrats of Buncombe County for a mass meeting in Asheville on March 21, 1868 helps to
explain what exactly Conservatives believed they would prevent by ending “fraud” and
“purifying” the electoral process. The Conservatives of Buncombe county warned that “negro
rule” would mean that the “DAUGHTERS of our poor white people” would be “forced into
social equality with negro BOYS at School” and military service “under negro officers.”55
Simply put, Conservatives’ calls to purify elections – including the disfranchisement of felons –
served the ultimate goal of preventing racial equality and reestablishing and maintaining white
supremacy in North Carolina.
In the reapportionment of 1872, Democrats packed black voters into eastern North
Carolina’s Second Congressional District, the so-called “Black Second,” effectively quarantining
black Republican voters into one district out of eight congressional districts. The Republican
Governor Tod Caldwell condemned the Democrat gerrymander, describing the second district as
“extraordinary, inconvenient and most grotesque,” and characterizing the map drawn by
Democratic legislators as “absurd and ridiculous.”56 In 1874, after the Democratic Conservatives
captured seven out of eight of the state’s congressional seats, six of the eight seats on the North
Carolina Supreme Court, and two-thirds of the membership of both Houses of the General
Assembly, Democrats sought to overthrow the “unjust and oppressive” 1868 Constitution with a
new constitutional convention. One of the chief provisions targeted by the Conservatives was
Article VI, as Democrats decried the suffrage provision that allowed “felons” to “vote equally
with the best and purest of the land.”57

55

“Mass Meeting,” The Asheville News (Asheville, NC), March 12, 1868.
Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872-1901: The Black Second (Baton Rouge, LA:
Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1981); “Governor Caldwell on the ‘Conservative’ Gerrymander,” The Daily Era
(Raleigh, NC), November 22, 1872; Gavin quote “North Carolina,” p. 566.
57
“Let Us Have a Convention,” The Daily Journal (Wilmington, NC), August 22, 1874.
56

26

 After the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, it became more difficult to
disfranchise African Americans outright. White supremacists instead turned to techniques that
were not racially discriminatory on their face – namely, the criminal exemption of the 13th
Amendment and felony disfranchisement. Conservative North Carolinians, like other white
southerners, relied on the 13th Amendment’s exception allowing denial of the rights of
citizenship ”as a punishment for crime,” which was based on a similar provision in the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and which still has consequences for the North Carolina felony
disfranchisement law today.
In North Carolina’s neighbor to the South, an upcountry South Carolina delegate at the
state’s provisional constitutional convention objected to the “except as a punishment for crime,”
and explained “it will be easily possible for the Legislature, if so disposed, to re-establish the
condition of slavery by a system of crimes and punishments impliedly authorized by that
clause.”58 Historian Eric Foner notes that the prisoner exemption clause of the 13th amendment
“did not go unnoticed among white Southerners. In November 1865, former Confederate
general John T. Morgan pointed out in a speech in Georgia that the Thirteenth Amendment did
not prevent states from enacting laws that enabled ‘judicial authorities’ to consign to bondage
blacks convicted of crime.” The former Confederate states immediately enacted Black Codes,
and “involuntary black labor” justified by the criminal exemption of the 13th amendment “was
central to these laws.”
The 15th amendment barred disenfranchisement on the basis of “race, color, or previous
condition of servitude,” but it did not contain a provision on felony disenfranchisement. As
Foner explained about the 15th amendment, “when the number of felons was quite small, no one

58

Sidney Adrews, The South Since the War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971 [orig 1866]), p. 323-24, and for
another quote on General Morgan in Georgia cited below, see p. 324.

27

 would have anticipated the consequences of subsequent increases in incarceration.” He
continued, “A truly positive Fifteenth Amendment (one that did not allow for the
disenfranchisement of those convicted of crimes) might have prevented the manipulation of
criminal laws after Reconstruction to disenfranchise blacks, not to mention the situation today in
which millions of persons, half of them no longer in prison cannot vote because of state felony
disfranchisement laws.”59
In North Carolina, Conservative Democrat David Coleman of Buncombe County
introduced a constitutional amendment to disfranchise felons on September 22, 1875.60 Colonel
Coleman was a leader among Conservative Democrats in western North Carolina, and he had
been given a mandate by the Conservatives of Buncombe County to lead a crusade against the
“Radicals” at the 1875 Constitutional Convention. The Conservative Democratic Party of
Buncombe County, which had unanimously nominated Coleman and his fellow representative,
Thomas L. Clingman, hoped that their delegates would “make the radical civil rights office
holder’s party tremble.” 61 Even before the nominating convention, a letter to the editor of
Asheville’s North Carolina Citizen predicted that Coleman would “move the mud-sills of
radicalism.”62 Coleman, as a representative of the Committee on Suffrage and Eligibility to
Office, offered an ordinance to disfranchise felons to the Convention. The amended suffrage
requirements would require that voters “have resided . . . ninety days in the county in which he

59

John Richard Dennett, The South as It Is, 1865- 1866 , originally series of articles in Nation between July 8, 1865
and April 11, 1865 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, reprint 2010); Foner, Second Founding, pp. 47-48,
110.
60
Coleman served as colonel of the 39th North Carolina Infantry, Bruce S. Allardice, Confederate Colonels: A
Biographical Register (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 105-106; Journal of the Constitutional
Convention of the State of North Carolina, Held in 1875 (Raleigh, NC: Josiah Turner, 1875), 112.
61
The Greensboro Patriot (Greensboro, NC), July 14, 1875; The Carolina Watchman (Salisbury, NC), July 8, 1875;
The North Carolina Citizen (Asheville, NC), May 13, 1875; “Our County Nominating Convention!” The North
Carolina Citizen (Asheville, NC), July 8, 1875.
62
“Copperhead,” “Convention Candidates,” The North Carolina Citizen (Asheville, NC), May 27, 1875.

28

 offers to vote,” and prevent any otherwise eligible voter who had been “adjudged guilty of
felony, or of any other crime infamous by the laws of this State” from participating in “any
election . . . unless such person shall be restored to the rights of citizenship.”63 As the
Wilmington Journal observed, this ordinance “excludes felons and ex-penitentiary convicts from
. . . voting unless restored to citizenship.”64 Unlike the 1840 statute that had disfranchised those
who had committed “infamous crimes,” this new restriction on suffrage extended to all North
Carolinians who committed any felony. And it was coupled with a new system of incarceration
of freedmen for such “crimes” as vagrancy and bad attitude.65
Democrats praised the changes to suffrage requirements. As the Cape Fear, a short-lived
Conservative Democratic newspaper, advocated, “this amendment offers a reward for honesty,
and a punishment for crime, and it is calculated to check much of the stealing that is going on in
the country.”66 The Tarborough Southerner made the same argument.67 Likewise, the Executive
Democratic Central Committee claimed that “a purification of the ballot box” would be a
consequence of felon disfranchisement.68
Democrats did not dispute that the effects of the law would be to disfranchise African
Americans, but particularly at this earlier stage of Reconstruction and before the Supreme Court
had weighed in on what was permissible and what was not, Democrats used coded language like
“purification” of the ballot box and “fraud.” Democrats were generally careful to use words like
“fraud,” “criminal,” and “purification” as code words for racism in fear that it would otherwise

63

“Constitutional Convention,” The Wilmington Morning Star (Wilmington, NC), October 8, 1875.
“Ordinances of the Convention,” The Wilmington Journal (Wilmington, NC), October 22, 1875.
65
Peter Wallenstein, “Slavery Under the Thirteenth Amendment: Race and the Law of Crime and Punishment in the
Post-Civil War South,” Louisiana Law Review, Vol 77, 2016, see esp. p. 6
66
“The Constitutional Amendments,” The Cape Fear (Wilmington, NC), October 18, 1876.
67
“The Amendments,” The Tarborough Southerner (Tarboro, NC), November 24, 1876.
68
“Address of the Executive Democratic Central Committee to the People of North Carolina,” The Raleigh News
(Raleigh, NC), June 23, 1875.
64

29

 be clear that they were acting in violation of the 13th, 14th, or 15th amendments of the
Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which explicitly gave rights of equality and
protection of those rights to African Americans.
Implicit racial appeals, like those used by the Conservative Democrats in justifying broad
felony-based disenfranchisement, communicate the same ideas as explicit racial appeals but do
so without using racial nouns or adjectives. They obliquely reference race and allude to “racial
stereotypes or a perceived threat” from racial or ethnic minorities. Political scientist Tali
Mendelberg defines an implicit racial appeal as “one that contains a recognizable – if subtle –
racial reference, most easily through visual references.”69 Legal historian Ian Haney Lopez
describes implicit racial appeals as a “coded racial appeal,” with “one core point of the code
being to foster deniability.” One characteristic of implicit racial appeals is that they are usually
most successful when their racial subtext goes undetected.70 Implicit racial appeals make use of
coded language to activate racial thinking.71 Racial cues, in the form of code words, such as
“lazy,” “manipulated,” “criminal,” “bestial,” “taking advantage,” “corruption,” “poverty,” and
“fraud” are racial code words that even when used in political campaigns today have their origins
in and often refer directly back to the Reconstruction era when African Americans successfully
asserted their citizenship rights and attained elected office, and prime racial attitudes in some
white voters.72
The white Democrats’ 1875 Constitutional Convention would also put other barriers to
racial equality in place, including, as historian Mark L. Bradley notes, “amendments that

69

Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 9, 11.
70
Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics, 130, 4.
71
Nicholas A. Valentino, Vincent L. Hutchings, and Ismail K. White. “Cues that Matter: How Political Ads Prime
Racial Attitudes During Elections,” American Political Science Review 96 (2002), 75-90.
72
Valentino, Hutchings, and White, “Cues that Matter,” 87.

30

 outlawed secret political organizations” – a blow to groups like the Union League and Equal
Rights League that acted to organize black political activism – alongside prohibitions on racially
integrated schools and interracial marriages.73 Furthermore, amendments to the North Carolina
Constitution in 1876 also legalized a system of convict-leasing, described by historian Douglas
Blackmon as “slavery by another name.” All of these other amendments were also racially
motivated, as was the decision to strip counties of the right to appoint judges. The judgestripping provision meant that the rights restoration process still governed by the 1840 statute
was unlikely to result in rights restoration for African Americans, since that process was
discretionary and depended on the individual judges, which voting disfranchisement laws
ensured would be white Democrats.74
The suffrage requirements of the 1876 Constitution were asserted to be a way to protect
“freedom of elections and the purity of the ballot box.”75 The Centennial of Warrenton, North
Carolina, also acknowledged that the new legislation would disproportionately impact black
North Carolinians when it claimed that “the great majority of the criminals are negroes.”
Nevertheless, The Centennial claimed, “the negro should vote for the ratification of the
amendment, because its adoption will tend to restrain their race from crime.”76 The Democratic
press used the debate over felony disfranchisement to characterize so-called “Radical”
Republicans as “unscrupulous” and criminal. The Raleigh News argued that “the debate on the
proposition to disfranchise for felony . . . shows the little regard the radicals have for the purity

73

Bradley, Bluecoats and Tar Heels, 260. For more information on black poltical organization during
Reconstruction, see Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From
Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003).
74
John V. Orth, The North Carolina State Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 26, 1783, 1875
Amendments to the NC Constitution of 1868, Amend. XXV, XXVI, XXX; Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By
Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America From the Civil War to World War II (New York:
Doubleday, 2008).
75
“How to Prevent Fraud at the Ballot Box,” The Daily Journal (Wilmington, NC), August 4, 1876.
76
The Centennial (Warrenton, NC), August 25, 1876.

31

 of the ballot,” and the Goldsboro Messenger accused Republicans of “rallying to the defence of
rogues and felons.”77
It is clear that felon disfranchisement was designed to destroy the power of the “radical”
Republicans in North Carolina, end “negro rule,” and reinstate white supremacy in the Old North
State. Professor William Alexander Mabry, in his study of black activism in North Carolina,
argues that these changes to suffrage requirements could “be used by the dominant party to
disfranchise considerable numbers of Negroes and to render less effective those votes actually
cast by the Negroes,” as they were “discriminations . . . against certain assumed characteristics of
his race.” Felony disfranchisement could be an especially powerful weapon against black voters,
since, as Mabry contends, “white registrars could be counted on to charge . . . that certain
Negroes seeking to register had been guilty of a crime and hence were ineligible to vote.” In
other words, the felonies selected were the felonies that white Democrats believed African
Americans more than whites committed, thus giving the law what one historian when observing
these same actions in South Carolina in 1895 called the “black squint of the law.”78 And the
white registrars and whites running the elections at the polling place provided the last step in
disfranchising potential African American voters.
Republicans strenuously opposed Coleman’s amendment, filibustering and attempting to
“clog the business of the Convention.”79 African American members of the Convention –
including James E. O’Hara, from Halifax in eastern North Carolina, John H. Smythe, from
Wilmington, and John O. Crosby, from Warrenton - were outspoken in their opposition to the

77

The Raleigh News (Raleigh, NC), October 8, 1875; The Goldsboro Messenger (Goldsboro, NC), October 11, 1875.
William Alexander Mabry, The Negro in North Carolina Since Reconstruction (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1940), 16-17; for “black squint,” see Orville Vernon Burton, “‘The Black Squint of the Law’: Racism in
South Carolina,” pp. 161-185, in The Meaning of South Carolina History: Essays in Honor of George C. Rogers,
Jr. Edited by David R. Chesnutt and Clyde N. Wilson. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).
79
“Proceedings of the Convention,” The Gleaner (Graham, NC), October 12, 1875.
78

32

 new restrictions. Black delegates to the Convention warned that these new restrictions would
“operate against the poor people” and “work hardship to both whites and blacks.”80 Smythe
argued that “this measure was intended to disfranchise his people,” and condemned the
amendment as “villainous,” a remark that led to him being “ruled down by the chair.”81 Oliver
H. Dockery, a white Republican from Rockingham, North Carolina who had served in the Fortyfirst Congress as the chairman of the Committee on the Freemen’s Bureau, also condemned the
suffrage amendment. During an address to the Third District’s Republican Convention in Troy in
June 1876, he argued that “the amendment disfranchising felons is brutal and cruel,” since “the
court house is the place to punish. After the criminal has suffered his punishment, for God’s sake
give him some chance.”82
North Carolina Republicans recognized that the new restrictions on suffrage –
particularly felony disfranchisement – specifically targeted black voters. White southerners in the
post-Civil War South “were convinced,” as historian Edward Ayers notes, of black criminality,
and white political leaders argued that African Americans were responsible for “a rising tide of
crime.”83 Although there is a distinct difference in a truly held belief, this trope was part of the
“othering” of African Americans by whites, and whites used and argued this stereotype for
political gain.84 In the years after the Civil War, white southerners claimed that “all negroes will
steal.”85 Even Daniel L. Russell, the Republican governor of North Carolina from 1897 to 1901,

80

The Newbern Weekly Journal of Commerce (New Bern, NC), October 16, 1875.
“Constitutional Convention,” The Wilmington Morning Star (Wilmington, NC), October 8, 1875.
82
The Randolph Regulator (Asheboro, NC), June 21, 1876; George Presbury Rowell, ed., George P. Rowell and
Company’s American Newspaper Directory (New York: George P. Rowell & Company, 1877), 235.
83
Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), 153.
84
The literature on “othering” developed from Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978;
Vintage ed. New York, 1994).
85
Theodore D. Bratton, “Race Cooperation in Church Work,” in Battling for Social Betterment: Southern
Sociological Congress, Memphis, Tennessee, May 6-10, 1914, James E. McCulloch, ed. (Nashville, TN: Southern
Sociological Congress, 1914), 152.
81

33

 reportedly claimed that “all Negroes are natural born thieves [emphasis in original]” who would
“steal six days in the week.” 86 This racial stereotype helped to prop up white supremacy in
North Carolina and the South as a whole. Immediately after the end of the Civil War, white
North Carolinians had increased the penalties for petty larceny, making even “the intent to steal”
a crime, and prosecuting attempted theft as larceny.87 As historian Leon Litwack contends, “by
the late nineteenth century, the criminal justice system operated with particular efficiency in
upholding the absolute power of white people to demand and obtain the submission . . . of black
men and women.”88
Republicans also opposed felony disfranchisement because they believed that it would
discriminate against poor whites, since they lacked the resources to petition to have their
citizenship rights restored. Frank Woodfin, a white Republican from Henderson County, argued
that the suffrage amendment was “unjust and calculated to work harm to the poor people.”89 At a
meeting in Alexander County in May 1876, Republicans adopted a resolution stating their
opposition to the “partizan [sic]” suffrage amendment, as it was “depriving many of the poor
people of the State of that sacred right.”90 White Democrats, meanwhile, supported felony
disenfranchisement as a tool of wealth-based disenfranchisement, because a “coalition of lowerclass white farmers and African Americans” were “posing a serious threat to the political power
of white Democrats in the state.”91
Because they understood that the suffrage amendment would disproportionately impact
African Americans and poor North Carolinians, Republican legislators overwhelmingly opposed

86

“To The Colored People of New Hanover County,” The Daily Review (Wilmington, NC), August 17, 1888.
Foner, Reconstruction, 202.
88
Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1998),
248.
89
“State Constitutional Convention,” The Evening Review (Wilmington, NC), October 8, 1875.
90
“Public Meeting in Alexander,” The Statesville American (Statesville, NC), May 27, 1876.
91
Holloway, Living in Infamy, at 92.
87

34

 the new suffrage limitations. As the Goldsboro Messenger noted, “the Republicans generally
opposed the passage and spoke against it.”92 Indeed, the suffrage amendment was opposed by all
but two Republicans in the 1875 Constitutional Convention. Notably, the two Republicans who
voted for the amendment – Thomas J. Dula of Wilkesboro and B. R. Hinnant of Micro, North
Carolina (in Johnston County) – were both white. Every African American representative voted
against the felony disenfranchisement provision, as they were aware that, despite the protests of
white Democrats, this provision was a calculated and deliberate attempt to disfranchise black
voters in the face of the Fifteenth Amendment.93
After the 1875 Amendments to the North Carolina Constitution were ratified on
November 7, 1876, and as federal troops withdrew from North Carolina, the General Assembly
got down to the business of enforcing these new restrictions on suffrage.94 The Legislature of
1876-1877 passed “an act to regulate elections” in March 1877, which provided that “persons
who . . . have been adjudged guilty of felony or other crime infamous by laws of this state”
would “not be allowed to register to vote.”95 White Democrat John S. Henderson, of Rowan,
chaired the committee of the House of Representatives that prepared this legislation.96
Henderson was an outspoken supporter of felony disfranchisement. In January 1876, he had
argued that “none but the most obstinate, hardened and inveterate felons and thieves ought to
object to the denial of the privilege of voting to those, who shall . . . be adjudged guilty of felony
or other infamous crime.”97 Henderson was also deeply committed to maintaining the

92

“The Constitutional Convention,” The Goldsboro Messenger (Goldsboro, NC), October 11, 1875.
“Republican Record on the Amendments,” The People’s Press (Salem, NC), October 19, 1876; “The
Convention,” The Newbern Journal of Commerce (New Bern, NC), September 4, 1875.
94
The Observer (Raleigh, NC), December 22, 1876.
95
“The Legislature,” The Wilmington Morning Star (Wilmington, NC), March 9, 1877; “The Election Law,” The
Carolina Watchman (Salisbury, NC), March 29, 1877.
96
“Our Next Congressional Election,” The Observer (Raleigh, NC), November 8, 1877.
97
John S. Henderson, “The Proposed Constitutional Amendments,” The Carolina Watchman (Salisbury, NC),
January 6, 1876.
93

35

 boundaries of Jim Crow. In 1906, he presided over the lynching of three African-American men
accused of murdering the Lylerly family at Barber Junction, near Salisbury, North Carolina. On
the evening of August 6, 1906, Nease Gillespie, John Gillespie, and Jack Dillingham were
paraded down Main Street to the Henderson baseball ground, across the street from Henderson’s
house, and lynched before a “bloodthirsty” mob of more than two thousand white citizens.98
Alongside the felon disfranchisement statute, Henderson and the General Assembly also
imposed stricter penalties for North Carolinians who attempted to vote without having their
citizenship rights restored. Chapter 275, Section 63 of the Public Laws of the State of North
Carolina decreed that “if any person so convicted shall vote at any election, without having been
legally restored to the rights of citizenship, he shall be deemed guilty of an infamous crime, and
on conviction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or
imprisonment at hard labor not exceeding two years, or both.” This would have been an onerous
penalty – in 1900, $1000 had the same buying power as more than $30,000 in 2020, and, in the
South as a whole, the per capita income of blacks was $40.01, and the per capita income of
whites was $65.43.99
The 1875 constitutional amendment and the 1877 statute were different from the 1840
felony disfranchisement statute because these new postbellum laws disenfranchised all felons,
not just those convicted of “infamous” crimes like treason. It is no coincidence that after
Reconstruction, when felony disfranchisement turned into a tool to disenfranchise black people,
it was used much more broadly than it was before the war when it just applied to whites. Not
only did white Democrats expand the categories of crimes that exposed North Carolinians to

98

“Three Are Lynched,” The Madison County Record (Marshall, NC), August 10, 1906.
Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at Its Session 1876-’77
(Raleigh, NC: The Raleigh News, 1877), 537; Kenneth Ng and Nancy Virts, “The Black-White Income Gap in
1880,” Agricultural History 67, no. 1 (Winter 1993), 8.
99

36

 disenfranchisement, they added the punishment for voting just described. During the pre-civil
war period when felony disenfranchisement only applied to whites, because black people were
disenfranchised in general, the laws did not provide for the same harsh punishments that were
imposed when North Carolina started using felony disenfranchisement as a tool to disenfranchise
blacks.100
The 1875 Constitutional Convention marked the beginning of a decades-long process of
the undermining of the democratic reforms of the interracial North Carolina legislature of
Reconstruction in what some historians, borrowing the term coined by white southerners, call
“Redemption,” but what is better understood not in the beautiful and symbolic language of
religion, but as a counterrevolution by white Democrats to restore white supremacy and the old
order in North Carolina, especially as they systematically sought to undermine voting rights for
black North Carolinians. Felon disfranchisement was just the beginning. As legal scholar Daniel
S. Goldman notes, “felon voting restrictions were the first widespread set of legal
disenfranchisement measures imposed on African Americans.”101 The calls that followed to build
on these measures to further “purify the ballot box” were closely linked to white North
Carolinians’ paranoia of “negro domination.”102
v.

Emergence of Fusion Political Power, the Resurgence of White Supremacy, and the
Disfranchisement Constitutional Amendment
In the 1890s, white Populists, mostly aggrieved non-elite farmers, and black and white

Republicans enjoyed a short-lived return to power in the form of a fusion coalition party. In
1892, raising issues with the Democratic Presidential nominee Grover Cleveland and the North

100

Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at Its Session 1876-’77
(Raleigh, NC: The Raleigh News, 1877), 537
101
Daniel S. Goldman, “The Modern-Day Literacy Test?: Felon Disenfranchisement and Race Discrimination,”
Stanfrod Law Review 57, no. 2 (Nov., 2004): 625.
102
“Benefits of the Amendment,” The Semi-Weekly Messenger (Wilmington, NC), June 8, 1900.

37

 Carolina Democratic Party’s refusal to allow votes on split tickets, Marion Butler, from a
yeoman background, became president of the North Carolina Farmers Alliance and led some
white Farmers Alliance members out of the North Carolina Democratic Party into the People’s
Party, or Populist Party. Working together, the Populists and Republican allies, despite suffrage
restrictions, successfully took control of the 1895 General Assembly. They sent two white men,
a Populist, Marion Butler, and a Republican, Jeter Pritchard, to the United States Senate; elected
a Republican governor, Daniel L. Russell; and gained majorities on the supreme court and the
superior courts.103 Fifty-nine African Americans were in the North Carolina House and 18 in the
Senate between 1876 and 1900, and from 1868 to 1901, four African Americans were elected to
Congress from North Carolina’s “Black Second,” including George White, who was the last
black representative from the American South until 1973.104
Such success proved ephemeral. With a battle cry of “Negro Domination,” a political
debacle created by the Populist Party’s endorsement of Democratic candidate William Jennings
Bryan in the 1896 presidential campaign, and a terrorist campaign of white supremacy, the
interracial alliance splintered. The Democratic message of white supremacy continued to gain
political value while white violence, terrorism, and suppression removed African American
political power. Ultimately, when George White lost his seat in 1901, he prophesized: “This, Mr.
Chairman, is perhaps the Negro’s temporary farewell to the American Congress, but let me say
that, Phoenix-like, he will rise up and come again.”105

103

Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 2001), 149.
104
Keech and Sistrom, “North Carolina,” p. 157.
105
Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 2d session, vol. 34, pt. 2 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1901), pp. 1635, 1636, 1638. Speech is online at University of Washington, An Online Reference Guide to African
American History, blackpast.org at http://www.blackpast.org/?q=1901-gorge-h-white-s-farewell-address-congress

38

 A series of Supreme Court decisions would help keep that phoenix from rising any time
soon by encouraging further racist legislation to prevent African Americans from voting. The
implicit stamp of approval from the federal government’s own Justices eliminated any doubts
about the viability of disfranchising schemes. North Carolina (1900), Louisiana (1898), Alabama
(1901), Virginia (1902), and Georgia (1908) joined Mississippi (1890) and South Carolina
(1896) in legally disenfranchising African Americans by adopting new disfranchising
constitutions, adding disfranchising amendments to existing constitutions (as was done in North
Carolina), or by adding statutes designed to eliminate black political activism. By the end of the
1880s, the United States Supreme Court’s decisions effectively neutered the Reconstruction-era
constitutional amendments and laws designed to protect the freed people.
In 1896 and in 1898, the Supreme Court sent a clear message to the former Confederate
states when they blessed racial disfranchisement and racial apartheid, the twin pillars of white
supremacy, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Williams v. Mississippi (1898). Following the
Court’s lead, racist rhetoric became even more blatant. From North Carolina’s neighbor to the
north, Carter Glass, a leader of the Virginia constitutional convention in 1902, used the words
approved by the Supreme Court in Williams v. Mississippi (“permissible action under the
limitations of the federal constitution”) to explain how driving African Americans from the
voting booth fit perfectly within the Supreme Court’s conception of the 15th Amendment:
“Discrimination! Why that is precisely what we propose, that, exactly, is what this convention
was called for – to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations
of the Federal Constitution.” Glass stated the purpose was “the elimination of every Negro voter
who can be gotten rid of legally without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white

39

 electorate.”106 By the word “legally,” he simply meant that it was with the Supreme Court’s
approval. In Louisiana the leader of the state’s constitutional convention, Ernest B. Kruttschnitt,
got to the bottom line in fewer words when he spoke about the literacy test: “What care I whether
it be more or less ridiculous or not? Doesn’t it let the white man vote, and doesn’t it stop the
negro from voting, and isn’t that what we came here for?”107
In 1898 the leaders of North Carolina’s state Democratic Party – in particular, state
chairman Furnifold Simmons – organized a campaign designed to destroy the alliance between
Populists and Republicans and forever break the power of black political activism. As historian
Michael Perman observes, “Simmons unleashed an election campaign of extraordinary
belligerence and intensity,” where “race . . . was the essence of the Democrats’ attack.”108 On the
eve of the election in November 1898, Simmons, in an address to the voters of North Carolina,
declared that “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 dare to attempt to establish negro rule here.”109 The “white supremacy” campaign in 1898
was brought to a conclusion in an outrageous explosion of racial violence in Wilmington, North
Carolina, where a black majority and an active “fusion” biracial coalition of Republicans and
Populists had previously succeeded in rising to power in the municipal government, including
the mayor’s office. White Democrats were determined to end “negro domination” in their city.
Colonel Alfred M. Waddell, the leader of the white supremacy movement in Wilmington,
declared that “we will not live under these intolerable conditions,” and announced their

106

Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South(New York:
Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 86.
107

Michael Perman, Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2010) p. 177.
108
Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 158.
109
“The Campaign In North Carolina,” The Wilmington Morning Star (Wilmington, NC), November 3, 1898.

40

 intentions to “change it, if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear river with carcasses.”110
Beginning on November 10, 1898, white supremacists in Wilmington went on a two-day
rampage, murdering African Americans, ransacking their community, and destroying a
prominent black newspaper. They installed themselves in the “elected” positions, and neither
state nor federal forces intervened in this coup d’état.111
In the wake of this massacre, in the election of 1898, the Democrats, determined to
“rescue” North Carolina from “low-born scum and quondam slaves,” recaptured the General
Assembly. When the new Democratic-controlled legislature convened in January 1899, one of its
first orders of business was the disfranchisement of black voters. In February 1899, the General
Assembly passed an amendment to the North Carolina Constitution that imposed literacy tests
and poll taxes and introduced a “grandfather clause” exception for any voter “who was on
January 1, 1866, or any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under the laws of any State in the
United States wherein he then resided” or a “lineal descendant of any such person.”112 (Very
similar to President Andrew Johnson’s grandfather clause in his May 29, 1865 “Proclamation
Establishing Government for North Carolina”). Democrats in North Carolina in 1898 -99 made
no attempt to disguise the purpose of the suffrage amendment – its intent was “to secure white
supremacy.”113
Even as they implemented broad suffrage restrictions, Democrats emphasized the need

110

Alfred M. Waddell, “The Story of the Wilmington, North Carolina, Race Riots,” The Farmer and Mechanic
(Raleigh, NC), November 29, 1898.
111
Orville Vernon Burton, The Age of Lincoln (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), p. 358; David S. Cecelski and
Timothy B.Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and its Legacy (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998); H. Leon Prather, We Have Taken a City: The Wilmington Racial
Massacre and Coup of 1898 (Cranbury, NJ: Farliegh Dickson University Press, 1984); LeRae Silks Umfleet, A Day
of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot (Raliegh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2009)
112
“Some Verses for North Carolina,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), July 26, 1900; “The Suffrage
Amendment,” The County Union (Dunn, NC), February 22, 1898.
113
“To Secure White Supremacy,” The Smithfield Herald (Smithfield, NC), April 14, 1899.

41

 for “rigid safeguards” concerning the suffrage of “ex-convicts.” In their 1898 Democratic Hand
Book, prepared by the State Democratic Executive Committee, they argued that “the Democratic
registration laws required particularity” because the Republican Party had registered “exconvicts and boys under twenty-one years of age.” The Democrats claimed that felon
disfranchisement, along with other suffrage restrictions, was necessary “to suppress fraud and
protect white suffrage” and prevent “the honest vote of a white man in North Carolina” from
being “off-set by the vote of some negro.”114 In the general election of 1900, North Carolina
approved the disfranchisement amendment by a 59% to 41% margin. The effort was successful by 1910 “almost no blacks voted,” and white voting decreased “substantially.”115
With “white supremacy” all but guaranteed, Democrats in North Carolina began to take a
more relaxed attitude towards the issue of felony disfranchisement. On Wednesday, January 18,
1899, William Houston Carroll, of Burlington (in Alamance County), introduced H.B. 349, “an
act to . . . facilitate the restoration to the rights of citizenship in certain cases.” Less than two
weeks before, on January 9, Francis D. Winston of Bertie County had introduced what would
become North Carolina’s 1900 suffrage amendment.116 During the debate over H.B. 349, Carroll
explained his justification for the legislation. In a story that Raleigh’s Morning Post described as
“not unlike the reading of a good novel,” the representative from Alamance County related that,
in 1897, Charles E. McLean, the mayor of Burlington, along with the board of commissioners,
had disinterred the body of Nathaniel Small, who had been buried in a lot in the town cemetery,

114

State Democratic Executive Committee of North Carolina, The Democratic Hand Book, 1898 (Raleigh: Edwards
and Broughton, 1898), 84.
115
William R. Kreech and Michael P. Sistrom, “North Carolina,” in Quiet Revolution in the South, ed. Chandler
Davidson and Bernard Groffman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 158; J. Morgan Kousser, The
Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party south, 1880-1910 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 183-195.
116
Journal of the House and Representatives of the General Assembly of North Carolina, Session 1899 (Raleigh,
NC: Edwards and Broughton, and E.M. Uzzell, 1899), 32; 139;

42

 after his next-of-kin had refused to pay for his plot, and reinterred Small’s body into the free part
of the cemetery reserved for indigent citizens. Small’s family, who were (justifiably) outraged by
the actions of McLean and the commissioners, “had them arrested and convicted of felony,”
thereby disfranchising almost the entire municipal government of Burlington. This conviction
was upheld by the North Carolina Supreme Court, in State v. McLean et al., though McLean and
the six commissioners were pardoned by Governor Daniel L. Russell a month later, in December
1897. Carroll was quick to reassure his colleagues that this legislation was “to cover the
Alamance case,” rather than to apply to any other counties. Nevertheless, legislators from Swain,
Lenoir, Wake, Mitchell, and Greene counties introduced amendments to exempt their counties
from being covered by the statute. These amendments were rejected, and the House passed the
bill on January 26.117 The Senate passed the legislation on February 1.118 H. B. 349 amended
chapter 26, section 2941 of the Code of North Carolina, and stipulated that:
Section 1. That section two thousand nine hundred and forty- one of The Code be amended
by adding thereto the following: Provided. That any person who may have been heretofore,
or shall hereafter be convicted of any crime whereby the rights of citizenship are forfeited,
and the judgment of the court pronounced does not include imprisonment anywhere, and
pardon has been granted by the governor, such person may be restored to such forfeited
rights of citizenship upon application, by petition, to the judge presiding at any term of the

117

The Morning Post (Raleigh, NC), January 27, 1899; “The State Supreme Court,” The Charlotte Observer
(Charlotte, NC), November 11, 1897; The Southeastern Reporter, vol. 28 (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co.,
1898), 140-144; “Only Technically Guilty,” The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), December 17, 1897; Journal of
the House and Representatives of the General Assembly of North Carolina, Session 1899 (Raleigh, NC: Edwards
and Broughton, and E.M. Uzzell, 1899), 240-241; “A Busy Day With Rather Small Bills,” The Morning Post
(Raleigh, NC), January 27, 1899.
118
Journal of the Senate of the General Assembly of North Carolina, Session 1899 (Raleigh, NC: Edwards and
Broughton, and E.M. Uzzell, 1899), 223.

43

 superior court held for the county in which the conviction was had, one year after such
conviction.
Sec. 2. The petition shall set out the nature of the crime committed, the time of conviction,
the judgment of the court, and that pardon has been granted by the governor, and also, that
said crime was committed without felonious intent, and shall be verified by the oath of the
applicant and accompanied by the Verified by oath affidavits of ten reputable citizens of
the county, who shall state that they are well acquainted with the applicant and that in their
opinion the crime was committed without felonious intent.
H. B. 349 allowed for a more speedy restoration of citizenship rights in certain cases, as
before 1899 persons convicted of felonies or infamous crimes were required to wait for four
years after being convicted before submitting a petition to the Superior Court to have their
citizenship rights restored.119 The legislation proposed by Carroll could potentially help to
expedite the restoration of citizenship rights to former convicts, but, as noted above, his intention
was merely to solve a specific political conundrum relating to white politicians, and certainly not
to enfranchise African Americans. In fact, in 1900 Carroll, who was the chairman of the
Democratic Party in Alamance County, was praised for leading “the good white people of
Alamance” in defeating “the possibility of a return to negro domination” and succeeding in “the
elimination of the great bulk of the negro vote from politics.”120
The next change to the process by which former convicts could have their citizenship
rights restored came in 1905, when Walter C. Feimster, an attorney from Newton who

119

Public Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina Passed By the General Assembly At Its Session of
1899, Begun and Held in the City of Raleigh on Wednesday, the Fourth Day of January, A.D. 1899 (Raleigh, NC:
Edwads and Broughton and E.M. Uzzell, 1899), 139-141; The Code of North Carolina, Enacted March 2, 1883, vol.
II (New York: Banks and Brothers Law Publishers, 1883), 271.
120
“A Glorious Victory!,” The Alamance Gleaner (Graham, NC), August 9, 1900.

44

 represented Catawba County in the House as a Democrat, proposed a bill, H.B. 1764, designed to
allow citizens to reclaim their citizenship rights if the court suspended judgment. Feimster’s
legislation, proposed on February 28, passed by the House on March 3 and by the Senate on
March 6, seems to have seen little debate – no discussion of the bill was recorded in either the
Raleigh News and Observer or Morning Post’s daily legislative summaries, and no amendments
were offered to the legislation in either the House or the Senate.121 It is significant that, as white
Democrats’ “white supremacy” campaign came to fruition, those same Democrats evidenced a
willingness to make it easier for some people with felony convictions to vote. With “the
elimination of the great bulk of the negro vote from politics,” felony disfranchisement was no
longer the essential bulwark of democracy in North Carolina.122 Instead, the disenfranchisement
of felons was a recipe for inconvenient situations (as State v. McLean, et al. illustrates) where the
ruling class could lose their suffrage rights. Simply put, white Democrats were concerned about
felony disenfranchisement when it was an important part of their toolkit to keep black North
Carolinians from voting, and once Democrats were able to reassert white supremacy in North
Carolina (beginning in 1898) they made the process of restoring citizenship rights more easily
achievable (especially for white North Carolinians who had the clout in their communities to
secure ten witnesses who could testify that their crime had been committed without felonious
intent or the connections to acquire a pardon from the governor).

121

“The County Democratic Ticket,” The Newton Enterprise (Newton, NC), September 9, 1904; “Representative
W.C. Feimster,” The Newton Enterprise (Newton, NC), March 10, 1905; “House Passed Ward Bill By Vote of 74
to 35,” The Morning Post (Raleigh, NC), March 1, 1905; “Legislature Has Ended Its Work,” The News and
Observer (Raleigh, NC), March 7, 1905; Journal of the House and Representatives of the General Assembly of
North Carolina, Session 1905 (Raleigh, NC: E.M. Uzzell & Co., 195), 1042, 1226; Journal of the Senate of the
General Assembly of North Carolina, Session 1905 (Raleigh, NC: E.M. Uzzell, 1905), 967; Public Laws and
Resolutions of the State of North Carolina Passed By the General Assembly At Its Session of 1905, Begun and Held
in the City of Raleigh on Wednesday, the Fourth Day of January, A.D. 1905 (Raleigh, NC: E.M. Uzzell & Co.,
1905), 139-141.
122
“A Glorious Victory!,” The Alamance Gleaner (Graham, NC), August 9, 1900.

45

 VII. Felony Disfranchisement in the Twentieth Century
Between 1905 and 1971, statutory felony disfranchisement remained virtually
untouched. At the same time, though largely disfranchised, African Americans continued to fight
the twin pillars of Jim Crow, disfranchisement and segregation. In 1917, there were three
branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), by
1955 there were 12,000 members in 83 branches in North Carolina. The NAACP in Horcutt v.
Wilson (1933) challenged Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) separate but equal, but lost at the North
Carolina Superior Court which upheld the denial of the admission of Thomas R. Horcutt, an
African American, to the University of North Carolina Pharmacy School. But in 1953 the
NAACP prevailed at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit where Floyd B. McKissick
(future executive director of the Congress of Racial Equality --CORE) sued for admission to the
University of North Carolina Law school. In 1942 the NAACP supported the “Durham
Manifesto,” denouncing segregation. In 1947, the NAACP assisted CORE’s “The Journey of
Reconciliation,” their first freedom ride where 16 black and white riders of the bus were jailed.
During the volatile years of the 1960s and 70s, following Brown v. Board of Education (1954),
black North Carolinians protested through the sit-in movement, most famously in Greensboro in
February 1960, and began to achieve greater access to their rights as citizens. The achievements
of this period included the momentous passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. But it was also a time of great peril to African Americans asserting their
rights, a time which saw the revitalization of the Klan in North Carolina, the assassination of
Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, the rise of the Black Power Movement, and the escalation of the
War in Vietnam. The Klan was particularly virulent in North Carolina, where more progressive
governors, like Terry Sanford, allowed the Klan, which became the largest and most powerful

46

 KKK in the era, to claim that they, not the state government, were the only “authorities” who
could be depended on to defend white supremacy. In 1958, a Klan rally near Maxton, North
Carolina in Robeson County was broken up by local Lumbee Indians, and in Monroe, North
Carolina, civil rights leader Robert F. Williams and other members of the Monroe NAACP were
forced to arm themselves to repel the Klan.123 In 1972, national attention was drawn to North
Carolina by accusations of “politically charged” convictions of the “Wilmington Ten,” including
the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, and the “Charlotte Three.” When Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg
County (1971) allowed busing to end segregated schools, the segregationist Alabama Governor
George Wallace won the 1972 North Carolina Democratic Presidential Primary, and there was a
decided shift towards the Republican Party among white voters.124
As African Americans began to eliminate other barriers to voting, the United States
Congress passed legislation protecting all Americans’ civil rights and the United States Supreme
Court struck down discriminatory laws, felon disfranchisement came again to be used as a tool to
prevent African Americans and poor North Carolinians from exercising their citizenship rights.
By 1970, in North Carolina the constitutional provisions disfranchising felons, as well as the
statutory restrictions on felons’ citizenship rights, had been largely unchanged for almost a
century. In part, this reflects the fact that, as legal scholar John L. Sanders argues, “with the
passage of time and amendments, the attitude towards the Constitution of 1868 had changed

123

David Cunningham, Klansville, U.S.A. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), ix; “Bad Medicine for the
Klan,” LIFE , January 27, 1958; Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black
Power (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
124
Gavins, “North Carolina,” pp. 567-68.

47

 from resentment to a reverence so great that until the second third of the twentieth century,
amendments were very difficult to obtain.”125
By the 1950s, felon disfranchisement was regarded by many North Carolinians as an
often ignored and seldom enforced legislative oddity. A 1957 article in the Charlotte Observer
claimed that “despite the fact that felony convictions roll monthly from Superior Courts all over
the state, it’s nobody’s job to tell the local election boards about it.” Mecklenburg County’s
Election Board’s secretary, Mrs. R. O. Fortenbery, remarked that “no one connected with the
courts ever sends the board a list of convictions.” R.C. Maxwell, the chairman of the State Board
of Elections, asserted that “there’s no administration set up . . . because there aren’t enough
convictions to justify it.” Instead, Maxwell said, “it’s handled mainly on the basis of handling the
individual voter.” Furthermore, according to Superior Court Judge (and future governor) Dan K.
Moore, relatively few convicted felons petitioned to have their citizenship restored. Moore
claimed that “usually they just go on and vote, and nobody knows the difference.”126 While this
suggests that this statute may have been seldom enforced (at least in Mecklenburg County), it
also makes it clear that it was enforced arbitrarily, at the whim of local election officials. In
1940, just 5 percent of eligible African Americans were registered to vote, but by 1956, 20
percent were registered, and by 1960 a third. But it is also in the 1950s that “the state legislature
mounted a more concentrated effort to dilute black votes,” when “the threat of the black vote
loomed larger and the national legal campaign disfranchisement gained momentum.”127

125

John L. Sanders, “A Brief History of the Constitutions of North Carolina,” in North Carolina Government, 15851979: A Narrative and Statistical History, John L. Cheney, Jr., ed. (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Department of the
Secretary of State, 1981), 798.
126
Loye Miller, “Extra Penalty For Felons: They Lose the Right to Vote,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC),
January 13, 1957.
127
Kreech and Sistrom, “North Carolina,” p. 159.

48

 Disenfranchising people convicted of felonies mainly served two purposes in North
Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s – as a threat for would-be offenders, and as a justification for
the state’s resistance to voting rights legislation. An editorial in the Daily Times-News of
Burlington, North Carolina warned young people that if they were convicted of a felony they
would “have no voice in public affairs,” and that it would “be humiliating” to petition to have
their citizenship rights reinstated.128 Obviously some North Carolinians saw the risk of
disfranchisement as a deterrent from committing felonies. But as national attention turned to the
South, with national legislation attacking vote disfranchisement and segregation in the South,
with the end of the white primary in Smith v. Alright in 1944, and then the landmark case on
public school desegregation Brown v. Board in 1954, many white southern Democratic party
leaders clung to felony disfranchisement as a pretext for southern states’ control of the elective
franchise.
Democrats and white supremacists normalized disenfranchising people convicted of
felonies and built support for resistance to voting rights legislation by twisting the past into a
mirror image of reality. The histories taught in the North Carolina public schools derived from
the distorted story white Democrats had told of the horrors of the integrated Republican party
emphasized the “tragedy of Reconstruction” as part of the “lost cause ideology” that dominated
white southern culture and still resonates among many. Naming Reconstruction the “tragic era”
solidified that interpretation in the historiography. A Democratic Party apparatchik dubbed
Reconstruction the “tragic era” following the 1928 election because Democrats feared losing the
South in future elections.129 History written after the overthrow of Reconstruction and during the
time of Jim Crow continued this particularly noxious and wrong-headed interpretation of

128
129

“Judge’s Remarks to Two Youths,” The Daily Times-News (Burlington, NC), June 17, 1969.
Charles Bowers, Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1929).

49

 Reconstruction where supposedly northern “carpetbaggers” (derisively called so because they
supposedly carried all their earthly belongings in those cheap bags as they came South to exploit
fallen Confederates), turncoat poor white “scalawags,” and ignorant former slaves, who were
manipulated by their white partners in crime, all made a mockery out of “honest government”.
This interpretation was wrong—both morally and intellectually—but public schools of
the former Confederacy taught this narrative well into the 1980s.130 Thus, schooled in this
“tragic era” propaganda, the argument – that voting rights legislation would allow “unqualified”
citizens to vote – was popular among opponents to the Civil Rights Movement. Senator Herman
Talmadge of the neighboring state of Georgia was an advocate of “states’ rights” who helped to
formulate the strategy of interposition and who, while serving as governor of Georgia, declared
that “as long as I am your Governor, Negroes will not be admitted to white schools,” resorted to
this argument.131 Talmadge insisted that erasing literacy tests and other limits on suffrage “would
even permit people who were lunatics and idiots and imbeciles and convicted felons to vote.”132
White Democrats in North Carolina also found this reductio ad absurdum argument convincing,
since it allowed them to claim that even “unconfined idiots and unconfined felons” would be
allowed to vote if voting rights legislation passed.133 This argument about felon voting persisted,
even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. J. Brian Scott, a moderate Democrat

130

David Earl Morgan, “The Treatment of the Reconstruction Period in United States History as Reflected in
American High School History Textbooks, 1890-1983.” Dissertation. Loyola University Chicago, 1985
Available from https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss; Thomas B. Bailey, ''Historical Interpretation of the
Reconstruction Era in United States History As Reflected in Southern State Required Secondary School Level
Textbooks of State Histories." Dissertation. University of New Mexico, 1967; John David Smith and J. Vincent
Lowery, eds., The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (Lexington: The
University of Kentucky Press, 2013).
131
Aucoin, “The Southern Manifesto and Southern Opposition to Desegregation,” 179; M.L. St. John, “Segregation
to Remain – Talmadge,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), June 6, 1950.
132
86th Cong., 2nd Session, Congressional Record 106, pt. 5: 6722 (1960).
133
“Proposed Amendment Is Unwise,” The Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, NC), October 1, 1959; Brent J.
Aucoin, “The Southern Manifesto and Southern Opposition to Desegregation,” The Arkansas Historical Association
55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 173-193.

50

 from Rocky Mount who was a local chairman for Robert W. Scott’s gubernatorial campaign in
1968 (and who in turn was appointed as the chairman of the North Carolina Board of Elections
by Scott in 1969), complained in 1970 that amendments to the Voting Rights Act “abolished all
prerequisites for voting as we know them,” and warned that while “right now felons are not
allowed to vote, but under the new act this prerequisite may well be abolished.”134
With passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Henry Frye, a Democrat from Guilford County,
was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1968, becoming the first African American
elected to the state legislature in the twentieth century (and later Chief Justice of the state
Supreme Court from 1999-2001).135 Frye tells a telling and compelling story about being denied
voter registration due to the state’s literacy test as recently as 1956, although he was a college
graduate and a Korean War veteran of the U.S. Air Force.136 In 1970, North Carolina voters
rejected a proposal, sponsored by Henry Frye, to repeal the literacy test. In a referendum held on
November 3, 1970, voters defeated the proposal by margin of 44% for and 56% against.137
In 1971, the suffrage requirements of the North Carolina Constitution were amended, but
the provision for felony disenfranchisement first added in 1875 remained. The revised Article
VI states that:
“No person adjudged guilty of a felony against this State or the United States, or
adjudged guilty of a felony in another state that also would be a felony if it had been

134

“Mrs. Scott Will Attend Headquarters Opening,” The Rocky Mount Telegram (Rocky Mount, NC), April 3, 1968;
‘Scott Names to NC Election Board,” The Rocky Mount Telegram (Rocky Mount, NC), November 19, 1969;
“Elections Chief Flays Voting Act,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), September 12, 1970.
135
Keech and Sistrom, “North Carolina,” 166.
136
Howard Covington, Henry Frye: North Carolina’s First African American Chief Justice (McFarland, 2013), 50.
See the Southern Oral History Project, UNC, interview,
https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/sohp/id/7856/rec/4
137
Literacy Test Proposal Loses,” The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), November 5, 1970; Rob Christensen, The
Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalities, Elections, and Events that Shaped Modern North Carolina (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 264.

51

 committed in this State, shall be permitted to vote unless that person shall be first restored
to the rights of citizenship in the manner prescribed by law.”138
The amended Article VI was substantively similar to the North Carolina constitution’s felony
disenfranchisement provisions from the Jim Crow era.139
Felony disfranchisement became a controversial issue in North Carolina in the 1970s, in
part because of increased policing of illicit drug possession. John R. Friday, a judge in the North
Carolina Superior Court for Gaston County (and the brother of William C. Friday, the president
of the University of North Carolina system from 1956 to 1986), viewed the disfranchisement of
felons – particularly of young people – as “tragic.” Friday deliberately asked “young drug
offenders” if they were aware that, by committing a felony, they had forfeited their citizenship
rights under North Carolina law. In North Carolina, state law made possession of more than five
grams of marijuana, and the possession of any amount of heroin, a felony. Even though Friday
insisted that “it breaks my heart to see them in court knowing they’re ruining their lives,” he still
believed that “the law about citizenship loss is a good one,” since “it is a deterrent to further
crime.” Friday argued that, since “felonies are serious crimes and possession of drugs is
serious,” it was fitting for former convicts to have to go through the arduous and emotional
process of having their citizenship rights restored.140 It is key to note, however, that Friday’s
views were not held by all of North Carolina’s public officials. John A. Faircloth, the chief of the
Greensboro Police Department, argued that, “to give our children a second chance, the first
offense possession of marijuana should be a misdemeanor, not a felony.” He believed that it was

138

N.C. Const., Art. VI, § 2, cl. 3.
“The Suffrage Amendment,” The County Union (Dunn, NC), February 22, 1899; 1875 Amendments to the N.C.
Constitution of 1868, Amend. XXIV.
140
“Drug Violators Lose Citizenship,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), October 28, 1972; “Citizenship
Loss Hit By Attorney,” The Charlotte News (Charlotte, NC), November 22, 1972.
139

52

 not fair that “the 16 or 17-year-old who tried one marijuana cigarette . . . could . . . lose his right
to vote . . . all because he smoked on marijuana cigarette.”141 North Carolina Attorney General
Robert Morgan recommended to the Governor’s Committee on Drug Abuse in 1970 that “the
committee consider the merits of legislation which would expunge the record of a young first
offender.”142 It is unsurprising that white public officials would have comfort calling for the
selective decriminalization of marijuana, since, as historian Matthew D. Lassiter points out,
beginning in the 1950s a “cultural and political script of racialized pushers and white middleclass victims” shaped the policing of marijuana use, possession, and distribution, leading to more
lenient attitudes towards victimized (white) marijuana users and harsher penalties for “urban and
foreign ‘pushers.’”143
Perhaps because of the bureaucratic and legal hurdles in the way of regaining full
citizenship, relatively few North Carolinians seemed to have been able to have their rights
restored. For example, in 1971 an official at the Gaston County superior court observed that “a
half dozen or less” had petitioned for the restoration of their citizenship rights in the past twenty
years.144 On February 23, 1971, Representative Joy Johnson from Robeson County (who at the
time was one of two black representatives in the General Assembly) introduced H.B. 285, titled
“an act to amend chapter 13 of the General Statutes to Require the Automatic Restoration of
Citizenship To Any Person Who Has Forfeited Such Citizenship Due to Committing a Crime and
Has Either Been Pardoned Or Completed His Sentence.”145 The Rocky Mountain Telegram

141

“Official Asks Review of Marijuana Laws,” The Asheville Citizen (Asheville, NC), June 23, 1969.
“N.C. Official Proposes Bill To Regulate Drug Delivery,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), August 22,
1970.
143
Matthew D. Lassiter, “Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs,” The
Journal of American History 102, 1 (June 2015): 128.
144
“Convicted Felon Can Regain Citizenship,” The Gastonia Gazette (Gastonia, NC), July 4, 1971.
145
Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, Session 1971
(Winston-Salem, NC: Winston Printing Company, 1971), 169.
142

53

 described Johnson as “an apostle for equality and open participation in citizenship without regard
to race, creed, or sex.”146 The Robesonian of Lumberton, North Carolina, characterized
Johnson’s proposal as “a humanitarian gesture” to “make former felons feel more welcome as
restored citizens.”147 Johnson introduced the legislation “when he became acquainted with
instances in which persons were released from prison, lived law-abiding lives, yet had to go
through expensive, embarrassing, and lengthy court procedures to regain citizenships.”148
Johnson’s bill would ensure that “the citizenship rights of a convicted felon would be
automatically restored when he had served his sentence or when he had received an
unconditional pardon.”149 H.B. 285, as introduced by Johnson, stipulated that “any person
convicted of an infamous crime, whereby the rights of citizenship are forfeited, shall have such
rights automatically restored to him upon full completion of his sentence or upon receiving an
unconditional pardon.”150
After being referred to the Committee on Judiciary, the bill was reported unfavorably by
the committee, and the committee instead offered a substitute bill on July 2.151 The Committee
Substitute was authored by Jim Ramsey, a Democrat from Person County and the Chair of the
House Judiciary Committee, and made several significant changes to Johnson’s original
legislation. First, the Committee Substitute removed any automatic or immediate restoration of
citizenship upon release from prison. Instead, felons would have their citizenship rights “restored
to him upon the full completion of his sentence including [emphasis added] any period of

146

“This Afternoon in North Carolina,” The Rocky Mount Telegram (Rocky Mount, NC), May 2, 1973.
“Restoring Citizens,” The Robesonian (Lumberton, NC), July 22, 1971.
148
“Rep. Johnson Zeroes In On State Social Issues,” The Robesonian (Lumberton, NC), April 8, 1975.
149
“Bill Offered to Raise Pay of Lt. Governor,” The Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, NC), February 24, 1971;
“Citizenship Bill,” The Robesonian (Lumberton, NC), February 26, 1971.
150
1971 Bill
151
Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, Session 1971
(Winston-Salem, NC: Winston Printing Company, 1971), 1216.
147

54

 probation or parole or upon receiving an unconditional pardon.”152 Second, the Committee
Substitute inserted that ex-convicts had to take an oath before the Clerk of the Superior Court “or
any judge of the General Court of Justice . . . in the county where he resides or in which he was
last convicted.” This oath required the petitioner to swear that he had “fully completed any and
all sentences,” that he was “not now under any court for any criminal offense” (including,
presumably, misdemeanors), that “he desires to have his citizenship restored,” and, finally, “that
he will support and abide by the Constitution and laws of the United States, and the Constitution
and laws of North Carolina not inconsistent therewith.”153 The Committee Substitute for H. B.
285 was considered by the House on July 7.
Representative Mary Odom, a white Democrat from Scotland County who, along with
Joy Johnson, was part of the delegation from the 24th North Carolina State House District (which
comprised Hoke, Robeson, and Scotland Counties) offered an amendment which “provided that
a person could get his citizenship restored on taking an oath of allegiance if (1) restoration was
recommended by the State Department of Corrections at the time the prisoner was released from
prison, or if (2) he had gone for two years after release without violating a state or federal law, or
if (3) he had received full pardon.” This amendment was perhaps an attempt to rescue some
aspects of Johnson’s original bill, which clearly had the intent to make the restoration of
citizenship automatic. Odom’s amendment provided more routes to the restoration of voting
rights than the Committee Substitute for H.B. 285, including allowing former convicts to have
their citizenship restored upon recommendation of the Department of Corrections, which would
help to expedite the process of re-enfranchising these voters.154 But Odom’s amendment, unlike

152

1971 Bill
1971 Bill
154
1971 Bill
153

55

 Johnson’s original bill, still conditioned automatic re-enfranchisement upon completion of the
terms of probation and parole, rather than simply release from prison.
Representative Henry Frye recognized that the bill ultimately passed by the General
Assembly was a far cry from Johnson’s original bill. Frye noted that he “favored the bill’s
original provisions which called for automatic restoration of citizenship when a felon had served
his prison sentence.” 155 But Odom’s amendment was adopted, and the General Assembly
passed the legislation in July 1971.156 The revised statute allowed citizenship rights (including
the right to vote) to be restored if either A) “the Department of Correction . . . recommends
restoration of citizenship; B) “two years have elapsed since release by the Department of
Correction, including probation or parole”; or, (C) the ex-felon was granted “an unconditional
pardon.”157 While, in some ways, this statute is an example of, as social scientists Angela
Behrens, Christopher Uggen, and Jeff Manza suggest, “relative liberalization,” the fact remains
that, even after individuals had been released from incarceration, they still were denied the rights
of citizenship.158

155

“Legislative Wrapup,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), July 15, 1971; “State Briefs,” The Rocky Mount
Telegram (Rocky Mount, NC), March 25, 1971; “House Passes Ex-Con Citizenship Measure,” The Charlotte
Observer (Charlotte, NC), July 8, 1971; “Felon Citizenship Bill Gets House Approval,” The News and Observer
(Raleigh, NC), July 8, 1971. Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of North
Carolina, Session 1971 (Winston-Salem, NC: Winston Printing Company, 1971), 6. Odom, newly elected to the
House of Representatives in 1971, was opposed to “the unfair practice of requiring an ex-offender to hire a lawyer
and legally reclaim his citizenship after his release from prison” and believed that “we’ve still got a great deal more
to do.”(Pat Borden, The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), January 23, 1971; “Legislators, Grand Jury Take Look
at Prison Camp,” The Robesonian (Lumberton, NC), November 17, 1970.
156
Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, Session 1971
(Winston-Salem, NC: Winston Printing Company, 1971), 1272; Journal of the Senate of the General Assembly of
the State of North Carolina, Session 1971 (Winston-Salem, NC: Winston Printing Company, 1971), 837; Journal of
the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, Session 1971 (Winston-Salem,
NC: Winston Printing Company, 1971), 1407
157
http://ncleg.net/enactedlegislation/sessionlaws/pdf/1971-1972/sl1971-902.pdf
158
Angela Behrens, Christopher Uggen, and Jeff Manza, “Ballot Manipulation and the ‘Menace of Negro
Domination’: Racial Threat and Felon Disfranchisement in the United States, 1850-2002,” The American Journal of
Sociology 109, no. 3 (November 2003): 591.

56

 Even as Johnson and his allies in the North Carolina General Assembly sought to make it
easier for citizens convicted of a felony to regain their voting rights, North Carolina experienced
a Republican party insurgence grounded on fiscal conservatism, opposition to integration
(particularly busing), and a growing demand among white suburbanites for “law and order.” The
rallying cry of “law and order” became a racist dog whistle for many North Carolinians. As the
Charlotte Observer argued in 1968, “to many North Carolinians, law and order means ‘keep the
niggers in their place.’”159 The leader of the Republicans in the late 1960s and early 1970s was
James E. Holshouser, Jr., a young legislator from Boone, North Carolina, who chaired the North
Carolina Republican Party from 1966 to 1972. Holshouser summed up the Republican agenda in
a 1970 interview, noting that “the people are really gripped off about taxes,” and “concerned
about education in general and desegregation in particular.” Finally, he asserted that “people are
alarmed about crime in the streets.”160 By adopting “law and order” as part of the platform of the
North Carolina Republican Party, Holshouser was following the leadership of Richard Nixon and
the Republican National Committee. As historian Matthew D. Lassiter observes, “the law-andorder platform at the center of Nixon’s suburban strategy tapped into Middle American
resentment toward antiwar demonstrators and black militants but consciously employed a colorblind discourse that deflected charges of racial demagoguery.”161 John Ehrlichman, President
Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, admitted in 1994 that the war on drugs – a key part of law-andorder campaigns – had an ulterior motive. He observed that “the Nixon campaign in 1968, and
the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people.” While the

159

J.A.C Dunn, “Law and Order Depends . . . ,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), October 27, 1968/
“Republican Chairman Attacks State’s Surplus,” The Statesville Record and Landmark (Statesville, NC), October
7, 1970.
161
Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006), 234.
160

57

 Nixon campaign “couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black,” they knew that,
“by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then
criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”162
The “problem of law and order” was a chief concern of both Democrats and Republicans
in the 1970s in North Carolina. In 1970, the Democratic Attorney General of North Carolina,
Robert Morgan, declared that Democrat leaders in North Carolina “are doing something about
the problem of law and order.” He argued that “while the Republicans have been dragging their
feet, Democrats have been doing something about law and order in North Carolina” before
rattling off a list of the Democrats’ accomplishments, including “prevention of destructive
disorder on college campuses, improvement and enlargement of the State Bureau of
Investigation, and state assistance to upgrade local law enforcement.”163 Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Robert S. Boyd observed that, in the early 1970s, “Democrats were able to minimize
the ‘social issue by pinning on a law and order badge of their own.”164
Ramsey, the chair of the North Carolina House Judiciary Committee who added more
stringent requirements to Joy Johnson’s citizenship restoration bill in 1971, seems to have been
willing to wear the “law and order badge.” Before he graduated from the University of North
Carolina Law School in 1958, he served as the president of the Law School Association. Ramsey
served as a recorder’s court judge, and he was a member of the North Carolina State bar, the
North Carolina Bar Association, and the Person County Bar Association, and he served a term as
the president of the Person County Bar. 165 Ramsey was fundamentally a moderate. When he ran

162

Dan Baum, “Legalize It All,” Harper’s (April 2016).
‘At Nash Democratic Rally – Morgan Pushes Law-Order Theme,” The Rocky Mount Telegram (Rocky Mount,
NC), October 27, 1970.
164
John S. Knight, “The Voters Are More Sophisticated,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), November 8,
1970.
165
“James E. Ramsey Speaks at (COFC) Annual Dinner,” The News-Journal (Raeford, NC), May 17, 1973; “Heck
Lecture Series to Present Winbourne,” The Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, NC), September 20, 1957
163

58

 as a candidate in the Democratic primary for North Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District, he
emphasized that he was for “more jobs and more job opportunities to make our people
independent economically and less dependent on government stipends,” unlike his rival African
American “Mickey” Michaux, who he accused of being “for more government spending and
more grants.166 In 1969, Ramsey introduced legislation to “eliminate the mercy provisions” in
North Carolina’s capital punishment provisions which prevented second-degree murder from
being a capital offense. He also introduced legislation that would raise the penalty for seconddegree murder, rape, arson, and burglary from a thirty-year prison sentence to life
imprisonment.167
For North Carolina Democrats, however, the “law and order badge” could not prevent
the state from going “red” in 1972. In a tidal change in North Carolina politics, in 1972,
Holshouser defeated the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Hargrove Bowles, Jr., to become the
first Republican governor of North Carolina since 1901. Holshouser’s victory was part of a
“Republican sweep” that also led to the election of political commentator Jesse Helms to the
United States Senate, as well as a Republican majority in the General Assembly.168
In March 1973, the House passed legislation, H.B. 33, that amended the 1971 reenfranchisement legislation in certain respects, but retained the requirement that those convicted
of felons complete all conditions of parole, probation, or other supervised release before
obtaining automatic restoration. Again, it was Representative Joy Johnson, who had introduced
H.B. 285 in the last legislative session, who sponsored the legislation, since he believed that “if

166

“Jim Ramsey Hopes to Increase Job Opportunities,” The Rocky Mount Telegram (Rocky Mount, NC), June 24,
1982.
167
Tom Eamon, The Making of a Southern Democracy: North Carolina Politics From Kerr Scott to Pat McCrory
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 195-196; “Law Vague,” The Charlotte Observer
(Charlotte, NC), March 17, 1969
168
Bryan Haislip, “Holshouser: Mountaineer, Lawyer, and Stubborn Political Fighter,” The Robesonian (Lumberton,
NC), November 13, 1972.

59

 rights are taken away from felons automatically upon conviction, they should be restored
automatically upon release.”169 Johnson’s legislation, as noted by the Robesonian of Lumberton,
“removes the financial hardship involved with reclaiming this right.”170 H.B. 33 was also cosponsored by two other African-American legislators, Henry Frye and Henry M. “Mickey”
Michaux, of Durham County. Michaux, Frye, and Johnson were the first three African
Americans elected to the General Assembly and were derisively described as “smart Negroes.”
In response to this racial harassment, Michaux, Frye, and Johnson formed the first black caucus
of the General Assembly.171 H.B. 33, like H.B. 285 in the last legislative session, was intended to
allow the automatic restoration of citizenship rights. H.B. 285 was again amended by the
Committee; as passed on April 19, 1973, it provided that:
“§ 13-1. Restoration of citizenship.—Any person convicted of a crime, whereby the
rights of citizenship are forfeited, shall have such rights restored upon the occurrence of
any one of the following conditions: (1) The unconditional discharge of an inmate by the
State Department of Correction or the North Carolina Board of Juvenile Correction, of a
probationer by the State Probation Commission, or of a parolee by the Board of Paroles;
or of a defendant under a suspended sentence by the Court. (2) The unconditional pardon

169

“Baby Animals, Felon Citizenship, Restoration Bill Are Discussed,” The Robesonian (Lumberton, NC), March
28, 1973.
170
Toni Goodyear, “Sickle Cell Anemia Detection Center Proposal Tops New Bills By Johnson,” The Robesonian
(Lumberton, NC), January 17, 1973.
171
Will Doran and Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan, “Durham Politician, Civil Rights Leader Mickey Michaux to
Retire From General Assembly,” The Herald-Sun (Durham, NC), February 8, 2018 <
https://www.heraldsun.com/news/local/counties/durham-county/article199194364.html> (accessed April 17, 2020).
On Michaux, see his interview for the Southern History Oral History Project at the University of North Carolina
Library, here: https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/sohp/id/21384/rec/1.; he was more recently
interviewed for a Duke University Oral History project, - http://livinghistory.sanford.duke.edu/interviews/henry-mmickey-michaux-jr/.

60

 of the offender. (3) The satisfaction by the offender of all conditions of a conditional
pardon.172
As one of the leaders of the reform efforts, African American representative Henry
Michaux, explains, Michaux, Johnson, and Frye worked with the NAACP throughout this period
to try to obtain automatic restoration of the rights of citizenship upon release from incarceration.
But they were ultimately unsuccessful in eliminating conditions that targeted African Americans
and economically disadvantaged people, including the condition of an unconditional discharge
from parole or probation. They believed that they were unable to fully purge the original felony
disenfranchisement provisions of their racist intent and effects.173
The following August, the North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled that the new law “must
be applied retroactively.”174 Even as Johnson sought to “liberalize” felon disfranchisement,
however, the United States Supreme Court “upheld a North Carolina statute which denies felons
the right to vote.”175 Fred Fincher, who had been prohibited from voting by the Scotland County,
North Carolina election board, argued that his disfranchisement was a violation of the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.176 The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision
of the US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina in Fincher v. Scott, which found
that “the states are not constitutionally required” to “give felons the right to vote.”177
VIII. Conclusion
Felony disfranchisement was one part of a systematic campaign to deny minorities and
poor North Carolinians the right to vote in North Carolina. In many ways, it is a kind of
172

https://www.ncleg.gov/EnactedLegislation/SessionLaws/PDF/1973-1974/SL1973-251.pdf
Affidavit of Henry M. Michaux, Jr. (May 7, 2020).
174
“Charlotte Record Firm Loses Suit,” The Charlotte News (Charlotte, NC), August 23, 1973.
175
“No Voting Rights For Felons Upheld,” The Gastonia Gazette (Gastonia, NC), May 9, 1973; “Felon Voting Bill
Upheld,” The Daily Times-News (Burlington, NC), May 8, 1973.
176
“Felon Voting Bill Upheld,” The Daily Times-News (Burlington, NC), May 8, 1973.
177
Fincher v. Scott, 352 F. Supp. 117 - Dist. Court 1972
173

61

 legislative “living fossil” – a fact recognized by North Carolinians from the 1950s onward.
Unlike white-only primaries, literacy tests, and poll taxes, felon disfranchisement has yet to be
repudiated, despite its obvious intent of disfranchising black voters. Black North Carolinians
during Reconstruction recognized that felony disfranchisement could be a powerful tool in the
hands of a white ruling class - who both wrote and enforced the law, and who, as John Dennett, a
traveling correspondent for the Nation, noted, “unaffectedly and heartily hate the negroes” - and
steadfastly opposed stripping convicts of their citizenship rights.178
Felony disfranchisement represented one of many ways that the ruling party – the
Democrats, in the nineteenth century – sought to maintain their power and disfranchise
minorities and poor voters. Gerrymandering, literacy tests, poll taxes, the white-only primary,
and even electoral fraud, voter intimidation and outright violence were all tools used by the state
of North Carolina after the Civil War to prevent minority and poor voters from exercising the
rights guaranteed to them by the Fifteenth Amendment. Even after the passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, felony disfranchisement was an
important tool for preventing North Carolinians from exercising their right to vote – in addition
to its immediate effect on black voting strength, it was used to discredit civil rights legislation
and as a weapon in the campaign for “law and order” and the War on Drugs.
Finally, when black leaders – most notably, African American state representatives in the
early 1970s, Joy Johnson, Henry Frye, and Henry M. “Mickey” Michaux – sought to liberalize
the felony disfranchisement statute because they recognized that it erected barriers to prevent
African Americans and poor North Carolinians from exercising their right to vote, moderates and
conservatives blunted the full impact of this reform effort. In short, the current North Carolina

178

John Richard Dennett, The South As It Is, ed. Henry M. Christman (New York, 1965), 119.

62

 disfranchising law was adopted with racial animus following the white Democratic party’s
overthrow of Reconstruction, and though modified over the years, it still maintains its origins in
racial discrimination and still disproportionately negatively affects African Americans in North
Carolina.

63

 I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct to the best of my
knowledge.

This 8th day of May, 2020.

anew @1717:

Dr. Orville Vernon Burton

 

 

ORVILLE VERNON BURTON
History Department, 126 Hardin Hall, 403 Calhoun Drive, Clemson University, Clemson, SC
29634-0527; O: 864/656-3153 C: 217/649-0608; Fax: 864/656-1015; H: 864/543-2552
Home: 107 Baywood Circle, Ninety Six, SC 29666 or 110 Houston St., Clemson, SC 29631
vburton@clemson.edu
https://ageoflincoln.app.clemson.edu
Education: 1976, Ph.D. Princeton University Ph.D. dissertation: “Ungrateful Servants?
Edgefield's Black Reconstruction: Part I of the Total History of Edgefield County, South
Carolina.” Advisors Sheldon Hackney and James McPherson
1969, B.A. Furman University, magnum cum laude
Military Service: active service 1969, 1974 U.S. Army, Honorably Discharged as Captain, 1977
Academic Positions:
Clemson University, 2010The Judge Matthew J. Perry, Jr. Distinguished Professor of History
Professor Sociology and Anthropology, Clemson University, 2014Creativity Chair of Humanities, Clemson University, 2013-15
Professor Pan-African Studies, 2012Professor Computer Science, Clemson University, 2011Director Clemson CyberInstitute, 2010Associate Director Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Clemson CyberInstitute, 2010
Professor of History, Clemson University, 2010Burroughs Distinguished Prof. Southern Hist. & Culture, Coastal Carolina University, 2008-10
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 1974-2008
2009- Chair, Advisory Board for Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and
Social Science (I-CHASS)
2008-11, Consultant for Humanities to Chancellor’s and Provost’s Office
2004-09, Founding Director I-CHASS
2008 - Emeritus University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar, University Scholar, and
Professor History, African American Studies, and Sociology
2006-08, Professor African American Studies
1989-2008, Professor History
1989-2008, Professor Sociology
1988-2008, Graduate College Statistics Faculty
1986-2008, Campus Honors Program
1985-2006, Faculty Affiliate, African American Studies and Research Program
1982-1989, Associate Professor, History
1976-1982, Assistant Professor History
1974-1976, Instructor
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
2002-10, Associate Director, Humanities and Social Sciences
1993-2002, Head, Initiative for Social Sciences and Humanities
1986- Senior Research Scientist
Princeton University
1972-74, Assistant Master, Woodrow Wilson Residential College
1971-72, Instructor, Mercer County Community College, NJ

 Burton, page 2

College of Charleston
2001-, Executive Director, Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World
(CLAW) http://claw.cofc.edu
1987, Professor of History, Governor’s School of South Carolina
Selected Honors, Fellowships, Awards
U.S. Professor of the Year, Outstanding Research and Doctoral Universities Professor (Council
for Advancement and Support of Education and Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching), 1999
American Historical Association Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Prize, 2004
Chicago Tribune’s Heartland 2007 Literary award for nonfiction for The Age of Lincoln
Illinois House Resolution of Congratulations, HR 0711, 2007. The Illinois State legislature
passed a special resolution acknowledging my contributions as a scholar, teacher, and
citizen of Illinois.
South Carolina Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities, presented by the
SC Humanities Council, 2017 (selected 2016)
Society of American Historians, Elected 2012
Fellow, National Humanities Center (NEH Senior Scholar Award), 1994-95
Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1988-89
Fellow, Pew Foundation, 1996
National Fellowship Program for Carnegie Scholars, 2000-2001
Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, 1978
Earl and Edna Stice Lectureship in the Social Sciences at the University of Washington, 2005
Strickland Visiting Scholar, Department of History, Middle Tennessee State University, 2006
Pew-Lilly Foundation Graduate Professor, Notre Dame University, 2001
Mark W. Clark Distinguished Chair of History, The Citadel, 2000-01
Elected to honorary life membership in BrANCH (British American Nineteenth-Century
Historians)
Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, 2004Choice Outstanding Academic Book for The Age of Lincoln, 2008
Choice Outstanding Academic Title for Slavery and Anti-Slavery: Transnational Archive, 2009
Booklist’s Editors’ Choice Title for Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive, 2009
Choice Outstanding Academic Book for Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities, 2003
Richard F. Fenno Prize, Legislative Studies Section, American Political Science Association, for
Quiet Revolution, 1995
President Southern Historical Association, 2011-12
President Agricultural History Society, 2001-02
Elected to the South Carolina Academy of Authors, 2015, inducted 2016.
Certificate of Excellence from the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning for Work that Advances the Practice and Profession of Teaching In Support of
Significant Student Learning, 2001
H-Net received the James Harvey Robinson Prize for teaching from the American Historical
Association, 1997 (I was one of the founders, and the first treasurer).
Award of Distinction in the Film/Video-History/Biography category from the International
Academy of the Visual Arts, 16th Annual Communicator Awards, for “People: A Lincoln
Portrait” television interstitial series (The Communicator Awards is the leading
international awards program honoring creative excellence for communications
professionals), 2010 (part of program I put together for Lincoln commemoration at

 Burton, page 3

UIUC).
SC African American Heritage Commission's 2009 “Preserving Our Places in History” Project
Award for Claw’s (Executive Director, College of Charleston Carolina Lowcountry and
Atlantic World) work in commemorating the banning of the international slave trade
Florida Historical Society, Medallion Lecture, 2002
Auburn University, Eminence in the Arts and Humanities Fellows Lectures Medallion, “awarded
to persons of distinguished achievement in the arts and humanities: writers, artists or
renowned scholars in one or more of the liberal arts disciplines,” 2012
Senior Research Fellow, Southern Studies, University of South Carolina, 1988
Phi Beta Kappa, Furman University, 1986
Princeton University Scholar Award, 1969
National Defense Educational Award Title IV Fellowship, 1971 (Princeton University)
Clark Foundation Scholarship, 1966-69 (Furman University)
Wicker Award for Outstanding Student (sophomore), Furman University, 1967
Endel History Award, Furman, 1969
Bradshaw-Feaster General Excellence Award (Furman’s highest honor for the graduating senior
selected by faculty), 1969
Honors Clemson University and Recognition
College of Architecture, Art, and Humanities (CAAH), Dean’s Award for “Outstanding
Service,” 2019
Inaugural Class 2018 University Research Scholarship and Artistic Achievement Award
Inaugural Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History, 2017CAAH, Dean’s Award for “Excellence in Research,” 2016
CAAH, Creativity Professor Humanities, 2013-15
Featured Clemson Homepage 2017, “Meet a Tiger,” http://newsstand.clemson.edu/meet-a-tigervernon-burton/
UIUC Honors and Teaching Awards and Recognition
Inaugural University “Distinguished Teacher/Scholar,” 1999-2008
University Scholar, 1988 – 2008
Campus Award for Excellence in Public Engagement, 2006
Graduate College Outstanding Mentoring award, 2001-02
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study, 1982, Associate, 1994
Burlington Northern Faculty Achievement Award (UIUC), 1986
Study in a Second Discipline, Statistics and Demography, 1984
All-Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 1999
LAS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 1999
LAS Award for Distinguished Teaching, 1986
School of Humanities Teaching Award, 1986
George and Gladys Queen Excellence in Teaching Award in History, 1986
Undergraduate Instructional Award (UIUC), 1984
Every semester and for every undergraduate course that I taught at the University of Illinois
(excluding large survey classes of between 300-750 students), I was deemed excellent in
the UIUC “Incomplete List of Excellent Teachers.” I was noted on the list for more than
twenty different courses. I was noted as “outstanding” from 1979 as long as they used
that designation.
Recognized by the Pan-Hellenic Council at as an “outstanding staff member for furthering
scholastic achievement”

 Burton, page 4

Selected by History Department as the “one instructor whom you believe best at creating
intellectual excitement in students” for an educational study of teaching practices of
college teachers, 1978
Received the Resident Hall Association Award for the Best Educational Program for
lectures/discussion on Gone With the Wind and Jubilee for Black History Month, 1996
The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, UIUC, Vice President, 2002-03; President, 2003-04
Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program Dedicated Service Award for Minority Students, 1996
Associate Vice Chancellor Academic Affairs award for contributions to the Student Research
Opportunities Program and work with minority students (1995, 2006)
Publications:
Books:
Penn Center: A History Preserved. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014; paperback
edition, 2017.
The Age of Lincoln. NY: Hill and Wang, 2007. (Audio: Blackstone Audio Books). Paperback
edition 2008. Selection for Book of the Month Club, History Book Club, Military Book
Club. The Age of Lincoln was nominated by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for the Pulitzer
Prize. Three historical associations featured sessions on the book, Association for the Study
of African American Life and History, 2008; Social Science History Association, 2008; The
Southern Intellectual History Circle, 2009.
(with Judy McArthur) “A Gentleman and an Officer”: A Military and Social History of James
B. Griffin's Civil War. NY: Oxford University Press, 1996; second printing 1999.
In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South
Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Paperback edition
1987; 5th printing 1998. In My Father's House was nominated by the University of
North Carolina Press for the Pulitzer Prize. Two Historical Associations featured this
book in sessions at their annual meetings: Social Science History Association, 1986;
Southern Historical Association, 1987.
(with Armand Derfner) “Justice the Guardian of Liberty”: Race and the Supreme Court.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, expected 2021.
Air Conditioning and the Voting Rights Act: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Historical
Perspective. Stice Lectures University of Washington. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, (withdrawn from press to include recent challenges to Section 5, Voter
Id controversies, and partisan redistricting challenges), expected 2022.
Lincoln and the South Revisited. (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, expected
2021).
The South as Other: The Southerner as Stranger—The Contradictions of Southern Identity.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, expected 2021.
(edited with Brent Morris) Reconstruction at 150: Reassessing the Revolutionary "New Birth of
Freedom. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, expected 2020.
(edited with Peter Eisenstadt) Lincoln’s Unfinished Work (expected 2021)
Editor, Becoming Southern Writers: Essays in Honor of Charles Joyner. Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 2016.
(edited with Ray Arsenault) Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of F. Sheldon Hackney.
Montgomery, AL: New South Books, 2013.
(edited with Jerald Podair and Jennifer L. Weber) The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional
Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction in Honor of James M. McPherson.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
Editor, The Essential Lincoln. NY: Hill and Wang, 2009.

 Burton, page 5

(edited with David O’Brien) Remembering Brown at Fifty: The University of Illinois
Commemorates Brown v. Board of Education. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2009.
(edited with Winfred B. Moore, Jr.) “Toward the Meeting of the Waters”: Currents in the Civil
Rights Movement in South Carolina during the Twentieth Century. Columbia: The
University of South Carolina Press, 2008. Paperback 2011.
Editor, Slavery in America: Gale Library of Daily Life, 2 vols. NY, Detroit: Gale Cengate
Learning, 2008.
(edited and annotated with Georganne B. Burton, introduction pp. 1-48) “The Free Flag of
Cuba”: The Lost Novel of Lucy Pickens [orig. pub. 1854] in the Library of Southern
Civilization series, edited by Lewis P. Simpson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2002. Paperback 2003.
Editor, Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2002.
(edited with David Herr and Terence Finnegan) Wayfarer: Charting Advances in Social Science
and Humanities Computing. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. This CD-ROM
contains more than 65 essays and research and teaching applications, including
illustrative interactive multimedia materials.
(with et al.) Documents Collection America's History, vol. 1, to accompany James Henretta, et
al., America's History, 2nd ed. NY: Worth Publishers, 1993.
(edited with Robert C. McMath, Jr.) Class, Conflict, and Consensus: Antebellum Southern
Community Studies. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1982.
(edited with Robert C. McMath, Jr.) Toward a New South? Studies in Post-Civil War Southern
Communities. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1982.
(with Beatrice Burton and Megan Shockley) An Administrative History of Fort Sumter and Fort
Moultrie (Washington, DC: The National Park Service, expected July 2019)
Plays:
(with Georganne Burton) “Abraham Lincoln’s Beardstown Trial: The Play” Premiered Sept. 29,
2009, Beardstown, IL. (Endorsed by the Congressional Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial
Commission, November 2009; Play available upon request);
http://www.lincolnbicentennial.gov/calendar/beardstown-trial-11-10-09.aspx;
http://www.civilwar.org/aboutus/events/grand-review/2009/almanac-trial.html
Editor, Book Series, A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era Series, University of
Virginia Press, 2011Editor, Book Series, The American South Series, University of Virginia Press, 2013Introductions and Forewords to Books:
“Foreword,” pp. ix-liv to Born to Rebel: An Autobiography by Benjamin Elijah Mays. Athens:
University of Georgia Press Brown Thrasher edition, 1987, also in paperback edition
(book without foreword originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971). Revd.
Foreword 2003.
“Introduction,” pp. 9-11 to Roll the Union On: Southern Tenant Farmers Union. As told by its
Co-founder, H.L. Mitchell. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1987.
“Introduction,” pp. xiii-xviii to Soldiering with Sherman: The Civil War Letters of George F.
Cram. Jennifer Cain Bohrnstedt, ed., DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000.
“Introduction,” pp. x-xxxiv to Pitchfork Ben Tillman: South Carolinian by Francis Butler
Simkins, for the reprint edition of the Southern Classics Series of the Institute for

 Burton, page 6

Southern Studies. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002 (book without
Introduction originally published by Louisiana State University Press, 1944).
(with James Barrett) “Foreword,” pp. xi-xxv to paperback edition of Cause at Heart: A Former
Communist Remembers by Junius Irving Scales with Richard Nickson. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2005 (book without Foreword originally published 1987).
“Foreword,” pp. vii-xi to Recovering the Piedmont Past: Unexplored Moments in NineteenthCentury Upcountry South Carolina History, edited by Timothy P. Grady and Melissa
Walker. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013.
“Foreword,” pp. vii-xiii to Our Ancestors – Our Stories: The Memory Keepers, edited by Harris
Bailey, et al. Suwanee, Georgia: The Write Image, 2014.
“Foreword,” pp. iv-xiv, to Kevin M. Cherry, Virtue of Cain, Biography of Lawrence Cain Washington:
From Slave to Senator: Takoma Park, MD: Rocky Pond Press, 2019.

Journals Edited:
Special issue on the Digital South, Southern Quarterly, expected 2021.
“Three Articles from a Century of Excellence: The Best of The South Carolina Historical
Magazine,” pp. 182-89 for South Carolina History Magazine 101: 3 (July 2000).
“Introduction,” pp. 161-65 for Social Science Computer Review 12:2 (Summer 1994).
Co-editor, “Technology and Education,” International Journal of Social Education 5:1 (Spring
1990).

History Articles, Chapters, and Essays:
“The South as Other, The Southerner as Stranger,” Presidential address for the Southern
Historical Association, The Journal of Southern History LXXIX:1 (February 2013): 7-50.
“Reaping What We Sow: Community and Rural History,” Presidential address for the
Agricultural History Society in Agricultural History (Fall 2002): 631-58.
“Building the Transcontinental Railroad,” Presidential Inaugural Portfolio, Joint Congressional
Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, January 21, 2013.
“The Creation and Destruction of the Fourteenth Amendment During the Long Civil War,”
Louisiana Law Review, Vol. 79 (Fall 2018): 189-239.
Review essay of Edward L. Ayers, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and
Emancipation in the Heart of America,The Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol 9, no. 3,
September 2019, pp. 493-496.
“Mystery and Contradiction: My Story of Ninety Six,” in State of the Heart: South Carolina
Writers on the Places They Love, Vol. 3, pp. 18-27. Edited by Aida Rogers (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2018)
“Reconstructing South Carolina’s Reconstruction,” keynote South Carolina Historical
Association, 2017 (Columbia: Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association,
2018), pp 7-40.
“The Birth of a Nation: A Roundtable,” (Roundtable Discussion of film on 1831 Nat Turner
Insurrection), edited Ryan Keating in Civil War History 64 (March 2018), pp. 56-91.
(with Anderson R. Rouse) “Southern Identity,” pp. 40-53, in The Routledge History of the
American South. Edited by Maggi M. Morehouse (New York: Routledge, 2018).
(with Anderson R. Rouse) “Religious Practices,” pp. 111-26, in The Routledge History of the
American South. Edited by Magi Morehouse (New York: Routledge, 2018).
“Reconstructing South Carolina’s History Through the South Caroliniana Library, 80th Annual
Meeting Address by Dr. Orville Vernon Burton,” The University South Caroliniana
Society 81st Annual Meeting, 22 April 2017, pp. 2-32.

 Burton, page 7

“From Clarendon County to the Supreme Court,” pp. 84-88 and “Eating with Harvey Gantt and
Mathew Perry: Myth and Realities of “Integration with Dignity,” pp.139-40
accompanying Cecil Williams’ photographs of South Carolina’s Civil Rights Movement
in Cecil Williams, Unforgettable, Life Hope Bravery, 1950-1970: Celebrating a Time of
Bravery (Orangeburg: Cecil J. Williams Photography/Publishing, 2017).
“Localism and Confederate Nationalism: The Transformation of Values from Community to
Nation in Edgefield, South Carolina,” pp. 107-123, 233-39 in Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.,
ed., Citizen Scholar: Essays in Honor of Walter B. Edgar (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 2016).
“Lincoln, Secession, and Emancipation,” pp. 81-104 in Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon,
eds., Lincoln, Congress, and Emancipation, for the U.S. Capitol Historical Society
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016).
“Stranger Redux,” pp. 38-49 in Orville Vernon Burton, Editor, Becoming Southern Writers:
Essays in Honor of Charles Joyner (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
2016)
“Tempering Society’s Looking Glass: Correcting Misconceptions About the Voting Rights Act
of 1965 and Securing American Democracy” Louisiana Law Review Lead article for Vol.
76:1 (2015): 1-42.
“Perceptions and Meaning of the Confederate Flag,” The Proclamation (President Lincoln’s
Cottage), XXVIII (Summer 2015): 8- 14 (longer unedited version on-line at:
http://www.lincolncottage.org/perceptions-and-meaning-of-the-confederate-flag-aninterview-with-two-scholars/ and with Edna Medford)
“Revisiting the Myth of the Black Matriarchy,” pp. 119-65 in Orville Vernon Burton and Ray
Arsenault, eds., Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of F. Sheldon Hackney (Montgomery, AL:
New South Books, 2013).
“The Passage of Lincoln’s Republic: Providence in Progress,” pp. 13-36 in Stephen Engle, ed.
The War Worth Fighting: Abraham Lincoln's Presidency and Civil War America
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2015).
"Bertram Wyatt-Brown: An Honorable Man and a Man of Grace," Georgia Historical Quarterly
XCIX, No. 3(Fall, 2015): 2013-18.
(with Michael LeMahieu), “Civil War Memory in the Civil Rights Movement and
Contemporary Commemoration,” Journal of American Studies (with American Studies
International, AMSJ) 53:4 (2014): 107-18.
Remembering the Civil War,” pp. 278-85 in The Civil War as Global Conflict. Edited by Simon
Lewis and David Gleeson (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2014).
“The Gettysburg Address Revisited.” In 1863: Lincoln’s Pivotal Year. Edited by Harold
Holzer and Sara Vaughn Gabbard (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013),
pp. 137-55.
(with Ian Binnington) “And Bid Him Bear A Patriot's Part”: National and Local Perspectives on
Confederate Nationalism in Deconstructing Dixie, pp 126-155. Edited by Jason Kyle
Phillips (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013).
“The Silence of a Slaveholder: The Civil War Letters of James B. Griffin,” in The Battlefield
and Beyond: Essays on the American Civil War. Edited by Clayton E. Jewett (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), pp. 13-27.
“Abraham Lincoln,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Political and Legal History.
Edited by Donald T. Chritchlow and Philip R.VanderMeer, 1:560-64. 2 vols. (NY:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
(with Lewie Reece) “Abraham Lincoln,” Essential Civil War Curriculum,
http://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/. Edited by William C. Davis and James I.
Robertson, Sesquicentennial Project of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies and the

 Burton, page 8

History Department of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech,
2013).
“Family,” in Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia. Edited by Daina R. Berry and
Deleso Alford Washington (Santa Barbara & Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2012), pp.
83-87.
“Lincoln at Two Hundred: Have We Finally Reached Randall's Point of Exhaustion?” In The
Living Lincoln: Essays from the Harvard Lincoln Bicentennial Symposium, pp. 204-25.
Edited by Thomas A. Horrocks, Harold Holzer, and Frank J. Williams (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), pp. 204-25.
(with Nick Gaffney) “South Carolina,” Vol. 2: pp. 745-764 in Black America: A State by State
Encyclopedia. Edited by Alton Hornsby (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2011).
“Mays, Benjamin” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Vol. 19 Education, Edited by
Clarence Mohr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), pp. 254-255.
“The Age of Lincoln: Then and Now,” Keynote for the South Carolina Historical Association
Annual Meeting, The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association, 2010,
pp. 7-22. Edited by Robert Figueira and Stephen Lowe (Columbia: South Carolina
Department of Archives and History, 2010). Reprinted pp 11- 26 in Michael Bonner and
Fritz Hamer (eds.) South Carolina in the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras: Essays
from the Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 2016).
(with Larry McDonnell and Troy D. Smith) “Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational
Archive,” pp. 121-26 in L'abolition de l'esclavage au Royaume-Uni 1787-1840 : débats et
dissensions The abolition of slavery in Britain 1787-1840 : debate and dissension.”
Edited by Susan Finding (Paris: ArmandColin, November 2009).
“Abraham Lincoln at Two Hundred,” OAH (Organization of American Historians) Newsletter,
37:4 (November 2009), pp. 1, 8, 12.
“Author’s Response to the Southern Intellectual History Circle Forum on The Age of Lincoln.”
The Journal of the Historical Society IX:3 (September 2009): 355-72.
(with Georganne Burton) “Lucy Holcombe Pickens: Belle, Political Novelist, and Southern
Lady,” in South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Vol 1. Edited by Marjorie
Julian Spruill, Valinda W. Littlefield, and Joan Marie Johnson (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2009), pp.273-98.
Three essays in the International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present.
Edited by Immanuel Ness. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
“Radical Reconstruction, United States, Promise and Failure of” VI: 2798-2801
<http://www.revolutionprotestencyclopedia.com/public/tocnode?query=burton%2C+vern
on&widen=1&result_number=3&from=search&id=g9781405184649_chunk_g97814051
846491238&type=std&fuzzy=0&slop=1>;
(with Beatrice Burton) “American Civil War and Slavery,” I: 70-72
http://www.revolutionprotestencyclopedia.com/public/tocnode?query=burton%2C+verno
n&widen=1&result_number=1&from=search&id=g9781405184649_chunk_g978140518
464940&type=std&fuzzy=0&slop=1;
(with Beatrice Burton) “Lincoln, Abraham (1809-1865) and African Americans,”
Volume V: 2121-2123”
<http://www.revolutionprotestencyclopedia.com/public/tocnode?query=burton%2C+vern
on&widen=1&result_number=2&from=search&id=g9781405184649_chunk_g97814051
84649925&type=std&fuzzy=0&slop=1>;
“Imagine Another Ending: Tweaking History to Shape an Alternative World,” pp. 48-50 in A
New Birth of Freedom, 1809*2009: Abraham Lincoln’s Bicentennial. Edited by Don
Wycliff (Washington, D.C.: The Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, 2009).

 Burton, page 9

(with Simon Appleford and Beatrice Burton) “Seeds in Unlikely Soil: The Briggs v. Elliott
School Segregation Case,” pp 176-200 in Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in
the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina during the Twentieth Century. Edited by
Orville Vernon Burton and Winfred B. Moore, Jr. (Columbia: The University of South
Carolina Press, 2008).
(with Lewie Reece) “Palmetto Revolution: The Coming of Desegregation in South Carolina,”
pp. 59-91, 283-94 in With All Deliberate Speed: Implementing Brown v. Board of
Education. Edited by Brian Daugherity and Charles Bolton. (Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press, 2008).
“Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina,” pp. 178-80; “Benjamin Mays,” pp. 601-02; (with
Beatrice Burton) “Francis Butler Simkins,” 866; (with Beatrice Burton) “Lucy Pickens”;
(with Beatrice Burton) “Sharecropping/ Tenantry,” pp. 952-54 in The South Carolina
Encyclopedia [A project of the South Carolina Humanities Council]. Edited by Walter
Edgar. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006).
“African Americans,” pp. 245-248 in The Encyclopedia of the Midwest [a project of the Institute
for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities at The Ohio State University]. Edited
by Richard Sisson, et al. (print version. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
“The Voting Rights Act,” pp. 1134-1136 in Vol. 4: Postwar America: An Encyclopedia of
Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History. Edited by James Ciment. (M.E.
Sharpe, 2006).
“Emancipation,” pp. 237-42, “Sharecropping,” pp. 563-67, “South Carolina,” pp. 584-593,
“Suffrage,” pp. 614-20, “Wade Hampton, III,” pp. 306-08, in Encyclopedia of the
Reconstruction Era. Edited by Richard Zuczek. (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press,
2006).
(with David Herr) “Religious Tolerance and the Growth of the Evangelical Ethos in South
Carolina,” pp. 146-64 in The Dawn of Religious Freedom in South Carolina, Edited by
James Lowell Underwood and W. Lewis Burke. (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 2006).
(with Beatrice Burton) “Jefferson Davis,” pp. 43-44 in The Frederick Douglass Encyclopedia.
Edited by Julius E. Thompson, James L. Conyers, Jr., and Nancy J. Dawson. (Westport,
CN: Greenwood Press, 2010).
“The 1965 Voting Rights Act in the South,” in History Vol. 3 (2007) The Encyclopedia of
Southern Culture, 2nd revised ed. Edited by Charles Reagan Wilson. (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and revised in James W. Ely, Jr. and Bradley
G. Bond, eds., Law and Politics Vol. 10 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,
pp. 399-401 (2008); and revised in Thomas C. Holt and Laurie B. Green, eds., Race Vol.
24, pp. 265-68 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (2013).
“Problems and Methods in Family History Research,” Journal of Humanities (National Central
University at Chuhgli/Taoyuen), 2006.
(with David Herr) “Defining Reconstruction,” pp. 299-322 in The Blackwell Companion to the
Civil War and Reconstruction. Edited by Lacy Ford. (Boston: Blackwell Publishers,
2005).
“John H. McCray,” pp. 125-27 in the Dictionary of Twentieth Century Black Leaders. Edited by
Alton Hornsby, Jr. Montgomery. (AL: E-Book Time, LLC, 2005).
“Stranger in a Strange Land: Crossing Boundaries,” pp. 256-283 in Shapers of Southern
History: Autobiographical Essays by Fifteen Historians. Edited by John Boles.
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).
“Dining with Harvey Gantt: Myth and Realities of ‘Integration with Dignity,’” pp. 183-220 in
Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times and His Legacy. Edited by W. Lewis Burke and
Belinda F. Gergel. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).

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“’Tis True that Our Southern Ladies have Done and are Still Acting a Conspicuous Part in this
War’: Women on the Confederate Home Front in Edgefield, South Carolina,” pp. 95-108
in “Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph”: Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their
Communities. Edited by Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond. (Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 2003).
(with Georganne Burton) “Lucy Holcombe Pickens and The Free Flag of Cuba,” South
Carolina History Magazine 103:4 (October 2002): 296-324.
(with Ian Binnington) “Civil War: The Homefront in the South,” Encyclopedia of the United
States in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, pp. 256-59. Edited by Paul Finkelman. (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001).
“Civil War and Reconstruction,” pp. 47-60 in A Companion to Nineteenth Century America.
Edited by William L. Barney. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, paperback
2006).
“South Carolina” and “South Carolina Democratic Party (PDP),” vol. 2: pp. 692-94 in Civil
Rights in the United States. Edited by Waldo E. Martin and Patricia Sullivan. (NY:
Macmillan, 2000).
“A Monumental Labor,” Review Essay of Walter Edgar’s South Carolina: A History,” South
Carolina Historical Magazine 100:3 (July 1999): 262-268.
“Bosket Family,” pp. 166-68 in vol. 1, Violence in America: An Encyclopedia. Edited by
Ronald Gottesman. (NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999).
“Butler, Andrew Pickens,” 4:88-90; “Gary, Martin Witherspoon,” 8:775-77; “Mays, Benjamin
Elijah,” 14: 795-97; “Mitchell, Harry Leland,” 15: 602-3; “Owsley, Frank Lawrence,” 16:
870-72; “Simkins, Francis Butler,” 19: 942-44; and “Tillman, Benjamin Ryan," 21: 67275, in American National Biography. Edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, 24
vols. (NY: Oxford University Press, 1999).
“Legislative and Congressional Redistricting in South Carolina,” pp. 290-314 in Race and
Redistricting in the 1990s. Edited by Bernard Grofman. (NY: Agathon Press, 1998).
“Race Relations in the Rural South Since 1945,” pp. 28-58 in The Rural South Since World War
II. Edited by R. Douglas Hurt. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998).
“Benjamin E. Mays: Born to Rebel,” pp. 21-75 in Walking Integrity: Benjamin Elijah Mays:
Mentor to Generations. Edited by Lawrence E. Carter, Sr. (Atlanta: Scholars Press of
Emory University, 1996; paperback, Mercer University Press, 1998).
“Edgefield, South Carolina: Home to Dave the Potter,” pp. 38-52 in I Made This Jar: The Life
and Works of the Enslaved African-American Potter, Dave. Edited by Jill Beute
Koverman. (Columbia: McKissick Museum University of South Carolina, 1998).
“African American Status and Identity in a Postbellum Community: An Analysis of the
Manuscript Census Returns,” Agricultural History 72:2 (Spring 1998): 213-240.
“Confederate States of America: Homefront,” pp. 163-64 in Reader's Guide to American
History. Edited by Peter Parrish. (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997).
“The ‘New’ South in a Postmodern Academy: A Review Essay,” Journal of Southern History,
LXII:4 (Nov. 1996):767-786.
“The Ninety Six Story,” pp. 4-7 in Historic Ninety Six, South Carolina in 9/6/96 Special Issue.
“South Carolina” in Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, vol 5: 2529-2533.
Edited by Jack Salzman, et al. (NY: Macmillan, 1996, rev. ed. and CD-ROM 2000).
“Farm Protest\Populism,” pp. 265-267, and “Tenancy,” pp. 747-749, in Encyclopedia of Social
History. Edited by Peter N. Stearns. (NY: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994).
NSF investigator and principal author (with Terrence R. Finnegan, Peyton McCrary, and James
W. Loewen) “South Carolina” chap. 7, pp. 191-232, 420-432, in The Quiet Revolution in
the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990. Edited by Chandler
Davidson and Bernard Grofman. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Winner

 Burton, page 11

of the 1995 Richard F. Fenno Prize, Legislative Studies Section, American Political
Science Association.
“Society,” 4:1483-1493, “Family Life,” 2:562-565, “Cotton” (with Patricia Bonnin), 1:416-420,
and “Tobacco” (with Henry Kamerling), 4:1597-1599, in Encyclopedia of the
Confederacy. Edited by Richard N. Current. (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1993).
“Large Questions in Small Places: Why Study Mount Pleasant's Institutions,” pp. 37-48, in
Mount Pleasant's Institutions: Proceedings of the Third Forum of the History of Mount
Pleasant. Edited by Amy Thompson McCandless. (Mount Pleasant, September 1993).
“Sectional Conflict, Civil War, and Reconstruction,” pp. 131-157, in Encyclopedia of American
Social History, vol. 1. Edited by Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W.
Williams. (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993; with revisions on CD-ROM 1998).
“The Burden of Southern Historiography: W J. Cash and the Old South,” pp. 59-79, in The Mind
of the South Fifty Years Later. Edited by Charles W. Eagles. (Oxford: University Press
of Mississippi, 1992).
“‘The Black Squint of the Law’: Racism in South Carolina,” pp. 161-185, in The Meaning of
South Carolina History: Essays in Honor of George C. Rogers, Jr. Edited by David R.
Chesnutt and Clyde N. Wilson. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).
“Reconstruction,” review essay of Eric Foner's Reconstruction in South Carolina Historical
Magazine 91:3 (July 1990): 217-220.
“Howard Kester,” pp. 401-03 (414-15 2nd rev); “Edward Britt McKinney,” pp. 462-63 (489-90
rev. 2nd); “Henry Leland Mitchell,” pp. 475-76 (502 rev. 2nd); Modjeska Monteith
Simkins, pp. 700-01 (747-48 rev. 2nd ) in The Encyclopedia of the American Left. Edited
by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas. (NY: Garland Publishing, 1990,
University of Illinois Press paperback, 1992 [rev. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press,
1998]).
“Whence Cometh Rural Black Reconstruction Leadership: Edgefield County, South Carolina,”
The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association, 1988-1989. Aiken: The
South Carolina Historical Association, 1989, pp 27-38. Reprinted as “Edgefield
Reconstruction Political Black Leaders, pp. 161- 172, in Michael Bonner and Fritz
Hamer (eds.) South Carolina in the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras: Essays from the
Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 2016).
“Fatherhood,” pp. 1106-07; “Motherhood,” pp. 1111-13; “Family, Modernization of,” pp. 154041 in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William
Ferris. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989; paperback 1991; rev.
ed.) “Motherhood” and “Fatherhood” in Myth, Manners, and Memory vol 4 (2007) and
also in Gender vol. 13 (2009).
“Hiring Out,” pp. 320-26, in the Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery. Edited by Randall M.
Miller and John David Smith. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988 [rev. 2nd. ed.
1997]).
“In My Father's House Are Many Leaders: Can the Extreme Be Typical?” The Proceedings of
the South Carolina Historical Association, 1987. (Aiken: The South Carolina Historical
Association, 1988), pp 23-32.
“The Development of the Tenant Farm System in the Postbellum South,” Tar Hill Junior
Historian 27, #1 (Fall 1987): 16-18.
“The Effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Coming of Age of Southern Males,
Edgefield County, South Carolina,” pp. 204-223 in The Web of Southern Relations:
Women, Family and Education. Edited by Walter J. Fraser, Jr., R. Frank Saunders, Jr.,
and Jon L. Wakelyn. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985, paperback ed. 1987).

 Burton, page 12

“Economics as Postbellum Southern History.” A Review Essay of Old South, New South:
Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War by Gavin Wright. (NY: Basic
Books, 1986) in Reviews in American History 16:2 (June 1988): 233-40.
“Anatomy of an Antebellum Rural Free Black Community: Social Structure and Social
Interaction in Edgefield District, South Carolina,” Southern Studies: Interdisciplinary
Journal of the South 21 (Fall 1982): 294-325. Special editor, Ira Berlin.
“The Rise and Fall of Afro-American Town Life: Town and Country in Reconstruction
Edgefield County, South Carolina,” pp. 152-92 in Toward a New South? Studies in PostCivil War Southern Communities, Edited by Orville Vernon Burton and Robert C.
McMath, Jr. (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1982). .
Review essay of Elizabeth H. Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865-1900, in Social
Science History, vol. 5 (Fall 1981): 483-88.
“The Development of Tenantry and the Post-Bellum Afro-American Social Structure in
Edgefield County, South Carolina.” In Presentations Paysannes, Dimes, Rente fonciere
et Mouvement de la Production Agricole a l'epoque Preindustrielle: Actes du Colloque
preparatoire (30 juin-let et 2 juillet 1977) au VIIe Congres international d'Histoire
economique Section A3. Edimbourg 13-19 aout 1978, Vol. 2: 762-78. Edited by E.
LeRoy Ladurie and J. Goy. Paris: Editions De L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes En Sciences
Sociales, 1982. Reprinted pp.19-35 in From Slavery to Sharecropping: White Land and
Black Labor in the Rural South, 1865-1900, vol. 3 of African American Life in the PostEmancipation South 1861-1900. Edited by Donald G. Nieman. (Hamden, CT: Garland
Publishing, 1994).
“Race and Reconstruction: Edgefield County, South Carolina,” Journal of Social History 12
(Fall 1978): 31-56. Referenced and summarized in Sociological Abstracts 12, #1 (April
1978): 45. Reprinted in The Southern Common People: Studies in Nineteenth Century
Social History. Edited by Edward Magdol and Jon L. Wakelyn, pp. 221-37. (Westport,
Conn: Greenwood Press, 1980). Reprinted pp. 87-112 in The Politics of Freedom:
African Americans and the Political Process During Reconstruction, vol. 5 of African
American Life in the Post-Emancipation South 1861-1900. Edited by Donald G. Nieman.
(Hamden, CT: Garland Publishing, 1994).
“The Antebellum Free Black Community: Edgefield's Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” The
Furman Review 5 (Spring 1974): 18-26.
Selected Review Essays:
"A Nation without Borders: The United States and its World in An Age of Civil Wars, 18301910 by Steven Hahn (NY: Viking Press, 2016) In the Penguin History of the United
States, Eric Foner, Series Editor, H-South Reviews, 2019.
“The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (NY:
Norton, 2017) in Journal of the Civil War Era, expected September, 2019

Accepted and in Press:
“The Origins of the 14th Amendment” in Reconstructuring the Constitution, Remaking
Citizenship, and Reconsidering a Presidential Succession for the U.S. Capitol Historical
Society (Athens: Ohio University Press, expected 2020).
“Lincoln and His Faith,” Fides et Historia, expected 2020.
“Religion and the Academy,” Books and Culture 17:3 (May/June), 2020.
“Datamining for the South: A Digital History Case Study.” Commissioned by Editor of the
American Historical Review, expected 2021.
“Picturing Lincoln in the 1850s,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, expected 2021.

 Burton, page 13

“Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in Context of the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th and 14th
Amendment,” Lincoln Lore, expected Fall 2021.
“Revisiting Edgefield, South Carolina: Home to Dave Drake, the African American Potter,” in I
Made This Jar: The Life and Works of the Enslaved African-American Potter, Dave.
Revised edition, edited Jane Przybysz. Original essay, “Dave and Edgefield County,” pp.
38-52 in book edited by Jill Beute Koverman. (Columbia: McKissick Museum
University of South Carolina, 1998), expected 2021.
“Lincoln and the South,” in Blackwell Companion to Abraham Lincoln. Edited by Michael
Green, expected 2020.
“A Paradigm for American Race Relations Growing out of Slavery and Reconstruction" in
Reconstruction at 150: Reassessing the Revolutionary "New Birth of Freedom", eds
Orville Vernon Burton and Brent Morris (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
expected 2020).
“Reconsidering Reconstruction,” Peter Parish keynote Lecture, British American Nineteenth
Century Historians: BrANCH American Nineteenth Century History, Vol 20 (2020)
issue 4

Articles on Digital History, Statistics, Computing, and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
(SoTL):
(with Simon Appleford) “Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences,” in
ECAR (Educause Center for Applied Research) Bulletin 9: 1 (January 13, 2009): 2-11.
(with James Onderdonk and Simon Appleford) “History: The Role of Technology in the
Democratization of Learning,” pp. 197-205 in Ubiquitous Learning. Edited by Bill Cope
and Mary Kalantzis. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
“Teaching Race and Citizenship,” pp. 229-35 in America on the World Stage: A Global
Approach to U.S. History. Edited by Ted Dickinson and Gary Reichard. Published for
the Organization of American Historians by University of Illinois Press, 2008.
(with Simon Appleford) “Digital History: Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and
Research,” Web Site Reviews in The Journal of American History 99 (March 2008):
1329-31.
(with James Onderdonk and Simon Appleford) “A Question of Centers: One Approach to
Establishing a Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences,”
Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch Quarterly 3:2 (May 2007) –CTWatch,
http://www.ctwarch.org.
Chapter 3, U.S. History Survey Syllabus (annotated), Teaching Philosophy, and examples, pp.
94-107 in AP US History Teacher’s Guide. Edited by Nancy Schick and Warren Hierl
(with Marc Singer, Assessment Specialist). (Princeton: College Board Advanced
Placement of the Educational Testing Service, 2007). Also available at
(http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/teachers_corner/3501.html).
“American Digital History,” Social Science Computer Review 23: 2 (Summer 2005): 206-220,
reprinted in “Essays on History and New Media,” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History
and New Media, at http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-his-new-media/essays/?essayid=30.
published in a Turkish translation, “AMERİKAN DİJİTAL TARİHİ,”Tuhed (Turkish History
Educational Journal) Year 2018, Volume 7, Issue 2, Pages 697 – 719
(http://dergipark.gov.tr/tuhed/issue/39129/448606).

“Creating a Sense of Community in the Classroom,” pp. 131-35 in The Art of College Teaching:
28 Takes. Edited by Marilyn Kallet and April Morgan. (Knoxville, University of
Tennessee Press, 2005).

 Burton, page 14

(with Ian Binnington and David Herr) “What Difference Do Computers Make? History,
Historians, and Computer-Mediated Learning Environments,” History Computer Review
19 (Spring 2003): 98-103.
(with Ian Binnington and David Herr) “Computer Mediated Learning Environments: How
Useful Are They?” AHR Perspectives: Newsmagazine of the American Historical
Association 41:1 (January 2003): 14, 22 (More detailed Carnegie Report as “Historians
Face the E-Future: Findings from the Carnegie Scholar Survey on Computer Mediated
Learning Environments,” at AHA Website
www.theaha.org/perspectives/issues/2003/0301/0301not3.cfm).
(with Terence Finnegan and Beatrice Burton) “The Census Workbench: A Distributed
Computing U.S. Census Database Linkage System,” in Wayfarer: Charting Advances in
Social Science and Humanities Computing. Edited by Orville Vernon Burton, David
Herr, and Terence R. Finnegan. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
(with David Herr and Beatrice Burton) “RiverWeb: History and Culture of the Mississippi River
Basin American Bottom,” in Wayfarer: Charting Advances in Social Science and
Humanities Computing. Edited by Orville Vernon Burton, David Herr, and Terence R.
Finnegan. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
“Interviews with Exemplary Teachers: Orville Vernon Burton,” The History Teacher 35
(February 2002): 237-251.
“A Special Kind of Community,” Furman Magazine 44, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 16-19.
“Why Care About Teaching? An interview with an Accomplished Scholar and National
Teaching Award Winner,” The Real Issue (January/February 2000): 2-5.
“The Use of Historical and Statistical Data in Voting Rights Cases and Redistricting: Intent and
Totality of Circumstances Since the Shaw Cases,” “Understanding Ecological Regression
Techniques for Determining Racial Bloc Voting: An Emphasis on Multiple Ecological
Regression,” and “Report on South Carolina Legislative Delegation System for Vander
Linden v. South Carolina, Civ. Non. 2-91-3635-1, December 1995,” in Conference
Workbook. Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Voting Rights Project,
American University Washington College of Law, Voting Rights Conference, November
19-20, 1999, Washington D.C.
“Presenting Expert Testimony in Voting Rights Cases” and “Understanding Ecological
Regression Techniques for Determining Racial Bloc Voting,” in Conference
Proceedings. CLE/NAACP Annual Meeting, Indianapolis, IN, 1993.
(with James W. Loewen, Terence Finnegan, Robert Brischetto) “It Ain't Broke, So Don't Fix It:
The Legal and Factual Importance of Recent Attacks on Methods Used in Vote Dilution
Litigation,” lead article in The University of San Francisco Law Review 27:4 (Summer
1993): 737-780.
“Teaching Historians with Databases,” History Microcomputer Review 9:1 (Spring 1993): 7, 917.
(with Terence Finnegan), “Two Societies at War, 1861-1865,” pp. 273-90 in Documents
Collection America's History, vol. 1. Edited by Orville Vernon Burton, et al., to
accompany James Henretta, et al., America's History, 2nd ed. (NY: Worth Publishers,
1993).
“Populism,” pp. E7-E11, in Instructor's Resource Manual America's History, 2nd ed., vol. 2 to
accompany James Henretta, et al., America's History (NY: Worth Publishing, 1993).
“Quantitative Methods for Historians: A Review Essay,” Historical Methods 25:4 (Fall 1992):
181-88.
“Computers, History, and Historians: Historians and Converging Cultures?” History
Microcomputer Review 7:2 (Fall 1991): 11-23.
(with Terence Finnegan) “Historians, Supercomputers, and the U.S. Manuscript Census,” in
Proceedings of the Advanced Computing for the Social Sciences Conference. Edited by

 Burton, page 15

Bruce Tonn and Robert Hammond. Washington, D.C.: GPO (U.S. Department of
Commerce Bureau of the Census), 1990. Revised edition published in Social Science
Computer Review 9:1 (Spring 1991), 1-12.
(with Terence Finnegan) “Developing Computer Assisted Instructional (CAI) Materials in the
American History Surveys,” The History Teacher 24:1 (Nov. 1990): 1-12.
(with Terence Finnegan) “Teaching Historians to Use Technology: Databases and Computers,”
International Journal of Social Education 5:1 (Spring 1990): 23-35.
“Complementary Processing: A Supercomputer/Personal Computer U.S. Census Database
Project” in Supercomputing 88, vol. 2 Science and Applications. Edited by Joanne L.
Martin and Stephen Lundstrom. Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society Press,
1990, pp. 167-177.
“History's Electric Future” in OAH (Organization of American Historians) Newsletter 17: #4
(November 1989): 12-13.
“New Tools for ‘New’ History: Computers and the Teaching of Quantitative Historical
Methods” in Proceedings of the 1988 IBM Academic Information Systems University
AEP Conference, "Tools for Learning," Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas, June 1988. Edited by
Frederick D. Dwyer. Abstract in Agenda, pp. 73-74. An expanded and significantly
different version with Terence Finnegan as coauthor appears in History Microcomputer
Review 5:1 (Spring 1989): 3, 13-18.
(with Robert Blomeyer, Atsushi Fukada, and Steven J. White) “Historical Research Techniques:
Teaching with Database Exercises on the Microcomputer,” Social Science History 11:4
(Winter 1987): 433-448.
The United States in the Twentieth Century (History 262). Champaign: University of Illinois
Guided Individual Study, Continuing Education and Public Service, 1986.
“The South in American History” in American History: Survey and Chronological Courses,
Selected Reading Lists and Course Outlines from American Colleges and Universities,
Edited by Warren Susman and John Chambers, vol. 1: 121-27. (NY: Marcus Wiener
Publishing, Inc., 1983, rev. 2nd ed. 1987, rev. 3rd ed. 1991).
“Using the Computer and the Federal Manuscript Census Returns to Teach an Interdisciplinary
American Social History Course,” The History Teacher 12 (November 1979): 71-88.
Reprinted with a few changes in Indiana Social Studies Quarterly 33 (Winter 1980-81):
21-37.
Collaborative Research With Dermatologists--Medical doctors and Computer Scientists
With Urso, B, Updyke KM, Domozych R, Solomon JA, Brooks I, Dellavalle RP,
MD, PhD. Acne Treatment: Analysis of Acne-Related Social Media Posts and the
Impact on Patient Care." 2018 Cutis102(1): 41-43.
With Updyke KM, Urso B, Ali H, Brooks I, Dellavalle RP, Solomon JA.”
“Following Autoimmune Diseases Through Patient Interactive Diaries: Continuous
Quality Improvement.” Practical Dermatology 2017; 14 (12) 48-54.
With Updyke KM, Urso B, Solomon JA, Brooks I, Dellavalle RP. “Identifying
the most influential social media networks utilized by different populations of patients
with autoimmune diseases.” Oral poster presentation, 2017 Society for Investigative
Dermatology Annual Meeting, Portland, OR. April 2017
With Updyke KM, Urso B, Solomon JA, Brooks I, Dellavalle RP. “An overview
of social media posts related to psoriasis patients’ perspectives towards Humira.” Oral
poster presentation, 2017 Society for Investigative Dermatology Annual Meeting,
Portland, OR. April 2017
With Urso B, Updyke KM, Domozych R, Solomon JA, Brooks I, Dellavalle RP.
“Acne treatment utilization among patients on social media platforms.” Oral poster

 Burton, page 16

presentation, 2017 Society for Investigative Dermatology Annual Meeting, Portland, OR.
April 2017
With Urso B, Updyke KM, Domozych R, Solomon JA, Brooks I, Dellavalle R.
Acne treatment utilization among patients on social media platforms (abstract). J Invest
Dermatol.;137(5):s66, 2017
With Updyke KM, Urso B, Solomon JA, Brooks I, Dellavalle RP. An overview of
social media posts related to psoriasis patients’ perspectives towards Humira (abstract). J
Invest Dermatol.;137(5):s13, 2017
Interviews, Reports, and Other Publications:
“A Brief Conversation with James M. McPherson,” in The Struggle for Equality: Essays on
Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction in Honor of James M.
McPherson. Edited by Burton et al., pp. 288-92 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2011).
"We must learn not to hide from our racist past," Greenville News December 27, 2014.
“Dr. Lacy K. Ford Jr.,” Caroliniana Columns: University of South Caroliniana Society
Newsletter, Issue 35 (Spring, 2014), pp. 3-4.
“A Few Words about Allen Stokes as He Retires as Director of the South Caroliniana Library,”
Caroliniana Columns: University of South Caroliniana Society Newsletter, Spring 2013,
pp. 1, 4-5.
“UI Earns Right to be Mr. Lincoln’s University: Excerpted from remarks by Prof. Vernon
Burton, April 1, 2010 keynote address at the UI College of Law,” The News Gazette
(Champaign, Illinois) May 23, 2010, pp. C-1 and C-4.
“Learning from the Bicentennial: Lincoln’s Legacy Gives Americans Something for which to
Strive,” The News Gazette (Champaign, Illinois) February 12, 2010, pp. C-1 and C-4.
“Life of Lincoln Resonates Today,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Opinion, Dec. 9, 2009,
A19.
“Colbert History,” Pan-African Studies, Fall 2009, p. 3.
“Remarks by Professor Orville Vernon Burton at the October 10, 2009 Celebration of Abraham
Lincoln’s September 30, 1959 Speech,” Delivered at the Milwaukee War Memorial
Center at the Invitation of the Wisconsin Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, Appendix
pages 166-177 in Final Report and Appendix of the Wisconsin Lincoln Bicentennial
Commission, To: The Governor of the State of Wisconsin, Jim Doyle, Responsive to:
Executive Order #245, Date: February 12, 2010.
“Max Bachmann's Bust of Abraham Lincoln, Circa 1915,” pp. 88-89 in Lincoln in Illinois, Ron
Schramm, Photographer and Richard E. Hart, Compiler and Editor (Springfield:
published by the Abraham Lincoln Association, 2009.
“Is There Anything Left to Be Said about Abraham Lincoln?” Historically Speaking 9:7
(September/October 2008): 6-8.
“An Interview with Vernon Burton” Lincoln Lore, no. 1894 (Fall 2008), pp. 18-24.
“Lincoln’s Generation also Faced Crisis Involving Religion and Terrorism,” in History Network
Newsletter, February 25, 2008.
“Abraham Lincoln, Southern Conservative: An Interview with Orville Vernon Burton” ( 2 Parts),
posted by Allen Barra, October 2, 2007.
http://www.americanheritage.com/blog/200710_2_1259.shtml and
http://www.americanheritage.com/blog/200710_2_1260.shtml
Interview by Roy A. Rosenzweig, 2001, “Secrets of Great History Teachers,” History Matters, at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/browse/secrets/.
“Keeping Up With the e-joneses: Information Technology and the Teaching of History,”
Proceedings for First Annual Charleston Connections: Innovations in Higher Education

 Burton, page 17

Conference. Learning from Each Other: The Citadel, The College of Charleston, The
Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston Southern University and Trident
Technical College. June 1 and 2, 2001, The Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina, p. 63.
(with Terence Finnegan and Barbara Mihalas) “Developing a Distributed Computing U.S.
Census Database Linkage System,” Technical Report 027 (December 1994). National
Center for Supercomputing Applications, UIUC.
“On the Study of Race and Politics,” Clio: Newsletter of Politics & History, An Organized
Section of the American Political Science Association 3:1 (Fall & Winter, 1992/1993): 6.
“Benjamin Mays of Greenwood County: Schoolmaster of the Civil Rights Movement,” South
Carolina Historical Society News Service, published in various newspapers, 1990.
“Quantitative Historical U.S. Census Data Base” in Science: The State of Knowing. National
Center for Supercomputing Applications, Annual Report to the National Science
Foundation 1987, p. 29.
“Computer-Assisted Instructional Database Programs for History Curricula” Project EXCEL.
1986-87 Annual Report. Office of the Chancellor, UI at Urbana-Champaign, pp. 41-42.
“Postmodern Academy,” The Octopus, January 24, 1997, p. 6.
(with David Herr and Ian Binnington) “Providing Lessons in Mississippi River Basin Culture
and History: riverweb.ncsa.uiuc.edu,” in Touch the Future: EOT-PACI, 1997, p. 43.
“The Coming of Age of Southern Males During Reconstruction: Edgefield County, South
Carolina,” Working Papers in Population Studies, School of Social Sciences, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1984.
In Memorial – Essays for Charles Joyner, F. Sheldon Hackney, Bertram Wyatt-Brown in the
American Historical Association (AHA) Perspectives; Thomas Krueger and Philip
Paladin in Organization of American Historians OAH Newsletter, and F. Sheldon
Hackney JSH LXXXI:2 (May 2015), pp. 350-52, and Ernest L. “Whitey” Lander, in
Journal of Southern History.
“Creating a Major Research Archive on Southern History,” Caralogue: The Journal of the South
Carolina Historical Society, June, 2015.
A number of brief essays about the Clemson CyberInstitute, for example, “Clemson’s
CyberInstitute encourages Collaboration,” http://features.clemson.edu/insideclemson/inside-news/clemson%E2%80%99s-cyberinstitute-encourages-collaboration/
In addition, I have written a number of reports as expert witness for minority plaintiffs in voting
rights and discrimination cases.
Accepted and In Press:
“Liberty,” in the Fetzer Institute's Booklet of Notable Lincoln Quotations, expected 2018.
Digital Publications and Projects:
Editor in Chief, The Long Civil War: A Digital Research and Teaching Resource, Alexander
Street Publishers, 2013Editor in Chief, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive. The Largest Digital
Archive on the History of Slavery. Farmington Hills, MI: Thompson-Gale, 2007--14.
http://www.galetrials.com/default.aspx?TrialID=16394;ContactID=15613. Advisory Board: Ira
Berlin, Laurent Dubois, James O. Horton, Charles Joyner, Wilma King, Dan Littlefield,
Cassandra Pybus, John Thornton, Chris Waldrep.
Part I: Debates Over Slavery and Abolition, 2009
Part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, 2011
Part III: Institution of Slavery, 2012
Part IV: Age of Emancipation, 2014

 Burton, page 18

Webmaster for the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Website, 2007-10, now
maintained by the ALB Foundation. http://www.lincolnbicentennial.gov/
"Does Southern Exceptionalism Exist," Inside Clemson, May 14, 2014
http://newsstand.clemson.edu/does-southern-exceptionalism-exist/
Lincoln Remembered: Nine essays – “Lincoln and the Founding of Democracy’s Colleges,”
“Lincoln: America’s “First and Only Choice,” “Picturing Lincoln,” “Putting His Politics
on Paper,” “Belief in the Rule of Law,” “Taking a Stand Against Slavery,” “The
Movement Toward Civil Rights,” “Political Brilliance on the Path to the Emancipation
Proclamation,” “Lincoln’s Last Speech,” commemorating the bicentennial of Lincoln’s
birth, February 2009 to February 2010. A monthly blog for the Illinois LAS On-line
Newsletter; available at http://www.las.illinois.edu/news/lincoln/.
Writing the South in Fact, Fiction and Poetry: A Conference Honoring Charles Joyner.
Thursday and Friday Sessions. DVD produced of Conference I organized at Coastal
Carolina University, Conway, SC, Feb. 17-19, 2011. Produced CD Aug. 2011.
Editor, “Slavery in America in Sources in U.S. History Online.” Farmington Hills, MI:
Thompson Gale, 2007.
“The Mississippi River in American History,” for Mark Twain’s Mississippi, including essays
with Simon Appleford and Troy Smith, on “Economic Development, 1851–1900,”
“Politics, 1851–1900,” “African Americans in the Mississippi River Valley, 1851–1900,”
“Native Americans in the Mississippi River Valley, 1851–1900,” “Religion and Culture,
1851–1900,” and “Women in the Trans-Mississippi West,1851–1900.” Edited by Drew
E. VandeCreek, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMSL) Project (2007). Online
Resource: http://dig.lib.niu.edu/twain/.
RiverWeb: An interdisciplinary, multimedia, collaborative exploration of the Mississippi River's
interaction with people over time (now redone as Cultural Explorer). CD-ROM and
Website http://riverweb.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.
The Illinois RiverBottom Explorer (IBEX). Part of the East Saint Louis Action Research Project
(ESLARP) where Faculty and East St. Louis neighborhood groups and local churches
work on tangible and visible projects that address the immediate and long-term needs of
some of the city's poorest communities. (More is available at
http://www.eslarp.uiuc.edu/). IBEX serves as a resource for historical documents,
primary and secondary sources, and oral history interviews. Website:
http://www.eslarp.uiuc.edu/ibex/archive/default.htm.
Text96. A collection of primary source electronic texts for teaching American History. Website
http://www.history.uiuc.edu/uitext96/uitexttoc.html.
“Database Exercises and Quantitative Techniques: Exercise I: Colonial America.” Madison, WI:
Wiscware, 1987. (for IBM and compatible computers, 1 disk, Instructional Workbook,
and Teacher's Instructional Sheet).
“Lessons in the History of the United States.” Wentworth, NH: COMPress, 1987 (1989 with
QUEUE, Fairfield, CT). For IBM color monitor; originally 50 computer exercise
modules on 25 computer disks + instructor's manual. An interactive electronic textbook
of U.S. history.
Automated linkage and statistical systems Unix Matchmaker, AutoLoad, RuleMatch,
DisplayMatch, ViewCreate (Urbana: UI NCSA, 2000).
Website http://www.granger.uiuc.edu/aitg/maps/1870/htm/default.htm
"Illinois Windows Dataentry System for U.S. Census." University of Illinois, 1988 (for IBM PS2
and compatible computers with Windows applications, 1 disk, Instructional Sheet)
The Age of Lincoln website at https://ageoflincoln.app.clemson.edu.
Current Digital Projects include Social Media Learning Center Studies of Elections,
Redistricting, Minorities, and Discussions of the American South, Race, and the Civil

 Burton, page 19

War. Also text and data analytics (mining) – developing techniques using the HathiTrust,
Internet Archive II Digital Book Collection, and Library of Congress Chronicling
America U.S. newspaper archive to study “DNA” of writings of Abraham Lincoln,
changing views of American South over time, interpretations of Civil War and
development of “Lost Cause Mythology.”
In addition, I continue to use Edgefield County, South Carolina to investigate, “large questions in
small places.” I have accumulated a quantitative database that includes every person and
farm recorded in the U.S. manuscript census returns linked from 1850 to 1880 for old
Edgefield District, South Carolina (a region now comprising five different counties).
With this unique database I (and my students) can study, test, and suggest themes in
American History with details and specificity related to the lives of ordinary folks.

Selected Grants:
National Science Foundation (NSF), GK-12: Ed Grid Graduate Teaching Fellows Program,
2003-09 ($4,990,015)
NSF, EAGER: Prototype Tool for Visualizing Online Polarization (co-Pi), 2012-14 ($262,654)
NSF CISE/IRIS Division Award, Grant No. ASC 89-02829, Automated Record Linkage, 1991
NSF Grant No. CDA-92-11139, “Historical U.S. Census Database with High Performance
Computing,” 1992
NSF, EPIC Grant, 2006-08 ($20,000)
NSF Catalyst Grant for Social Science Learning Center (with MATRIX, Michigan State
University), 2006-09 ($175K)
NSF, Senior Investigator on the MRI award, Award #1228312 MRI: Acquisition of High
Performance Computing Instrument for Collaborative Data-Enabled Science
($1,009,160) See:
http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1228312&HistoricalAwards=false
Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, Lincoln’s “Unfinished Work”: Conference on The
South and Race,” 2012-2018 ($27,000)
National Parks Service, “Administrative Histories of Fort Sumter National Monument and
Charles Pinckney National Historic Site,” $110,000.00
Clemson University, “Tracking Themes Across Time and Space,” 2012 ($10,000)
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Challenge Grant for Institute for Computing in
Humanities, Arts, and Social Science, 2008-11 ($750,000, 3 mil. Total with challenge
matches)
NEH Educational Technologies Grant, ED-20758, 1997-99
NEH Humanities High Performance Computing Advance Research and Technology (HpC):
Coordinating High Performance Computing Institutes and the Digital, 2008-09
($249,997). To support a total of nine institutes and one joint conference for humanities
scholars, to be hosted by three different high-performance computer centers: the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and the
San Diego Supercomputer Center.
NEH, NSF, and the Joint Information Systems Committee, “Digging Into Image Data to Answer
Authorship Related Questions,” 2009-11 ($100,000).
(with Max Edelson) NEH, The Cartography of American Colonization Database Project, To
support the development of a database of 1000 historical maps illustrating the trajectory
of colonization in the Americas. The database will provide a searchable introduction to
the mapping of the western hemisphere in the era of European expansion, ca. 1500-1800.
2008-09 ($24,997)

 Burton, page 20

NEH Conference Grant (with R. C. McMath, Jr., History and Social Sciences, Georgia Institute
of Technology), 1978
NEH Summer Research Fellowship, 1983
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Travel grant, 1977
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Grant- to Recent Recipients of the Ph.D., 1977
PT3/Technology Across Learning Environments for New Teachers grant, U.S. Department of
Education, 2002-03, 2003-04
Academy of Academic Entrepreneurship, 2006-08
National Archives Record Administration grant for digital records, 2003-05
IBM Shared University Research Grant, 1994
IBM Innovations grant, Educational Technologies Board, 1992
IBM Technology Transfer IBM grant, 1988
IBM EXCEL II, History Database Teaching Project, 1987
IBM EXCEL Project, History Database Teaching Project, 1986
Partnership Illinois Award, 1998 (with Brian Orland, Pennsylvania State University Landscape
Architecture, East St. Louis Research Project), RiverWeb 2002-03, 2003-04
East Saint Louis Action Research Program Grant, 2005-06, 06-07, 07-08
Andrew Carnegie Foundation 3-year Baccalaureate Study Grant, 1976
Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Environment Grant, 1998
South Carolina Humanities Grant for Lincoln’s Unfinished Work, $7,000, 2018-19
The Humanities Council (South Carolina) Outright Grant ($8,000), THC grant #10-1363-1
(Writing the South in Fact, Fiction, and Poetry), 2011
South Carolina Humanities Council Conference Grant (with Tricia Glenn), 2005
South Carolina Humanities Council Conference Grant (with Winfred Moore), 2002-03
South Carolina Humanities Council Conference Grant (with Bettis Rainsford), 2000-01
(with Ian Brooks, University of Illinois) “Improving patient outcomes by listening to their social
media communications,” Homecare Education And Resource Team Support
(H/E/A/R/T/S), $15,000, 2017Grant for Conference on “Lincoln’s Unfinished Work,” Thomas Watson Brown Foundation,
$17,560, 2017- 18
Self Family Foundation, $6,000 for Lincoln’s Unfinished Work, 2018-19
Selected Grants from University of Illinois
Office of Continuing Education Grant, 2005-06, 06-07
Chancellor, Provost, and Vice Chancellor Research, RiverWeb Grant, 2004-05 ($30K)
Advanced Information Technologies Group Research Award, 1994, 96, 97, 2000
Applications of Learning Technologies in Higher Education grant for UI--Text96 Project, 1995-2000 (co-principal investigator with Richard Jensen of UIC campus)
Educational Technologies Board Grant for RiverWeb 1998
Guided Individual Study Grant for RiverWeb, 1997-98
Program for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics, Course Development Award, 1993
Arnold O. Beckman Research Grant Award, UIUC Research Board, 1989, 1992
Language Laboratory Computer Assisted Instruction Award, 1988
Research Board Humanities Faculty Research Grant, 1986
Graduate Research Board, support for various projects, 1976-08
Selected Grants from Clemson University
2011/2012 University Research Grant Committee (URGC) Program ($10,000)
2013-14 CAAH & Library Digital Humanities Grant ($4000)

 Burton, page 21

2018- Clemson Humanities Hub Short Term Visiting Humanities Fellowship, a grant to help
fund the Conference on Lincoln's Unfinished Work ($5,000)
Selected Professional Activities and Service:
Officer Congressional Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Foundation, 2008-2010;
Board of Directors, Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, interim President, 2010,
vice-chair 2010Southern Historical Association, President 2011-12, President Elect, 2011, Vice President Elect,
2010, Executive Council, 2005-08, 09-15; Program Committee 1989, 1998; 2005 (Chair);
Membership Committee, 1986-87, 1991-92; 1995-98; 2002; Committee on Women,
1992-95, Nominating Committee, 1999-2000, Chair H.L. Mitchell Book Award
Committee, 2000-02
Agricultural History Society, President 2001-02, Vice President 2000-01, Executive Committee,
1997-2006; Committee to Review and Revise Constitution and By-Laws, 2004-05;
Nominating Committee, 1991-94, chair 1993-94; Committee to Select first Group of
Fellows for Society, 1995; Committee to select new Secretary/Treasurer, 2009-10
Organization of American Historians, Included in the Organization of American Historians Race
Relations Expert Guide, 2015-, OAH/ALBC (Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial
Commission) Abraham Lincoln Higher Education Awards Committee, 2007-09; ABCCLIO “America: History and Life” Award Committee, 1997-99; Membership
Committee, 1990-94, nominated for executive board 1989.
Social Science History Association, Executive Committee 2000-03; Nominating Committee
1990-91; Program Committee 1989, 1993; Community History Network Convener,
1976-79; Rural History Network Convener, 1988-90, 1993-94
Social Science Computing Association, Executive Council, 1993-2002; Organizing Committee
Chairperson for Annual Conference, 1993, Conference on Computing for the Social
Sciences (CSS93); program committee 1993-95, 2001
American Historical Association, Nominated for Vice President for Teaching, 2009
Southern Association for Women Historians, Membership Committee, 1996-99
The Society of Civil War Historians, Chair Thomas Watson Brown Book Award for the best
book published on the causes, conduct, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil
War, 2017-18.
South Carolina Historical Association, Executive Board, 2009-12
H-Net, founding member of H-Net, Treasurer and Executive Committee, 1993-99; Chair,
committee to evaluate multimedia NEH grant; Editor H-South (book review editor 19972000); Editorial Board of H-Rural, H-Slavery, and H-CivWar.
Scholarly Advisory Group, President Lincoln’s Cottage at the Soldier’s Home, 2012Executive Council, The University South Caroliniana Society, 2011-15
University of South Carolina, Search Committee for Director South Caroliniana Library, 2012
Executive Board South Carolina Jubilee Project, 2012-14
Member South Carolina Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, 2008-2010
Member Champaign County, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, 2006-10
Council, U.S. Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission, 2009-15
Historical Advisory Committee to the “Fort Sumter/Fort Moultrie Trust,” charged with
organizing Sesquicentennial Activities in Charleston and South Carolina Lowcountry,
2010-15
The Illinois Humanities Council Scholar, 2004-05
Presented to President’s Information Technology Advisory Commission (PITAC), 9-16-2004
Invited to NEH Digital Humanities Initiative Mini-Conference, March 2006 and Digital
Humanities Summit, April 2011, December 2007

 Burton, page 22

Digital Library Federation Scholars’ Advisory Panel, 2004-7
University of Tennessee Knoxville Horizon Project Steering Committee, 2014Peer Reviewer, ACH/ALLC/SDH-SEMI Joint Digital Humanities Conferences, 2007-13
E-Docs, (one of 3 founding members) Editorial Board, 1998-2005
Mentor for Southern Regional Council Minority Scholars Program, 1992-96
UIUC Representative to Lincoln Presidential Library Committee: Educational Activities
Committee, 2001; Fellowship Committee, 2002
Faculty Associate, Council for International Exchange of Scholars, 2002-03
Evaluator/Referee (one of two for history) for the Pew Foundation Faculty Research
Fellowships, 1997-98, 1998-99; 2001 (for graduate students for summer seminar)
Evaluator and Referee for American Council of Learned Societies Grants, 2005-08
National Endowment Humanities, Review Panels: Scholarly Editions Program, 2007-08, for
Digital Humanities Grants, 2010, NEH Division of Public Programs Panel, “America's
Historical and Cultural Organizations” (AHCO) grant initiative, 2013; Humanities
Connections, 2016
National Science Foundation Review Panel for Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence grants,
1998, 1999
Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), Steering
Committee and Planning Committee, 2003-04, Program Committee, 2009, 2010, 2013-14
Advisory Committee, American Studies Program, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs,
U.S. Information Agency, 1989-93
Delegate to the Mexican/American Commission on Cultural Cooperation, Mexico City, June
1990; Chairperson of United States delegation (Co-Chairperson with Mexican
counterpart), U.S. Studies Working Group
Advisor for “Crossroads of Clay”: NEH Alkaline Glazed Stoneware Exhibition and Catalog,
McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina, 1987-90
Advisory Committee Film Project for Historic Southern Tenant Farmers Union, 1986-90
Consultant, Commercial film, “Roll the Union On” about H.L. Mitchell and the Southern Tenant
Farmers Union
Consultant on the Renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, 1981-82, 2004-07, including
consultation for an NBC TV Special.
Consultant for Documentary, “Behind the Veil,” 1995-2005
Board of Directors of the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project, 1997Advisory Council for the Lincoln Prize at Gettysburg College, 1997Prize Committee for the Technology and History Award, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of
American History, 2000-01
International Committee on Historic Black Colleges and Universities, 2001Consultant, Belle Meade and The Hermitage and Vanderbilt University. Presentations of
slavery.
Consultant, Morven Park, 2010-12
Consultant, for Matt Burrows, documentary “The Assassination of N.G. Gonzales by James H.
Tillman,” 2010Consultant, for Chris Vallilo musical performance, “This Land is Your Land: Woody Guthrie
and the Meaning of America,” 2010Organizing and Founding Committee International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning (IS-SOTL), 2003-7. Drafted initial mission statement for Society.
Furman University Alumni Council Board, 2010-16
International African American Museum (IAAM) Program Subcommittee (Charleston, SC),
2016-

 Burton, page 23

IAAM, Content team for an exhibit wall located in the Carolina Gold gallery entitled Built on
Slavery, 2018Dr. Benjamin E. Mays Historical Preservation Site Foundation Board, 2015Editorial Boards:
Associate Editor for History, Social Science Computer Review, 2012-16
Editorial Board, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Research, 2015Editorial Board, Digital Humanities Series, University of Illinois Press, 2005Editorial Board, Change and Continuity, 1995Editorial Board Fides et Historia, 2010Editorial Board Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association, 2009-14
Editorial Board, History Computer Review, 1990-2003
Editorial Board, Locus: An Historical Journal of Regional Perspectives on National Topics,
1994-96
Editorial Advisory Board, The South Carolina Encyclopedia, gen. editor Walter Edgar, 2000-06
Advisory Boards:
Advisory Board for International Journal of Social Education, 1986-2000
Advisory Reviewer for The Journal of Negro History (since 2002, The Journal of African
American History), 1992Advisory board for the online South Carolina Encyclopedia. Southern Studies Institute,
University of South Carolina, 2015Advisory Board, Digital Library on American Slavery, University of North Carolina,
Greensboro, 2004-10
Advisory Board, Biographies: The Atlantic Slaves Data Network (ASDN), 2010Advisory Board, Simms Initiatives of the Library at the University of South Carolina, 2009-14
Advisory Board, American Insight, 2013- (www.AmericanINSIGHT.org)
Strategic Advisory Council for MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social
Sciences On-line at Michigan State University, 2004Advisory board, of the Michigan State University MATRIX online project, “Mapping Civil War
Politics”
External Advisory Board (EAB) of proposed Center of Data for the Public Good, University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Advisory Board, The Virtual Archives for Land-Grant History Project, Association of PublicLand Grant Universities, 2012External Advisory Board, National Historic Preservation Research Commission (NHPRC)
“Effective User-Centered Access For Heterogeneous Electronic Archives” project,
Illinois Institute of Technology, 2003-05
Advisory Board, Postwar America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and
Economic History
External Advisory Board (EAB) of the proposed NSF Center for Data Science and Engineering,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2014National Advisory Board to Alan Lomax's Global Jukebox: 1993-2015
The Civil Rights Project at University of California, Berkeley, Advisory Board for “The Decade
Ahead: Reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act and the Future of Democratic
Participation,” 2004-07
Advance Research and Technology Collaboratory for the Americas (ARTCA) –Organization of
American States, Advisory Board Chair, 2008Gullah-Geechee Corridor Board, 2019-

 Burton, page 24

Service - University of Illinois (three campus system – Urbana, Chicago, Springfield)
UI Senate Conferences (elected), all three campuses of the University of Illinois, 2006-09,
Presiding officer (chair) 2007-08
Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, 2006-09
Academic Affairs Management Team, 2007-08
Task Force for Global Campus, 2006-07
External Relations Management Team, 2006-09
Strategic Plan Committee, 2005-06
Service (selected) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Faculty Senate (elected), 1999-2001, 2002-03; 2005-06, 2006-07, Presiding Officer (Chair,
Senate Executive Committee), 2005-06, 2006-07 (was Senate Council) elected 2000-01,
2003-04; 2005-06; 2006-07; Chair, Education Policy Committee, 2002-03, Chair 200304; Budget and Priorities Committee, 1999-01, Chair 2000-01
As Chair Faculty Senate Executive Committee, 2005-07 represented faculty at Board of Trustee
meetings, and CIC meetings. Led in developing ideas of shared governance, helped in
the drafting and implementing of a strategic plan for both the University of Illinois and
the Urbana-Champaign campus. Oversaw establishment of the Illinois Informatics
Institute (I3) and the School of Earth, Society, and Environment. Dealt with issues of
multi-year contracts for research faculty and staff policy, rehiring of retirees, Global
Campus, and led study of Academic effects of Chief Illini and diversity issues.
Organizer and Chair, Planning Committee for the Lincoln Bicentennial, 2006-09
Task Force for Diversity and Freedom of Speech, 2007-08
Convocation address, August 21, 2000
Search Committee for Chancellor, vice-chair, 2004-5
Association of American Colleges and Universities campus representative and Assoc., 2004-05
Martin Luther King, Jr., Week Planning Committee, co-chair, 2002-03, 03-04, 04-05, 05-06
Strategic Plan Committee, 2005-06
Chancellor’s Task Force (“Kitchen Cabinet”) for the Humanities, 2002-04
Provost’s ad hoc Committee on Evaluating Public Service for Promotion and Tenure, 2003-04
Brown Jubilee Planning Committee, Diversity Initiative, 2002-04
Law-Education Brown Jubilee Conference Program Committee, 2002-04
East St. Louis Action Research Projects (ESLARP) Campus Advisory Committee, 2004-9
University Planning Council, 2000-01
Selection Committee for University Scholars, 1999 -- 2000, Chair Subcommittee for Social
Sciences, Humanities, FAA, Communications, Education, Law 2000
UI President's Distinguished Speakers Program, 2000-02, 2006-08
University of Illinois Press Board, 1995-2000, Chair 1998-2000
Search Committee for Director University of Illinois Press, 1998-99
Committee on University Publishing, 1997-98
Graduate College Executive Committee, 1998-2000; Committee to Evaluate Dean of Graduate
College, Committee to Review and Implement Graduate Program Revisions, Graduate
Student Grievance Policy Committee
Graduate College Office of Minority Affairs Strategic Planning Committee, 1999-2000
University Administration Budget and Benefits Study Committee, 2000-02
Budget Strategies Committee, 1993-94, Subcommittee for Library. Subcommittee for Faculty
Productivity and Teaching Models
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Advisory Committee, 2001-03
Center for Democracy in a Multicultural Society, Advisory Committee, 2002-08
Center for Advanced Study George A. Miller Committee, 2000-03

 Burton, page 25

African American Studies and Research Program (AASRP), later Department of African
American Studies, Advisory Council, 1982-86; Curriculum Development & Faculty
Recruitment Committee, 2002-2003; Research and Course Competition Committee,
1991-94, Chair 93-94; Electronic Networking Committee, 1996-2000, Chair 1997-98;
Library Advisory Committee, 1997-2003
UI-Integrate Faculty Advisory Committee, 2003-04
Graduate College Area Subcommittee for the Humanities and Creative Arts, 1996-98
Campus-wide Advisory Committee for the Center for Writing Studies, 2000-01
Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), Selection Committee for CIC Research Grants in
the Humanities, 1993-94
Chancellor's Task Force for Minority Graduate Students, 1989-92
Chair, Subcommittee for Summer Program for Minority Graduate Students, 1990
Computer Resources Development Committee, Program for the Study of Cultural Values and
Ethics, 1991-93
High Performance Computing Committee for the Social Sciences, 1989-95
Rural History Workshop Convener, 1989-94 (with Sonya Salamon)
Faculty Fellow, 1990-2003
Graduate College Fellowship Committee, 1988
Selection Committee for Lily Fellows, 1987
Social Studies Committee for the Preparation of Teachers, Council on Teacher Education, 1986
Chair, Search Committee for African-American Scholar, 1986-87
Search Committee, Director for AASRP, 1985-86, Chair 87-88
Graduate College Appeals Committee, 1984
Chancellor's Allerton Conference, 1988; Chancellor's Beckman Conference, 2001-06;
Chancellor’s Conference on Diversity, 2002, faculty facilitator
Combating Discrimination and Prejudice Workshop, 1988
Krannert Art Museum, Committee on The Black Woman as Artist, 1992
H. W. Wilson Faculty Panel, 1993
Advanced Information and Technology Committee, 1992-97, Advisory Committee, 1993-94
Honors Symposium for UI recruitment of High School Seniors, 1993
Search Committee for Archivist, UIUC Computing and Communications Service Office, 1993
Search Committee for Research Librarian, UIUC Library, 1997; Undergraduate Library
Advisory Committee, 2002-9
Member Human Dimensions of Environmental Systems Group, 1997-2017
Faculty Learning Circle for 2003-04
Illini Days Speaker, 1999, 2000, 2002
Public Interest Fund of Illinois Representative, 1996- 08
Facilitator for Interinstitutional Faculty Summer Institute on Learning Technologies, UIUC,
2000, 2002
Board Advisors, Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices (CHAMP), 2005-08
Faculty Mentor for Campus Honors Program, 1980-2008
Service - College of Liberal Arts and Science UI:
Lecturer at Pedagogy 2000: Teaching, Learning and Technology, Annual UIUC Retreat on
Active Learning (2000)
Keynote Address at LAS Awards Banquet, 2000 and Keynote at UIUC Campus Awards
Banquet, 2000
Dean’s Committee to Evaluate Chair of History Department (1 of 3 elected by History
Department), 1996
Oversight Committee Computing for the Social Sciences, 1993-95

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Committee to select nominees for election to College Executive Committee, 1992
Academic Standards Committee, 1983-85, Chair 1984-85
School of Humanities Scholarship and Honors, 1986-88, Chair 1987-88
Social Sciences and Humanities Respondent to the Joint Task Force on Admission Requirements
and Learning Outcomes, 1988
Advisory Committee, Social Sciences Quantitative Laboratory, 1987-88, 1989-93
Alumni Association Annual Speaker, 1990
General Education Committee, 1990-91
Awards Committee, Chair, 1991-92
Race & Ethnicity, Class & Community Area Committee of Sociology Graduate Program, 19932009
LAS Alumni Association Speaker, 2000
Cohn Scholars Honors Mentoring Program (choosing the 10 best Humanities first-year students),
1986-88, 1989-90, 1992-93, 1995-96, 1998-99, 2002 -05
Faculty Mentor, Committee of Institutional Cooperation Summer Research Opportunities
Program for Minority Students, 1987, 1991-95, 1997-2000, 2002, 2003
Faculty Mentor, McNair Minority Scholars, 1993-94, 1996-97
Summer Orientation and Advance Enrollment Program, Faculty Leader, 1991-93, 2000, 2002,
2004
Gender Inclusivity Seminar, 1992
The African-American Experience: A Framework for Integrating American History: An
Institute for High School Teachers of History, instructor 1992, 1994
Faculty Advisor for UIUC Law School Humanities Teaching Program, 1998-99
Senior Faculty Mentor, LAS Teaching Academy, 1999-2008
Service - Department of History UI:
Lincoln Bicentennial Committee, Chair, 2005-06, co-Chair 2006-08
Department Distance Learning and Global Campus committee, 2007-08
Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, 2003-05
Ethical Conduct Liaison, 2004-05
Phi Alpha Theta Faculty Advisor, 2005-06
Graduate Placement Officer, 1990, 1991-94, 1997-99
Graduate Admissions Officer, 1990-91
Graduate Committee, 1990-93
Organizer of OAH Breakfast Meeting, 1989-90, 1993-94
Computer Resources, 1976-88, 1989-91, 1995-99, Chair 1976-85, 1997-99
Teaching Awards, 1986-88, 1992-93, 1997-98, 1999-2000, Chair, 1987-88, 1997-98, 1999-2000
T.A. Evaluation, 1975-76, 1978-82, 1984-88, 1990-91, 1995, 1998-99, 2002, 2005-06
Speakers and Colloquia, 1981-82
Grants and Funding, 1981-82
Capricious Grading, 1985-86, 2002-03
Social Science History Committee, 1980
Advisor, History Undergraduate Club, 1976-78
Swain Publication Prize Essay Committee, 1991
Proposal-Writing Workshop, 1991-92, 2002
Teaching Workshop, 1993
Chair Library Committee, 1996-97
Faculty Advisor for Phi Alpha Theta, 2005-06
American History Search Committee, 1991-92
Chair, American History Search Committee, 1993-94

 Burton, page 27

James G. Randall Distinguished Chair Search Committee, 1999-2000
Service Coastal Carolina University:
Search committee for Archaeologist, 2008-09
Selection Committee for Clark Chair of History, 2010
Third Year Assistant Professor Faculty Review Committee, 2010
Service Clemson University:
Chair, Search committee for Dean of the Library, 2017-18
Search Committee for Dean of CAAH, 2019-20
Provost’s Research Strategy Committee, 2014-16
Martin Luther King, Jr. program planning committee, 2013Pan-African Advisory Committee, 2014-17; Steering Committee, 2017-, Chair Speaker’s
committee, 2018-19
History Department Graduate Committee, 2017-18
History Department Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee, 2010-15
History Department Digital MA, then Digital Ph.D. committee, 2011Clemson Center for Geospatial Technologies Advisory Committee, 2017GIS Steering Committee, 2012Clemson University Computational Advisory Team (CU-CAT), 2010University Academic Technology Council, 2010Ex-officio Steering Committee, Clemson CyberInstitute, 2010University Committee to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Integration of
Clemson, 2011-13
Outstanding Staff Employee Award, Academic Affairs Selection Committee, 2011
University Morrill Act Anniversary Celebration, 2011-13
Ben Robertson Society (BRS) Foundation Advisory Board, 2013Chair, Clemson University Humanities Grid committee, 2012-14
Chair, CAAH Digital Humanities Computing committee, 2013-15
CAAH, Digital Humanities Ph.D. taskforce, 2014-16
CAAH taskforce on undergraduate “Creativity Certificate”
History Department committee to review university signage of historical significance,
2015First Faculty in Residence (Norris Hall), 2011-13
Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion, 2013

A more complete list of Service and Public Engagement is available upon request.

Conferences Organized (selected list):
In 1978, I (with Robert C. McMath, Jr.) organized and chaired a National Endowment for the
Humanities Conference on Southern Communities at the Newberry Library. In 1993, I
organized, hosted, and chaired the annual meeting of the Conference on Computing for the
Social Sciences at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. In 1999, I organized
and hosted the 12th Annual Meeting of the Southern Intellectual History Circle (SIHC) in
Edgefield and Ninety Six, S.C, and again hosted SIHC for its 16th Annual meeting in 2004 at the
College of Charleston, and the 2013 meeting in Edgefield. In 2001, I organized a workshop and
conference on diversity and racism in the classroom with Carnegie Scholars at The Citadel in
Charleston, S.C. In 2001, I organized a South Carolina Humanities Council Edgefield Summit

 Burton, page 28

History Conference. In January 2003, I organized a Workshop on Diversity and Racism and a
Conference on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, both at the University of Illinois. In
March 2003 I organized The Citadel Conference on the South: “The Citadel Symposium on the
Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina.” I organized the Humanities, Arts, Science, and
Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) meeting in January 2004 in Washington, D.C.
I organized and hosted a Humanities Computing Summit in August 2004 at NCSA and UIUC.
In 2005, I planned and hosted the British American Nineteenth Century History (BrANCH)
Conference in Edgefield, South Carolina and a symposium honoring Jim McPherson’s retirement
in April 2005 in Princeton. As program chair I helped organize the Southern Historical Annual
meeting in Atlanta in November 2005. In 2011, I organized a conference in honor of Charles
Joyner, Writing the South in Fact, Fiction, and Poetry, at Coastal Carolina University. In 2013, I
organized a conference honoring F. Sheldon Hackney at Martha’s Vineyard. On Nov. 28-Dec 1,
2018, I organized and hosted an international conference on “Lincoln’s Unfinished Work,” and
on the afternoon of Dec. 2 lead a workshop for teachers on how to teach about the history of race
in South Carolina k-12 schools. As Director of I-CHASS, I regularly organized conferences and
workshops, at least two major conferences a year such as “Computing in Humanities, Arts, and
Social Sciences” (2005), “Spatial Thinking in the Social Sciences and Humanities” (2006), and
the “e-Science for Arts and Humanities Research: Early Adopters Forum” (2007). In 2007 we
hosted the annual international meeting of The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
including The Association for Computers and the Humanities. As Director of the Clemson
CyberInstitute, I regularly organized workshops, brownbags, conferences, and meetings. And as
Executive Director of the College of Charleston Atlantic World and Lowcountry (CLAW)
Program, I regularly work with others to organize conferences and meetings.

Reviews:
I have reviewed books for numerous journals and book manuscripts for numerous presses. In
addition, I have refereed article manuscripts for numerous journals. I have also reviewed
proposals for various granting agencies. I have also reviewed and written outside letters of
recommendation for promotion, tenure, and endowed chair decisions for more than a hundred
cases at various colleges and universities. Lists of these reviews, presses, journals, universities,
and granting agencies are available upon request.
Invited lectures and conference participation available upon request. Recently, selected invited
lectures include those at Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Black Congressional
Caucus on Lincoln (2009), Printers Row Book Fair, Society of Civil War Historians, Society of
Historians of Early America, Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC), Atlanta
Town Hall meeting on Race at Morehouse College and at Jimmy Carter Presidential Library
Center, the Crown Forum Martin Luther King, Jr. lecture at Morehouse College, Western Illinois
University, Drake University, University of Illinois Law School, Union League Club of Chicago,
Association of Archivists and Librarians, CASC, University of Georgia, Lawrence University,
Wisconsin Lincoln Bicentennial, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, University of
Wisconsin at Madison, University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, University of Kansas, Samford
University, Talladega University, ALBC Morrill Act Conference, Arkansas State University, San
Francisco State University, Lewis University, Notre Dame, University of Oklahoma, University
of Florida, University of Southern Florida, Florida State University, University of South
Carolina, South Carolina State University, North Greenville University, Anderson University,
Augusta State University, Auburn University, Mercer University, American Historical
Association, Organization of American Historians, Southern Historical Association, Agricultural
History Society, Wheaton College, University of Illinois, Florida Atlantic University, Lincoln

 Burton, page 29

College, Claflin University, Francis Marion University, Policy Studies Association, Southern
Studies Association Meeting (regional affiliate of American Studies Association), Association
for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), Penn Center, Coastal Carolina
University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), South Carolina
Historical Society, South Carolina Department of Archives and History Civil War Symposium,
Supercomputing11 (Seattle), History Miami, William Patterson University, USC Upstate,
University of Hawaii, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, The Lincoln Forum, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Furman
University, Berry College, High Noon series at S.C. Upstate Museum, Erskine College,
Mississippi State University, University of Manchester, Cambridge University, Edinburg
University, University of London, Oxford University.

Samples of recognition given to me or my work:
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. L: 2 (September 5, 2003), cover page, A37-38. Online at http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i02/02a03701.htm
C. Vann Woodward, “District of Devils,” New York Review of Books, xxxii #15: 30-31
Chicago Tribune, October 13, 2007, cover of the Book Review Section, “Orville Vernon
Burton’s Heartland Prize-winning The Age of Lincoln.” Catherine Clinton, “Lincoln and
His Complex Times,” pp. 4-5; Cover page 1988 on In My Father’s House
Washington Post, Hannah Natanson, “Lincoln’s forgotten legacy as America’s first ‘green
president’” in the Washington Post on Feb. 16, 2020
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/lincoln-green-president-e…/)
USA Today, February 25, 2010, Larry Bleiberg, 10 Civil Rights Sites You Should See before
Black History Month Comes to a Close,”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/destinations/10greatplaces/2020/02/25/blackhistory-month-10-civil-rights-sites-you-should-check-out/4832666002/
Featured as example of “Faculty Excellence” on UIUC Homepage:
http://www.uiuc.edu/overview/explore/
Call out in Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), p. 132, and her
Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina, 2011 (on C-Span) and
“Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor uses vivid examples from two key figures in
her life—her mother and South Carolina native and historian Vernon Burton”; Wayne
Washington, “You Learn Values from Your Family, Supreme Court Justice Tells Grads,”
The Columbia State, May 9, 2011;
http://www.thestate.com/2011/05/07/1808978/sotomayor-parents-arekey.html#storylink=misearch#ixzz1NljBBgHA and
http://dailygamecock.com/news/item/1422-sonya-sotomayor-delivers-personal-inspiringmessage-at-university-of-south-carolina-graduation; and at Clemson 2017 with Supreme
Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn3GbXen58c);
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq1LAQmHh0I (4 April 1992 on history and high
performance computing);
The South Carolina Encyclopedia Guide to South Carolina Writers. Edited by Tom Mack
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014), pp. 33-35 (SC Humanities)
In last few years, numerous international, national and local television, radio interviewed me
(especially about the murders at Mother Emanuel in Charleston and the removal of the
Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds). A number of interviews about the Voting
Rights Act (VRA) or Voter ID, for example, Congressional Briefing on the Voting Rights Act
(2015), Voting Rights Act 1965, Dec 4 2015   Video   C-SPAN.org and Historians Expert Witnesses Civil Rights,
Jan 7 2017   C-SPAN.org, NPR—for example, June 27, 2013, “On Point” discussing the Supreme

 Burton, page 30

Court Ruling on VRA, Sections 4 and 5-- http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/06/27/scotus-votingrights; and http://wbur.fm/138DolQ, and NPR and BBC, see for example recently, Jorge
Valenca, Feb. 26, 2020, “The Abroad Primary,”( For overseas voters, a primary of their own
www.pri.org › stories › overseas-voters-primary-their-o...) and commercial, and other media
interviews and programs, including several C-SPAN Book TV (for example, “President Lincoln
and Secession,” http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/293631-3) and a two-hour Clemson
University lecture on Southern Identity at “Lectures in History,” http://www.c-span.org/History/
– downloaded 492,791 times in first year after it debuted October 25, 2012. Numerous
appearances on SC ETV for documentaries. In Feb., the Clemson Area Pledge to End Racism
(CAPER) began using a training video featuring Vernon Burton speaking on racism (Video on
youtube at ( CAPER Burton Video). (more complete list available upon request).

 Orville Vernon Burton is the inaugural Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History and
Professor of Pan-African Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, and Computer Science at Clemson University, and
the Director of the Clemson CyberInstitute. From 2013-2015 he was Creativity Professor of Humanities; in 2016
Burton received the College of Architecture, Art, and Humanities (CAAH) Dean’s Award for “Excellence in
Research” and in 2019 the College’s award for “Outstanding Achievement in Service.” In 2018, he received the
initial University Research, Scholarship and Artistic Achievement Award. From 2008-2010, he was the Burroughs
Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University. He was the founding
Director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the University of
Illinois, where he is emeritus University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar, University Scholar, and Professor of
History, African American Studies, and Sociology. At the University of Illinois, he continues to chair the I-CHASS
advisory board and is also a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) where he served as Associate Director for Humanities and Social Sciences from 2002-2010. He serves as
Executive Director of the College of Charleston’s Low Country and Atlantic World Program (CLAW). Burton
served as vice-chair of the Board of Directors of the Congressional National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial
Foundation, 2009-2017. In 2007 the Illinois State legislature honored him with a special resolution for his
contributions as a scholar, teacher, and citizen of Illinois. A recognized expert on race relations and the American
South, and a leader in Digital Humanities, Burton is often invited to present lectures, conduct workshops, and
consult with colleges, universities, and granting agencies.
Burton is a prolific author and scholar (twenty authored or edited books and more than two hundred
articles); and author or director of numerous digital humanities projects. The Age of Lincoln (2007) won the
Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Award for Nonfiction and was selected for Book of the Month Club, History
Book Club, and Military Book Club. One reviewer proclaimed, “If the Civil War era was America's ‘Iliad,’ then
historian Orville Vernon Burton is our latest Homer.” The book was featured at sessions of the annual meetings of
African American History and Life Association, the Social Science History Association, the Southern Intellectual
History Circle, and the latter was the basis for a forum published in The Journal of the Historical Society. His In My
Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (1985) was featured at
sessions of the Southern Historical Association and the Social Science History Association annual meetings. The
Age of Lincoln and In My Fathers’ House were nominated for Pulitzers. His most recent book, is Penn Center: A
History Preserved (2014)
Recognized for his teaching, Burton was selected nationwide as the 1999 U.S. Research and Doctoral University
Professor of the Year (presented by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and by the Council
for Advancement and Support of Education). In 2004 he received the American Historical Association’s Eugene
Asher Distinguished Teaching Prize. At the University of Illinois, he won teaching awards at the department,
school, college, and campus levels. He was the recipient of the 2001-2002 Graduate College Outstanding Mentor
Award and received the 2006 Campus Award for Excellence in Public Engagement. He was appointed an
Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer for 2004-20.
Burton's research and teaching interests are American history, with a particular focus on the American South,
including race relations and community, and the intersection of humanities and social science. He has served as
president of the Southern Historical Association and of the Agricultural History Society. He was elected to
honorary life membership in BrANCH (British American Nineteenth-Century Historians).
Among his honors are fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Humanities Center, the U.S. Department of
Education, National Park Service, and the Carnegie Foundation. He was a Pew National Fellow Carnegie Scholar
for 2000-2001. He was elected to the Society of American Historians and was one of ten historians selected to
contribute to the Presidential Inaugural Portfolio (January 21, 2013) by the Joint Congressional Committee on
Inaugural Ceremonies. Burton was elected into the S.C. Academy of Authors in 2015 and in 2017 received the
Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities from the South Carolina Humanities Council.