Content note: Racist "Negro Rule" caricature. This object is shown as it was published. Why
"Negro Rule" vampire cartoon with sworn affidavit
A bat-winged Black figure labelled 'Negro Rule' rises from a 'Fusion ballot box' and claws at fleeing white people. Below it, a sworn statement says a Black preacher called for killing whites 'from the cradle up' if the suffrage amendment passed. Two years earlier the same white-supremacy campaign ended in the Wilmington coup of November 1898, in which armed white men killed Black residents (state commission, 2006). The page charges the targeted group with the killing its own side had done.
- Date
- July 4, 1900
- Period
- Pre-1914
- Made by
- The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), Democratic Party white-supremacy and disfranchisement campaigns; cartoonist Norman E. Jennett
- Region
- North America
- Country
- United States
- Medium
- Cartoon
- Issuer type
- Media
- Regime
- Mckinley Administration
- Leader
- William Mckinley
- Audience
- Domestic public
- Purpose
- Demonize
- Themes
- Race and ethnicity, Elections and party politics
- Event
- North Carolina White Supremacy Campaign
- Techniques
- Accusation in a mirrorFear appealScapegoating
- Source
- Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- Source
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (via Wikimedia Commons), retrieved September 27, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (U.S. newspaper published before 1931; Commons: not copyrighted)
Norman E. Jennett, The News & Observer (Raleigh), 1898 drawing, 1900 printing. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Text on the object
NEGRO RULE FUSION BALLOT BOX NORTH CAROLINA—Wake County. John Hubbard, being duly sworn, deposes and says: That while working the public roads some days ago, he heard several negroes in Mark's Creek Township, Wake County, talking about the Constitutional Amendment, and one of the negroes, a preacher and neighbor of H. H. Knight, by the name of Offee Price, said, referring to the white people, may pass the Amendment, but that they would have to fight them, and that the right way to do them, the whites, would be to kill them from the cradle up. JOHN HUBBARD,
Transcribed verbatim per the archive's no-sanitising rule, including the era's dehumanising labelling and the sworn affidavit's wording. 'NEGRO' and 'RULE' are the two words lettered on the bat-wings either side of the caricature; 'FUSION BALLOT BOX' labels the box the figure rises from. The affidavit's signature line appears to continue below the visible crop of this file (cut off at 'JOHN HUBBARD,'); any further text (e.g. a notary line) is not visible in this scan.
