ABSTRACT
With few exceptions news reports in the border states approved of the measures taken by southern slaveholders to recapture runaway slaves. In 1913, the Progressive Farmer, an influential newspaper for the agricultural sector, campaigned successfully to get the North Carolina Farmers Union to endorse segregation in "rural districts." It is a matter of record—often observed in the newspapers of that time—that the conservative white leaders in the South shared and even supported the fearful views of black politicians and officeholders regarding the advent of Jim Crow. Very few newspapers were interested in probing the nerve ends of slavery and what they thought might best be left under the carpet rather than on it—racism. The newspapers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did provide a forum for the discussion of what value, if any, the people of the United States were willing to place on the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens.
