Charles Brantley Aycock was born on November 1, 1859 in Fremont, North Carolina, United States to Benjamin Aycock and Serena (Hooks) Aycock, the youngest of their 10 children. His father died when Charles was 15. His mother and brothers later recognized his abilities and decided thet he should go to college.
Charles Aycock attended University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated in 1880 with first honors in oratory art and essay writing.
In 1888 he canvassed his congressional district as presidential elector for Grover Cleveland and gained distinction as an orator and political debater. He was elector-at-large on the Cleveland ticket four years later and in 1893 received appointment as United States attorney for the eastern district of North Carolina, a post which he held until 1897.
In the spring of 1900 he was unanimously nominated for governor by the Democratic state convention, and became the leader in a notable campaign to secure an amendment to the state constitution requiring literacy as one of the qualifications for suffrage. In August of that year he was elected by the largest majority that had ever been received by any candidate in the state.
He served from 1901 to 1905, when he returned to Goldsboro to resume the practise of his profession, moving to Raleigh in 1909. In 1911 he yielded to a widespread demand and became a candidate for the Democratic nomination to the United States Senate, but he died before the campaign opened. Aycock's greatest achievement was in the cause of popular education. In this he early became interested.
As a boy he had seen his mother make her mark to a deed and the incident greatly impressed him with the failure of his state to provide schools. Educational conditions were inadequate when he reached manhood. Throughout the South the principle of public education had not yet been practically accepted. Economic desolation, racial conflicts, defective school arrangements, and the blight of partisan politics were among the obstacles which stood in the way of substantial social progress. Conflicts over the elimination of the Negro vote were fierce and demoralizing.
As a candidate for governor on a platform of white supremacy and education, Aycock led the movement which took the ballot from the illiterate Negro until he could be prepared by education and training for its proper use, thus committing the state to a program of universal education. When he was inaugurated governor in 1901 the annual school term of the state was less than four months, the monthly salary of teachers was only $25, the schoolhouses were inferior, and nearly a thousand districts had no schoolhouses. Most of the teachers were poorly trained. There was almost no professional supervision. One-fifth of the white population above ten years of age was illiterate.
Aycock gave the prestige of his office to a movement to improve these conditions. He organized and led campaigns to arouse the people to the need for increased school funds for longer terms, increased salaries for teachers, better schoolhouses, improved school teaching and management, and other features of improved public educational work. Wide publicity was given to the state's educational needs, through the press, by meetings in court-houses, schoolhouses, churches, and wherever the people could be assembled.
Educational rallies were held in each county. Public men of almost every calling followed Aycock's leadership and liberally gave their services as speakers and workers in behalf of better schools. Improvements appeared almost immediately. Larger legislative appropriations were made, increased local taxes were voted, the school term was lengthened, facilities for the training of teachers were provided, the salaries of teachers were established, illiteracy was gradually reduced, provision was made for the establishment of rural high schools (1907), all as a result of the movement inspired and led by Aycock.
Charles Aycock holds credit for his educational reforms and his political support for constructing 690 new schoolhouses during his rule as governor (including 91 for black-only schools). The auditorium at UNC Greensboro, as well as a street, a neighborhood, and a middle school, a high school in Pikeville, North Carolina were all named for him. There are dormitories at UNC-Chapel Hill and East Carolina University campuses named after him, although ECU decided to rename the dorm in 2015. Today, however, his personality attracts a great deal of controversy due to his white supremacy campaigns.
Aycock connected himself with the Baptist Church while he was a student at the University.
His faith in God was sublime and he had no more doubt of the divinity of Jesus Christ than he had of his own existence.
Aycock was passionately interested in good government; therefore it will be necessary to write plainly of the system of state and local administration which he was so largely instrumental in overthrowing.
He believed that the only hope of good government in North Carolina, and the other Southern States, rested upon the assured political supremacy of the white race; therefore the effect of negro supremacy in the political affairs of North Carolina must be clearly explained.
Aycock was extremely simple in all his tastes. His friends, his books, his pipe, plenty of money to give away and enough left to live on in quietness — this was all he would have cared for.
He called himself a Democrat and believed that a true Democrat is a man who believes in the Declaration of Independence, and who is filled with that spirit of equality which has made this country of ours the refuge of the oppressed of all the world and the hope of this age and of all ages to come
Quotations:
"Let us cast away all fear of rivalry with the negro, all apprehension that he shall ever overtake us in the race of life. We are the thoroughbreds and should have no fear of winning the race against a commoner stock. An effort to reduce their public schools would send thousands more of them away from us. In this hour, when our industrial development demands more labor and not less, it becomes of the utmost importance that we shall make no mistake in dealing with that race which does a very large part of the work, of actual hard labor in the State. "
"I am proud of my State. .. because there we have solved the negro problem. .. We have taken him out of politics and have thereby secured good government under any party and laid foundations for the future development of both races. We have secured peace, and rendered prosperity a certainty. "
Aycock had a perpetual flow of quaint humor, and a rare faculty of "mixing" with any kind of crowd. He was robust, manly, fun-loving and red-blooded to have any suggestion of prudishness about him, but he was simply innately clean and pure-minded and had no relish for any associations or environments of a different character.
Quotes from others about the person
Aycock's schoolmate: "He was always full of fun and naturally witty and fond of jokes, but never indulged in anything of a vulgar nature. "
J. R. Rodwell: "I never knew him to do or say anything as a college boy that he would have been ashamed to tell his mother. "
In 1881 he married Alice Varina Woodard, who died in 1890. In 1891 he married Cora Woodard, a younger sister of his first wife.
