the Democratic Party to get an upper leg on upcoming stories. This model worked well for the paper until Ashe lost favor in the Democratic caucus, leading the paper to fall on hard financial times for the fourth time in its history. In 1894 the paper was sold at auction, this time to a Washington, North Carolina, native who was a strong Democratic supporter. Josephus Daniels, with help from Julian Carr and other friends, bought the paper. Quickly Daniels refocused the News and Observer to combat rampant corruption and other problems he saw within the state. Put differently by Daniels himself, "The News and Observer was relied upon to carry the Democratic message and to be the militant voice of White Supremacy, and it did not fail in what was expected, sometimes going to extremes in its partisanship." Daniels believed that "the greatest folly and crime" in U.S. history was granting Blacks the right to vote. In the findings of the Wilmington Race Riot Commission, Daniels is the only name mentioned as a cause of the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, According to historian Helen Edmonds, the paper "led in a campaign of prejudice, bitterness, vilification, misrepresentation, and exaggeration to influence the emotions of the whites against the Negro." The result was the only successful coup d'état in American history, the overthrow of Wilmington's elected government by force. In 1900, he used the paper to support soon-to-be Governor Charles B. Aycock, another white supremacist, during his bid for the office. He also used the paper to advocate female suffrage, workers' compensation, state industrialization, better roads and crop rotation. In 2006, on occasion of the release of the report of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission, the newspaper offered "an apology for the acts of someone [Daniels] we continue to salute in a different context…and for the misdeeds of the paper as an institution." The newspaper published a 16-page special report on the events of 1898. After Daniels Daniels continued to run the paper until his death in the mid-1940s. After his death his four sons assumed management of the company. All four sons contributed to the operation of the paper, but Jonathan Daniels, editor from 1933 to 1941 and from 1948 until 1964, kept the paper in the direction of appealing for school desegregation and a reduction in race related discrimination. It was also under Jonathan's leadership that The News and