The Fusion Party that sent White to Washington in 1897 was a hallmark of the “more perfect union” that the United States had struggled toward after the Civil War. In a statewide, grassroots effort, freed slaves recognized common cause with poor and working-class whites in North Carolina and successfully defeated the Southern Democrat power structure of the white elite’s plantation economy. The Fusion Party won every statewide election in 1896. But this multiethnic bloc was attacked by a coordinated white-supremacy campaign determined to regain power.

The so-called “Wilmington race-riot” of 1898—the only successful coup d’état in American history—showed how far Democrats were willing to go to guarantee white power: They established Jim Crow laws. But despite their use of terrorism, George White wasn’t going anywhere. Democrats would not be able to unseat White without disenfranchising black voters in North Carolina first. Then, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court gave them the language of “separate but equal.” But White understood that, in fact, Jim Crow was determined to maintain the power structure of the plantation economy by any means necessary.

America’s Second Reconstruction—what is usually referred to as the “civil-rights movement”—pushed back against Jim Crow half a century later by exposing the moral contradiction of segregation, especially in the context of a global struggle for democracy. After the world witnessed Bull Connor’s dogs and George Wallace’s vitriol, Jim Crow was exposed as a thug and lost his respectability in Washington. Once again, it was a fusion of black and white, Christian and Jew, civil rights and labor coming together that presented the possibility of a new America. But it was also a fear of that possibility that inspired a racist backlash.

This time, Jim Crow got smarter. As in the 1890s, it was essential to exploit racial fear through divide-and-conquer tactics to maintain white supremacy. But the harsh language of states like Alabama didn’t play as well on the nightly news. The Southern strategy, which had given the South to the Republican Party for a generation, depended on a more respectable compromise between the South’s power structure and the rest of the country’s ruling elite. So Jim Crow learned the lexicon of “forced-busing,” “entitlements,” and “law and order.” And all the while, Crow attacked the Voting Rights Act as a violation of “states’ rights.”

George White showed North Carolinians that despite the tactics of white supremacy, a fusion of people joining hands across dividing lines is the South’s true moral majority. More than a century later, the North Carolina NAACP’s Moral Movement decided to follow White’s example. The group began mobilizing a coalition to once again subvert the Southern strategy. By the 2008 presidential election, they’d done it: North Carolina’s 15 Electoral College votes went to Barack Obama, breaking the “solid South” for the first time. The movement had turned a red state blue.