Call it what it is.

• Position: UPFRONT - Republican Party and Democrats tightly contested the elections

The means have meandered from murder to mundane legislative measures, but the aim remains the same, proving again how profound a passage William Faulkner penned: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The Mississippi novelist and Nobel laureate could have been writing about North Carolina.

On the night of Feb. 26, 1870, robed and masked horsemen rode into Graham, dragged Wyatt Outlaw from his house and, with cord they cut from a rope bed, hanged him from a tree only 30 yards from the Alamance County Courthouse. Before departing, they left a note warning Mayor William R. Albright a similar fate awaited.

Albright and Outlaw were both Republicans. The mayor, who was white, would survive Reconstruction. The dead man left dangling had been the county's most prominent black, a town councilman and constable. Word spread his lynching was revenge for shooting at Ku Kluxers the previous year, but the real reason was political. Outlaw led the local Union League, which encouraged freedmen to register and vote Republican. In a tightly contested county such as Alamance, that was dangerous to Democrats, so Klansmen killed him to suppress the vote. It's why, three decades later, Winchester-wielding Red Shirts patrolled polling places, intimidating voters to break the fusion of Republicans and Populists that briefly reigned in Raleigh. Back on top...