Newspapers in America have not always been fair. In 1898, The Charlotte Observer used its pages - and even a star reporter - to promote white supremacy in North Carolina.

Its actions helped lead to the overthrow of a duly elected and racially integrated government in the city of Wilmington and the disenfranchisement of the state's black voters.

To understand how it happened, consider Southern politics in 1898: The Civil War had ended just 33 years earlier, and liberated blacks in North Carolina were opening businesses, buying property and getting elected to public office as Republicans - the party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator.

Nowhere in the state was black progress more evident than in Wilmington, where a "Fusionist" government of blacks and whites had a precarious hold on power.

Backed by powerful railroad executives and given political cover by the state's dominant newspaper editors, Democratic leaders in North Carolina launched a concerted campaign to rob blacks of the vote and restore whites-only rule. They portrayed Southern whites as victims of black domination, and they painted black men as sexualized beasts just waiting to rape white women.

At the Observer, Editor Joseph P. Caldwell was part of this effort. He wrote state Democratic leaders and offered a staffer - an ambitious, freckle-faced reporter named Henry Edward Cowan Bryant - to write horror stories about black officials.

James H. Pou, a leader in the party, wrote back: "Your offer is liberal and perfectly satisfying. Please send Mr. Bryant as soon as you can."

Bryant, later known as "Red Buck," in part because of his flaming red hair, apparently had a way with words.

Tom Hanchett, staff historian at the Levine Museum of the New South, said Bryant wrote with a "lively, salt-of-the-earth" tone that endeared him to Observer readers. In fact, Hanchett said, his columns often were picked up by newspapers across the country.

Bryant found journalism almost by accident. Fresh out of UNC Chapel Hill, he was so eager to land a reporting job he agreed to work for free. Editors immediately sent him to cover a trial in Lexington.

A few months later, he was earning $20 a month and on his way to a career that eventually would take him to reporting jobs in Washington, New York and back to Charlotte, where he died in 1967 at age 94.

In 1898, however, Bryant was on special assignment from the Observer's top editor.

He traveled the state writing stories under provocative headlines such as "White Supremacy In Danger," "A Dirty Filthy Town Without Any Police Protection To Speak Of," and "Negro Rule: Shall It Last Longer in North Carolina?"

In one Observer column headlined "The Negroes Want More Offices," Bryant wrote: "The negro must stay in his place. The negro that behaves himself will be treated like a gentleman, but the one that gets too large for himself will be curbed."

The campaign worked. Democrats regained power in 1898. Republicans were forced out, and many black officials and business leaders - especially in Wilmington - left the state forever, particularly after Democrats took away their right to vote. Others were killed or saw their shops burned or their property taken.

Jim Crow segregation was re-imposed, and the tactics used in Wilmington were exported to other parts of the South, where they remained in use until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s.

What the Observer did in 1898, Hanchett said, was not unique in those days. The News & Observer of Raleigh and the Wilmington paper, in particular, also backed the Democrats and their campaign of fear and violence.

"At that point, there was absolutely no effort to have a balance," Hanchett said. "Newspapers were intended to be the mouthpieces of a particular political party."

Finally, in May 2006, an independent state commission investigated the events of 1898. It concluded that newspapers - including the Observer - helped incite fear and damage democracy. The commission called on the newspapers to study the lingering effects of 1898. In response, the Observer and News & Observer published a special section laying out the sordid history. Later, in an editorial, the Observer apologized for actions more than a century old:

"We apologize to the black citizens and their descendants whose rights and interests we disregarded, and to all North Carolinians, whose trust we betrayed by our failure to fairly report the news and to stand firmly against injustice."