It was out of the ordinary for the paper to hire an outside historian to write the story and publish it in a special section. It was not ordinary to partner with other papers to produce and distribute the work. And it was especially unusual for a newspaper to dissect, in unflinching detail, its own role in a sorry chapter of American history.

The News & Observer hired historian Timothy Tyson, a visiting professor at Duke, to write the 16-page section, "The Ghosts of 1898," which was published as an insert on Nov. 17. The section, all or in part, also was published in The Charlotte Observer, The Wilmington Star-News, The Fayetteville Observer, The Greensboro News & Record and The Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald. That's more than 600,000 potential readers.

Published separately from the section were articles, produced by The Charlotte Observer, that looked at today's descendants of Wilmington families harmed by the riot. The N&O did a separate story about its own evolution from a voice of white supremacy to one of social justice. And The N&O and The Charlotte Observer published editorials apologizing for their sins of 108 years earlier.

Tyson's history was hard-hitting and unsparing of The N&O and founder Josephus Daniels. As described by Tyson, Daniels used his newspaper to foment the racial hatred that fueled the Wilmington riot. An unknown number of black people were killed, more than a thousand were displaced and the multi-racial government of Wilmington was overthrown.

"Its aftermath," Tyson wrote, "witnessed the birth of the Jim Crow social order, the end of black voting rights and the rise of a one-party political system in the South that strangled the aspirations of generations of blacks and whites."

Such words reflect a judgmental rendering of history that departs from standard impartial newspaper journalism, and some readers were puzzled. Why delve back into this painful sore in the past of North Carolina and this newspaper?

In part, because we were asked to. The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission, created by the General Assembly, issued a report earlier this year calling on newspapers that played roles in the 1898 events -- principally, the Raleigh and Charlotte papers -- to acknowledge that history and publicize it. Another reason, N&O editors said, was to lift a veil on a critical crossroads in time that affected North Carolina for decades but has received little attention in textbooks. The most common reaction I received from readers was: "I didn't know that."

Outsiders to whom I talked thought the project succeeded. Irving Joyner, a law professor at N.C. Central University and a member of the Race Riot Commission, praised the work and said it "indicated a seriousness on the part of The N&O about getting the information out to people and getting people to look at it from a number of different angles." He said, though, that he wished there had been collaboration with the state's African American-owned newspapers on the project. (Some were offered the opportunity to participate, but declined.)

Duke historian William H. Chafe, former president of the Organization of American Historians, said The N&O's project was a major contribution to public understanding of "the most pivotal event in North Carolina history and one of the most important events in American history." Chafe, a colleague and friend of Tyson, said the Wilmington riot "dashed to smithereens" the brightest experiment in biracial democracy that existed in America at the time.

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