Daniels escalated trivial incidents into front-page outrages. All that was required was incidental contact between a white woman and a black man. Daniels noticed an item in the Wilmington Star about a fifteen-year-old white girl, the daughter of “an honest and respectable farmer”; she was purportedly approached by two black teenagers on her way home from Sunday school. The boys did not so much as “place their unholy hands on her person,” Daniels reported—but only because the girl screamed. That was the extent of the incident. But Daniels made sure the account dominated the front page of the
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