Daniel Lindsay Russell Republican Charles Brantley Aycock Democratic The 1900 North Carolina gubernatorial election was held on August 2, 1900.

[1] The backdrop of the election campaign was the backlash among whites to the relatively large role that African Americans had played in politics during the 1890s, as the coalition (or "Fusion") of Republicans and Populists took power.

In 1898, the state Democratic Party won back the majority of seats in the legislature on a platform emphasizing "white supremacy."

The resulting legislature then proposed an amendment to the North Carolina Constitution which added a literacy test and a poll tax requirement for voting, amounting to disfranchisement.

The party seemed to threaten violence, including a "willingness — in Aycock’s words — to 'rule by force'; only a vote for white supremacy and Black disenfranchisement would restore peace and good order.