After graduating in 1880 with first honors in both oratory and essay writing, he entered law practice in Goldsboro and supplemented his income by teaching school.

[2] Ernest and the younger Charles died in childhood,[2] while Alice went on to marry the writer Clarence Hamilton Poe.

This amendment added a poll tax and literacy test intended to prevent black voting, and a grandfather clause to avoid disenfranchising poor white voters.

Aycock supported the amendment, and urged legislatures to submit it to a popular vote in an August election, moved up from November.

On the campaign trail, his supporters displayed one of the rapid-fire guns from the Wilmington insurrection and Aycock regularly appeared with Red Shirts.

Kousser wrote, "Some scholars have made a great deal of the opposition of 'progressive' Governor Charles B. Aycock and state school superintendent James Y. Joyner to the movement for a constitutional amendment in North Carolina to limit black school expenditures to the amount paid by Negroes in taxes.

It is true that Aycock threatened resignation if such a law passed and that, speaking to the legislature in 1903, he condemned the proposed measure as 'unjust, unwise and unconstitutional.'

In other words, the disfranchisement of the almost unanimously Republican blacks, which was virtually priceless to the Democrats, would be bartered for the temporary gain of a few extra dollars of the school fund.

Aycock fought against lynching as governor, but expanded the state's convict leasing program, a de facto form of slavery.

[16] On December 18, 1903, Governor Aycock went to Baltimore gave a speech to 300 people at the North Carolina Society.

[17] Entitled "The Negro Problem," the speech outlined his thoughts on keeping blacks separate, subservient, and locked out of representative government by circumventing the Fifteenth Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote.

DuBois and Booker T. Washington, that considers the web of economic, political, and social problems faced by blacks in their collective history as slaves and second-class citizens after Emancipation.

The speech is one of Aycock's best-known and controversial:[17] I am proud of my State … because there we have solved the negro problem … We have taken him out of politics and have thereby secured good government under any party and laid foundations for the future development of both races.

It is, first, as far as possible under the Fifteenth Amendment to disfranchise him; after that let him alone, quit writing about him; quit talking about him, quit making him “the white man’s burden,” let him “tote his own skillet”; quit coddling him, let him learn that no man, no race, ever got anything worth the having that he did not himself earn; that character is the outcome of sacrifice and worth is the result of toil; that whatever his future may be, the present has in it for him nothing that is not the product of industry, thrift, obedience to law, and uprightness; that he cannot, by resolution of council or league, accomplish anything; that he can do much by work; that violence may gratify his passions but it cannot accomplish his ambitions; that he may eat rarely of the cooking of equality, but he will always find when he does that “there is death in the pot.” Let the negro learn once for all that there is unending separation of the races, that the two peoples may develop side by side to the fullest but that they cannot intermingle; let the white man determine that no man shall by act or thought or speech cross this line, and the race problem will be at an end.

My own opinion is, that so far we have done well, and that the future holds no menace for us if we do the duty which lies next to us, training, developing the coming generation, so that the problems which seem difficult to us shall be easy to them.

But before the nomination was decided, Aycock died of a heart attack on April 4, 1912, while making a speech to 5,000 teachers at the convention of the Alabama Education Association in Birmingham.

[24] But another, by a reporter at the scene, says Aycock told the teachers, "I have fought long the battles of education," and added, after asking a question of Alabama Governor Emmet O'Neal, "However, I have determined, if such a thing is possible, to open the doors of the schools to every child..." He stopped, staggered and fell dead of a heart attack.

[26] Dormitories at UNC-Chapel Hill and East Carolina University campuses were named after him, although ECU renamed the dorm in 2015.

[27] UNC-Chapel Hill followed suit in 2020, renaming the dormitory for Hortense McClinton, the first black faculty member at the school.

"[30] In recent years, that viewpoint has been challenged:[3] Often overlooked was Aycock's role as a leading spokesman in the white supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900, which were marked by widespread violence, voter intimidation, voter fraud and even a coup d'état of the government of Wilmington … The campaigns had far-reaching consequences: blacks were removed from the voter rolls based on literacy tests, Jim Crow customs were encoded into law, and the Democratic Party controlled Tar Heel politics for two-thirds of the 20th century.

On February 20, 2015, East Carolina University trustees voted to remove Aycock's name from a residence hall after a months-long debate with faculty, students, staff and alumni.

[36] On February 28, 2018, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper asked the Architect of the Capitol to replace Aycock's statue with one of evangelist Billy Graham, pursuant to legislation signed in 2015.

[39] On May 4, 2021, Raleigh City Council voted to rename Aycock Street to Roanoke Park Drive after a neighborhood petition.