Carr was nominated for Vice President of the United States by delegates from North Carolina (and one from Montana) at the 1900 Democratic National Convention,[4] at which he gave a speech.

He publicly endorsed the Ku Klux Klan, opposed the 15th Amendment (1870) giving the vote to African-American men, and promoted racial unrest and turmoil in the late 19th century to defeat an interracial "Fusion" political party.

Carr promoted his racial views through The News & Observer newspaper, which he bought, setting up white supremacist Josephus Daniels as its editor.

He bragged of an incident when he was 19 years old, "less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox", in which he performed the "pleasing duty" of horse-whipping an African-American "wench" "until her skirts hung in shreds", because he said she had "publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady".

[12] This passage received a great deal of attention starting in 2011, after it was rediscovered in the university archives by a graduate student in history (Adam Domby) and published in the campus newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel.

As Trinity College struggled to overcome postwar dependency on uncertain student tuition and church donations, interested Methodist laymen were crucial to its survival.

Carr was elected a trustee of Trinity College in 1883, and over the course of the decade acted as benefactor and administrator of the struggling institution that was eventually renamed Duke University.

He engineered the selection of John F. Crowell as the institution's new president, and along with Washington Duke won support to remove the school from its rural setting in Randolph County, North Carolina, to Durham.

[3] In April 1923, while giving the keynote address at the annual convention of the United Confederate Veterans being held in New Orleans, Carr proudly announced that he was a member of the recently reestablished Ku Klux Klan.

[15] At the 1913 dedication of the Confederate Monument (later known as Silent Sam) on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carr gave a speech wherein he credited the Confederate soldiers of having "saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South," and as a consequence, "the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States," after which he ended his speech by relating a personal anecdote when he was 19 years old of having soon after the war "horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds" in Chapel Hill for having "publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady," and having performed this "pleasing duty" in front of a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers after she sought protection at the university.

[28] Carr supported white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan, spoke favorably of the murder of African Americans that occurred during the Wilmington massacre of 1898, which he called a "grand and glorious event", and celebrated lynchings.

In our present, when we are faced with the enormity of the consequences of the ideology of racism, the monstrosity of unfettered capitalism, and active threats to the realistically very weak institutions of democracy that we hold on to, the idea of venerating Carr is the worst kind of apologia.

Coclanis opined that "Carr, alas, was an ex-Confederate, and a man of his times, whose personal 'allusion' during a 1913 address in Chapel Hill—uttered when he was 67 years old—has made him a reviled figure among many people today.

"[12] Sturkey responded that Coclanis ... inaccurately portrays Carr as an otherwise generous philanthropist, unfairly vilified over a single bad moment or poor choice of words.

In the broader view, Carr’s life was filled with abhorrent activities and rhetoric that are not only deplorable today, but were illegal and belligerent in his own time.

Carr committed treason against the United States of America, advocated the murder and disfranchisement of African Americans, and helped lead a racially divisive and violent political campaign that shattered democracy in North Carolina for over 60 years.

He was an enemy of enlightenment and democracy whose rhetoric and actions, both then and now, cast dark shadows over the civil and political life of the state and retard our ability to move forward from the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow.

The vast majority did not, however, make pioneering innovations in business, did not bring about profound changes in the economy, and did not provide opportunities for generations of people (some of whom were African-American) to raise their living standards.