Lies, Guns and Money

 “Wilmington's Lie - the Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy” by David Zucchino, 2020 (Part 1)

This is a relatively untold story, yet similar to other pogroms against African-Americans like 1921’s Tulsa, OK massacre; 1923’s Rosewood, Florida’s massacre and the 1876 Hamburg, South Carolina killings. The story is told from the moment Union troops, including armed freedmen among them, entered Wilmington in 1865, through Reconstruction, to the bloody violence and coup in 1898, to its aftermath.  It shows that while the Confederacy lost the war, it won the peace.  And, of note, it is still trying to win it.  What is indicative is how you can trace present methods back to those times.

Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 was an enlightened model of somewhat democratic functioning, financial wherewithal, government participation and geographic integration of its dark-skinned citizens.  African-Americans played a prominent role in the economy, the trades, the local government, the skilled professions and more. At the same time abuse of local dark-skinned citizens was normal. Wilmington's pale capitalist elite wasn’t having this ‘black rule’ anymore, and formed “The Secret Nine.”  Wilmington and nearly every county in eastern, tidewater North Carolina had a black voting majority, and this was the real target.  What broke the camel’s back was the unity of the Republican and Populist parties representing blacks and whites, who united in a 'fusion' to replace Democratic Party rule. This political unity was one of a kind in the South.  It was essential to break this bloc with racism, fear and violence.

Supremacist businessmen and politicians in the Secret Nine organized a pogrom just after the November 1898 statewide election, which did not include municipal Wilmington officers.  Their militias started it at the intersection of Hartnett and Fourth Street in Wilmington near the Cape Fear River, now a somewhat bland and anodyne intersection in town, but then a location where darker-skinned workers had congregated. The racists opened with a barrage of gunshots but the lie was told that blacks had shot first.   

The Conspiracy

Zucchino tells of the mobilization of an aggrieved planter and business class, led by people like ex-Klan leader Roger Moore and lawyer and politician Col. Alfred Waddell, followed by many ex-Confederate officers in the Democratic Party. They made the Dems an explicitly white supremacist organization. Waddell promised to “choke the Cape Fear River with (black) carcasses.” The local white-owned papers read like KKK broadsides in 1898, raving about rapists, inventing fearful stories, blowing up trivial incidents to incite race hatred, similar to present hysteria about immigrants.  Racists blamed blacks for planning a riot on election day, a classic lie of projection. The memory of Virginia slaves under Nat Turner rebelling in the early 1800s fueled fake stories about blacks planning to burn white homes and rape white women. The northern press, like the Washington Post and NYT, parroted the racist newspapers.  These kind of conspiracy theories, rumors, lies and fake news are all familiar.  Local militias backed the Democrats, including the Red Shirts, a state-wide militia run by the Democratic Party.  The Secret Nine militia spear-headed the pogrom in Wilmington, with the Red Shirts and 2 white state military units in their wake. 

Opposing them was a long tradition of civil rights activism in North Carolina, first starting with an escaped slave and union spy named Abraham Galloway, of mixed ethnicity, who stood up for ‘colored’ soldiers and then African-Americans in eastern North Carolina and Wilmington as an elected representative.  After he died he was replaced by the ‘light-skinned’ editor of The Daily Record, Alex Manly, who crusaded for better conditions for black people, then had the temerity to oppose lynchings of supposed black rapists in print. He was a member of the ‘talented tenth’ and was targeted for a lynching himself. His allies were white Republicans and Populists – called Fusionists - including the Governor.  The Governor, out of fear, bowed to racist intimidation and removed a slate of local candidates while refusing to call for federal marshals. Conservative black leaders accused Manly of being the cause of the commotion. He himself was nearly lynched on election day. Manly was naïve about the intentions of the city’s white elite. President McKinley, after warnings about a white riot, did nothing.    

As the election in November drew closer, the wealthy white elite organized Wilmington into a military fiefdom, running patrols in each ward.  They knew they would have to use violence to evict local black municipal officers, as the election was only for state and federal seats. As Zucchino describes it, night-riders threatened, beat and attacked potential black voters, while their employers told them they’d be fired if they registered or voted.  Just prior to the vote, Red Shirts attacked dark-skinned people in the streets.  Ben Tillman, a vicious racist who helped organize the killings of black militiamen and people in Hamburg, South Carolina in 1876, lectured them on methods.  He was very open about using lies, fraud, ballot stuffing, forged ballots, beatings and bullets to end ‘nigger rule.’  This was the method subsequently adopted in Wilmington.

The rioters outside the burned building housing the Daily Record

For their part Wilmington blacks were nowhere as well organized.  Gun dealers refused to sell them weapons as individuals, and if they were armed, they had archaic rifles and pistols from the Civil War or hunting.  The Red Shirts had Winchesters and modern hand guns, along with machine guns. Black protests were put down and Fusionist politicians tried to make compromises out of fear.  The Republican and Populist Parties were not armed either, at least not formally.  Black Federal units that had enlisted to fight in the Spanish-American war were kept in Georgia, while white Federal units returned to Wilmington just before the election. They brought their guns, including a machine gun, with them.

The Massacre and Coup

The Red Shirts patrolled on election day, but were dissuaded from lynching Manly – who had already left town. The Democrats, predictably, swept state-wide and federal offices so the lies, racism and intimidation had worked. The next day the local white elite ordered all municipal black, Republican and Populist office holders to resign, under threat.  The day after Red Shirts burned Manly’s newspaper office, confronted fearful black workers at the Compress Cotton mill, then headed over to Hartnett Street where the shootings started.  The fascist pogrom commenced.

The Republican governor bought the lie that this was a ‘black riot’ and ordered the two State militia units in Wilmington, fully trained and armed, to intervene to ‘prevent bloodshed.’  They did not, they perpetrated it.  His decision allowed the white supremacists to declare ‘Martial Law’ in the town against ostensible black rioters.  It was a betrayal.  I’m not going to go into detail from here on in, but the result was, from gunfire by militia men, state ‘national guard’ types and random local whites:  60 black people killed and many injured; middle-class black businessmen expelled from the city overnight, some having escaped earlier; many working-class black families terrorized into leaving town; white Fusionists marched out of town too; the mayor, police chief and aldermen forced to resign, replaced by Democratic Party men; some black-owned buildings burned, wrecked or shot up - all to solidify Jim Crow segregation for almost 70 years in North Carolina. 

(More to Come in Part II)

The value of the book is that it points to an existential problem in the United States.  A virulent capitalist society bent on crushing minorities, splitting the working class and raising up the rich continues to this day, built on an archaic Constitution, history and ideology. It’s like a hamster wheel of progress and backwardness, rolling into the future, a bloody ground-hog day of repetition, nonsense and lies.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Black Cloud Rising,” “Why the South Lost the Civil War,” “The Bloody Shirt,” “The State of Jones,” “Struggle & Progress,” “The Second Founding" (E. Foner); “Slavery By Another Name” (Blackmon); “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” "The Watchmen."

*PBS has a documentary, "American Coup: Wilmington 1898"

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent cut-out and used section, which has just received many books donated by comrades. Come and get them for the Holidays.  Make an Offer!

Red Frog / December 6, 2024