November 10, 1898 – Wilmington, NC Massacre of Blacks by White Supremacists

On this day in history, a gang of Democratic white supremacists illegally seized power from an elected government (which included Blacks) in Wilmington, North Carolina, running officials out of the city, and killing many Blacks in widespread attacks.

At the time of the riot, Wilmington in Cape Fear was the largest city in North Carolina. Moreover, having a large Black majority, it boasted large numbers of African American businessmen. Not only were many shops and restaurants owned by Blacks, but Wilmington’s newspaper “The Daily Record” was the only Black daily newspaper in the country. Political offices, however, were mostly held by whites. When white Populists joined Black Republicans to challenge this political hegemony, the white Democrats had had enough.

“The Vampire that Hovers Over North Carolina.” Cartoon. News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), September 27, 1898. via U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The self-proclaimed ‘party of white supremacy’ launched a campaign to wrest control of the government back from the biracial Republican Party in the 1898 elections. They used racist appeals (including the old reliable and false charge of the need to protect white women from Black men) to turn back the inroads into equality that had already been forged. “‘We will not live under these intolerable conditions,’ Colonel Alfred Waddell, soon to become mayor of Wilmington, told a crowd of cheering Democrats. ‘We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of negroes, even if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses.’”

As the Nov. 8, 1898 election approached, white supremacists in Wilmington mobilized. As NPR recounts, they held rallies and parades and organized militias of “Red Shirts” to intimidate Blacks from voting.

At one point, Colonel Waddell told a rowdy white crowd:

“You are Anglo-Saxons! You are armed and prepared, and you will do your duty. Be ready at a moment’s notice. If you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win this election, even if we have to do it with guns.”

But even after Waddell won the election, he and the rabble he had energized were not satisfied. Two days after the vote, on this day in history, armed groups of whites seized the city by force.

The coup was carried out by a mob of some 2,000 white men. They destroyed property and businesses of Black citizens built up since the Civil War, including the only Black newspaper in the city, and killed an estimated 60 to 300 people. No one knows the actual body count, since some 1400 Blacks fled the city. Some were forcibly banished with their property confiscated. While some whites were wounded, no whites were reported dead. The coordinated overthrow is known as the only successful coup d’etat on U.S. soil.

Armed rioters in front of destroyed press building

Back in power, Democrats were determined never to lose it again. According to James Leloudis, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC), they took two steps to ensure this: (1) making sure Blacks could no longer vote, and (2) making poor whites feel superior to and animosity toward Black voters.

As The Atlantic reports, drawing on Leloudis’s history:

In the 1899 legislative session, Democrats wrote an amendment to the state constitution that required that anyone who wanted to vote demonstrate to local elected officials that they could read and write any section of the Constitution. Voters ratified it in 1900, disenfranchising the state’s black voters for decades. Between 1890 and 1908, every state in the South adopted new state constitutions that sought to disenfranchise black voters. Democrats reigned in North Carolina and in the South for the next 60 years.”

 

They also set about in 1899 passing the first “Jim Crow” laws, state and local laws that enforced racial segregation, prohibiting Blacks and whites from sitting together on trains, steamboats, and in courtrooms, and even requiring Blacks and whites to use separate Bibles. These laws not only encouraged whites to see Black people as outcasts and pariahs, but also rewarded them for doing so, socially and psychologically. Whereas prior to 1898 whites and Blacks lived close to one another in Wilmington, by the next year, physical segregation increased, with home value, social status and quality of life improving for whites, the further they physically lived away from Blacks.

The events of 1898 became a source of great pride to the Democratic Party in North Carolina, and the next five governors of the state were all selected from among participants of the white supremacy crusade.

Charlotte continues to be heavily segregated to this day. Whites largely live in the city’s south, where neighborhoods are between 80 and 95 percent white. Blacks and the city’s growing Latino community live everywhere else. According to 2014 Census data, 43 of the 51 census tracts that are 70 percent or more Black or Hispanic are areas of high poverty.

A UNC report calls schools in Wilmington “hyper-segregated.” In addition, data show that Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the worst places in the United States for poor children to have a shot at getting ahead as adults.

White supremacism is also still a force in Wilmington. A Black high school student in eastern North Carolina, Lennon Lacy, was found hanging dead on the swing shown below in 2014. He had an older white girl friend. The battered and bruised body was shod with too small sneakers that weren’t his, but local police called it a suicide.