Articles and Book Reviews by Fergus M. Bordewich
An American Tragedy
By 1898, North Carolina’s largest city was a thriving mixed-race community—and so a target of the state’s white supremacists.
[Book review] Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by DAVID ZUCCHINO
Reviewed By Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal, January 2020.
MR. ZUCCHINO'S GRIPPING ACCOUNT of one of the most disturbing political events in American history opens with a terse verbal jolt: "The killers came by streetcar." From this ominous beginning, the ruthless 1898 massacre of Wilmington, North Carolina blacks by a carefully-laid white supremacist conspiracy roars inexorably onward to its tragic conclusion. It is a grim but fascinating story that will doubtless shock readers to whom this long-suppressed history is unfamiliar.
(Above) On Nov. 11, 1898, armed white militiamen escort several prominent black men to Wilmington’s train station for permanent banishment. Photo: Cape Fear Museum
Wilmington was not the first deliberate massacre of innocent black Americans. In the late 1860s, white race riots killed scores of blacks in Memphis, New Orleans, and upcountry Louisiana. Nor was it the last. Scores of blacks were systematically slaughtered in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Ocoee, Florida in the 1920s. Thousands, too, were lynched or shot during the Jim Crow decades in individual incidents in small towns and rural areas across the South. The Wilmington massacre stands out, however, as the only coup against a stable, elected government in American history, a government that was objectionable for no other reason than that it was biracial.
Mr. Zucchino, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, welds crisp writing, an eye for telling detail, and probing research into the best rendering to date of events that reached far beyond Wilmington to influence the disenfranchisement of African-Americans across the South. The Wilmington coup was in effect a coda to Reconstruction, a final act in what remained of the brave, failed effort to create a biracial politics in the former Confederacy. Black and white Republicans had been ousted from power in most of the South by the late 1870s. But as long as the federal government remained in Republican hands, as it did almost all the rest of the nineteenth century, the southern wing of party was kept alive through federal patronage and the tenacious attempts of African-American voters to take part in elections. From time to time, the mainly black Republicans also managed to make common cause with populist reformers as they did in North Carolina in the mid-1890s. Their fusion ticket won sweeping victories across the state, putting many blacks into office in areas which, like Wilmington, were heavily populated by African Americans, and ultimately setting in motion the revolution that Mr. Zucchino has so vividly detailed.
In 1898, three of the city's ten aldermen and ten of its twenty-six policemen were black; there were black health inspectors, a black street superintendent, black postmasters, black magistrates, a black county treasurer, all drawn from an educated and active middle class that included lawyers, doctors and churchmen, a black-owned newspaper, and two black-owned banks. Just months before the massacre, the American Baptist Publication Society had called Wilmington "the freest town for a negro in the country." Other key offices such as mayor and police chief were held by white Republican allies. Contrary to later racist propaganda, the city was well run, but the presence of any blacks in positions of power was intolerable to leading Democrats, who began railing against "Negro rule."
Mr. Zucchino's narrative toggles skillfully between members of the city's vibrant black community and the white revolutionaries, who included members of leading local families, Confederate veterans, militia officers, thuggish rabble rousers and, notably, the widely influential editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, Josiah Daniels, whose scurrilous race-baiting and fake "reporting" fueled much of the savagery that the white mobs brought to their work. "White supremacy" has today become something of an all-purpose buzzword to challenge perceived racial inequities great and small: in the Wilmington of 1898, it was a proud and ruthless battle cry.
It was no secret that violence was in the offing. In the weeks before the coup, gun sales soared. Wealthy merchants handed out free weapons to white men who couldn't afford to buy their own. When blacks attempted to buy guns for their own defense, however, the local white newspaper in Wilmington, the Messenger, declared, "Sambo is seeking to furnish an armory here."
Democrats were looking for an excuse to act. They found it when Alex Manly, the fiery editor of Wilmington's black newspaper, the Daily Record, published an editorial denouncing hackneyed but incendiary charges that blacks were wholesale rapists and could be brought to heel only by lynching. "Every Negro lynched is called a 'big, burly, black brute,' when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers, and were not only 'black' and 'burly' but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them as is very well known to all," Manly sarcastically wrote.
Calls for Manly's murder swelled, while the columns of the Messenger wildly asserted with no evidence whatsoever that Wilmington was experiencing a massive—in fact non-existent—crime wave, writing at one point, "The Sambos do not wait to be threatened or assaulted but they take the initiative and assault and kill from the start." The paper further charged that blacks were stockpiling arms and that nannies planned to poison the white children in their care and set their homes on fire. As the November state elections approached, white vigilantes rode menacingly through black neighborhoods shooting off their Winchester repeaters and daring blacks to vote. One white ringleader, Col. Alfred Waddell, a one-time Confederate officer, directed his followers "do their duty" as white men: "Go to the polls tomorrow and 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!" Waddell threatened to fill the Cape Fear River with black men's bodies if they resisted. On election day, white gunmen forced blacks away from polling stations at gunpoint and openly stuffed ballot boxes. (In one typical instance, the "winning" Democratic candidate had more than one hundred more votes than the total number of registered voters in the precinct.) Using similar tactics, Democrats won overwhelming victories across much of the state. Newspapers trumpeted: "Our state redeemed—Negroism defunct."
What came next was an organized riot. On streetcars, on horseback and on foot, hundreds of armed men poured into the city from outlying towns, "stoked with adrenaline… and eager for an opportunity to shoot black men," in Mr. Zucchino's words. Many of them, known as "Red Shirts," wore red calico blouses or red jackets over white butterfly collars, with their trousers jammed into boots and cartridge belts around their waists. They shot into black homes, fired on groups of nervous blacks standing on streetcorners, and burned the office of the black-owned Daily Record. Alex Manly had already fled north, or he would have been lynched. Others marauding whites were members of the state militia, frustrated that they hadn't been able to get to Cuba to shoot Spaniards.
Later, white officials claimed that their actions were necessary to quell "Negro riots." In reality, what took place was a one-sided slaughter. The gunmen murdered blacks—almost none of whom were armed—all over the city, many shot in the back as they fled. One white man was overheard to say to another as he fired, "We are just shooting to see the niggers run!" White housewives brought the shooters hot coffee, fried ham and eggs, and hotcakes. Meanwhile, hundreds of black women and children fled to the surrounding swamps in terror, where they lay for days exposed to the weather with nothing but the clothes they wore. By the time it was all over, at least sixty black men lay dead and many others wounded.
The revolutionists' ultimate goal was to seize control of the city government. They issued a manifesto demanding an immediate end to Negro "rule," the handing over of black-held jobs to white men, and no tolerance for "the actions of unscrupulous white men in affiliating with the negroes." Every official of the city's fusion government, white and black, elected and appointed, from the mayor on down was forced to resign, virtually at gunpoint. An impromptu "election" was held, and eight white supremacists, including two men who had directed the rioters, were chosen as alderman. Col. Waddell—who had threatened to fill the river with black men's corpses—was then selected as Wilmington's new mayor.
Fifty "troublesome" men, mostly black but including the leading white Fusionists, were peremptorily put on trains out of town, and warned never to return. They included the city's deposed mayor, Silas Wright, a Massachusetts man who had lived in the city for almost thirty years, the white police chief, a United States commissioner who had committed the sin of having a common-law black wife, and others. Many others were beaten, dragged, and threatened with lynching. In the weeks and months that followed, an estimated 2,100 blacks fled the city. Not one white rioter was ever charged with a crime, much less convicted.
"With the killings completed and their enemies banished, Wilmington's whites began crafting a lasting narrative of a heroic victory over dark and malevolent forces," Mr. Zucchino writes. Later reports in the white press typically asserted that black men were the aggressors. One of the city's leading churchmen, Rev. James Kramer, who had carried a gun during the massacre, told his congregation that whites had done holy work, since they were destined by God to "lead the people and rule the country."
Resurgent Democrats in the state legislature soon stripped the vast majority of blacks of the ability to vote by crafting discriminatory poll taxes, whites-only primaries, and targeted literacy tests. Other southern states followed suit with similar legislation in the first years of the twentieth century, until the black vote even in areas where they were a majority had been reduced to nearly nothing. The victors were proud of what they had accomplished. Josephus Daniels, the editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, later to be Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, praised the gunmen of 1898 for creating "a reign of terror." Boasted Col. Waddell, Wilmington had "set the pace for the whole South on the question of white supremacy." In the years that followed, whites shamelessly rewrote history according to incorporate racist tropes. In the 1930s, one popular writer asserted that Wilmington's whites had to act because "black rapists prowled the city…attacking Southern girls and women." And as late as 1949 school textbooks portrayed the revolutionists as heroic defenders of law and order.
The story of what happened in Wilmington has never been better or more fully told than in Mr. Zucchino's unflinching account. As befits the work of a serious journalist, he eschews polemics and lets events speak for themselves. "Wilmington's Lie" joins a growing shelf of significant books that unpeel the brutal realities of the post-Civil War South including, among others, Steve Luxenberg's "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Freedom", Stephen Budianski's "The Bloody Shirt: Terror after the Civil War", and Charles Lane's, "The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction". More books yet to come will doubtless continue to reveal the still inadequately understood history of what might rightly be considered the nation's most shameful era. Apart from its historical value, Mr. Zucchino's book may also serve as a tacit warning of the dark forces that may still lie beneath the deceptively stable surface of American society.