Wilmington 1898

In 1898, Wilmington was a majority-Black city with a biracial government. The Fusion coalition, an alliance between the Republican Party and the Populist Party, had won statewide elections in 1894 and 1896 by uniting poor white farmers with Black voters around shared economic interests. It was a political realignment that threatened the Democratic Party's hold on the South.

Wilmington itself had become a showcase of Black prosperity. There were Black lawyers, doctors, bankers, contractors, and barbers. The police force was integrated. Three of the ten city aldermen were Black. The customs collector was Black. The city's only daily African American newspaper, the Wilmington Daily Record, was edited by Alex Manly, a light-skinned Black man whose grandfather had been governor of North Carolina.

This was intolerable to the Democratic Party establishment. The Raleigh News and Observer, edited by Josephus Daniels, began a deliberate campaign in the summer of 1898 to inflame white racial anxieties. The campaign was coordinated. The goal was explicit. Furnifold Simmons, chairman of the state Democratic Party, said openly that the aim was to "redeem" North Carolina for white supremacy.

A group of nine prominent Wilmington businessmen, known as the Secret Nine, met through the fall of 1898 to plan the overthrow of the city government. They were not a fringe faction. They were bankers, lawyers, and merchants who ran the city's economy. They coordinated with the state Democratic Party, purchased a Gatling gun, and formed a paramilitary group called the Red Shirts.

On election day, November 8, 1898, Democrats swept the state through a combination of voter intimidation and outright violence. That was the coup at the ballot box. But the Fusion government in Wilmington itself was elected on a different cycle and would not come up for election until 1899. The Secret Nine did not wait.

On November 10, Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate officer and former U.S. Congressman, read the "White Declaration of Independence" at the Wilmington Light Infantry Armory. Waddell then led an armed mob of roughly 500 men to the offices of the Wilmington Daily Record. They burned the building to the ground. Alex Manly had already fled the city after receiving death threats.

Armed violence spread across the Black neighborhoods. Contemporaneous accounts describe bodies in the streets. The exact death toll has never been established. Historians estimate between 60 and 300 Black residents were killed. Many more fled into the swamps. A train conductor reportedly smuggled Black families out of the city hidden in freight cars.

By afternoon, the armed mob had forced the mayor, the aldermen, and the police chief to resign at gunpoint. Alfred Moore Waddell was installed as mayor before the end of the day. The entire city government was replaced with white supremacists who had been named in advance by the Secret Nine.

In 1900, two years after the coup, North Carolina adopted a new state constitution with poll taxes, literacy tests, and a "grandfather clause" that effectively disenfranchised nearly every Black voter in the state. Black voter registration in North Carolina collapsed from 126,000 in 1896 to fewer than 6,000 by 1902. It did not recover until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Wilmington model became the template. Across the South, Democratic parties used a combination of paramilitary violence and legal disenfranchisement to destroy the Reconstruction-era biracial coalitions. Wilmington was the proof of concept. If a biracial government in the largest city in a Southern state could be overthrown in a single day, and the perpetrators celebrated as patriots, then every other Black political foothold in the South was in jeopardy.

The property of exiled Black residents was seized or sold under duress. The Black middle class of Wilmington never recovered its 1898 scale. The city, once majority Black, became majority white within a generation.

For more than a century, the coup was described in North Carolina textbooks as a "race riot" caused by Black aggression. The perpetrators had been allowed to write the history.