Wilmington 1898

In 1898, Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina and a majority-Black city with a biracial government[4]. The Fusion coalition, an alliance between the Republican Party and the Populist Party, had won the state legislature in 1894 and 1896[4] by uniting poor white farmers with Black voters around shared economic grievances against the railroad and lien-merchant interests that ran the Democratic Party. Daniel Lindsay Russell, a Republican from Brunswick County, had been elected governor on the Fusion ticket in November 1896[4]. George Henry White, a Black attorney from Tarboro, held the state's Second Congressional District seat in the United States House. The Fusion realignment had broken the Democratic Party's hold on North Carolina for the first time since Reconstruction.

Wilmington itself had become a showcase of Black prosperity. There were Black lawyers, doctors, bankers, contractors, and barbers; a stevedore-controlled Cape Fear waterfront; the only Black-owned daily newspaper in the South; and a Black professional class growing year over year[4]. The municipal police force was integrated. Three of the ten city aldermen were Black[1]. The customs collector for the Port of Wilmington was John Dancy[1], one of the highest-ranking Black federal appointees in the South. The Daily Record was edited by Alex Manly[2], a light-skinned Black man whose grandfather had been a North Carolina governor.

On August 11, 1897, Rebecca Latimer Felton, a Georgia plantation mistress and prominent Southern lecturer, addressed an agricultural society on Tybee Island and called for a thousand lynchings a week to defend white women from Black men[3]. Her speech was reprinted across the South through 1898, including in North Carolina papers from Charlotte to Raleigh. On August 18, 1898, Alex Manly answered Felton in a Daily Record editorial, writing that interracial relationships in the rural South were often consensual and were re-classified as assault only when discovery threatened a white woman's standing[3]. The editorial ran in a paper most white residents of Wilmington never read. Furnifold Simmons[3] and Josephus Daniels[3] made sure they read it. Daniels reprinted excerpts through the fall as the central artifact of the white-supremacy campaign[3].

A group of nine prominent Wilmington businessmen, known as the Secret Nine[1], 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 for the Wilmington Light Infantry[2], and organized a paramilitary group called the Red Shirts[4] that grew to an estimated one hundred thousand members across North Carolina by election day.

On election day, November 8, 1898, Red Shirts patrolled polling places across the state[4]. Black voters who appeared at the polls were turned back by armed men, beaten, or shot. Democrats swept both chambers of the state legislature, reversing the Fusion margins of 1896[1]. That was the coup at the ballot box. The Wilmington municipal government was 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 United States Congressman[3], read the "White Declaration of Independence"[6] at the Wilmington Light Infantry Armory. Waddell then led an armed force of roughly five hundred men[1] to the offices of the Wilmington Daily Record. They burned the building to the ground. Alex Manly had already fled the city after receiving explicit death threats in the white press[2]. Through the morning and afternoon, additional Red Shirts and members of the Wilmington Light Infantry mobilized; by mid-afternoon, the armed force across the city had grown to roughly two thousand men under Colonel Walker Taylor of the state militia[3].

Armed violence spread across the Black neighborhoods through the day. Contemporaneous accounts describe bodies in the streets; the exact death toll has never been established. Historians estimate between sixty and three hundred Black residents were killed[5]. Many more fled into the swamps along Smith Creek and the Cape Fear River. Daniel Wright, a Black resident, was shot down by a crowd of armed white men at the corner of North Fourth and Harnett Streets[3]. Armond Scott, a young Black attorney, escaped the city hidden in a coffin a Black undertaker had loaded onto a north-bound freight car[4]. By afternoon, the armed mob had marched on city hall and forced Mayor Silas P. Wright, the elected aldermen, and the police chief to resign at gunpoint[1]. Alfred Moore Waddell was installed as mayor by nightfall[1]. Governor Daniel Russell, who had refused state-militia requests in the days before, took no action after[3].

In the days that followed, an estimated twenty-one hundred Black residents were forced from the city, many on the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad's north-bound trains and the Atlantic Coast Line south to Charleston[1]. Property left behind was occupied by white residents or absorbed by white-owned businesses through forced sales at a fraction of value. The home of Thomas C. Miller, who had owned significant Wilmington real estate, was seized within the week of his banishment. Wilmington was majority-Black in the 1890 census; the city was majority-white by the end of the next decade and remained so for the rest of the twentieth century[1].

In 1899, the new North Carolina General Assembly passed a sweeping Election Law that placed registration in the hands of partisan officials and required Black voters to navigate a deliberately obstructive process[4]. In 1900, two years after the coup, North Carolina adopted a new state constitution with a poll tax, a literacy test, and a "grandfather clause" that effectively disenfranchised nearly every Black voter in the state[4]. Black voter registration in North Carolina collapsed from one hundred twenty-six thousand in 1896 to fewer than six thousand by 1902[4]. The structure was built to be permanent. It held for sixty-five years, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 forced its dismantling, and it is the reason Black political representation in North Carolina did not approximate Wilmington's 1898 levels for most of the twentieth century.

The Wilmington model became the template the post-Reconstruction Democratic Party used across the South[4]. The combination of paramilitary intimidation organized through state-party channels, a coordinated media campaign that fixated on a single inflammatory artifact, the reversal of an election outcome by armed force, and the legal disenfranchisement that followed appeared in modified forms in Alabama's 1901 disenfranchisement amendment, Virginia's 1902 constitution, the Atlanta riot of 1906, and the displacement of Black officeholders across the former Confederacy through the first decade of the twentieth century. Wilmington was the proof of concept. If a biracial city government in the largest city in a Southern state could be overthrown in a single day and the perpetrators celebrated as patriots, then no Black political foothold in the South was secure.

The property of exiled Black residents was seized or sold under duress. The Black middle class of Wilmington never recovered its 1898 scale. The Daily Record was never reestablished. The Black professional and commercial life of the city rebuilt in time, but on a smaller footprint, on the streets and parishes that had survived the burning, and without the political representation that had made the 1898 city possible.

For more than a century, the coup was described in North Carolina textbooks as a "race riot" caused by Black aggression[3]. The perpetrators had been allowed to write the history. Aycock, Simmons, Daniels, and the other white-supremacy campaigners were honored with their names on schools, dormitories, and government buildings through the twentieth century. The 2006 state commission report adopted the term coup d'etat as the official finding[1]; in 2007, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a resolution formally apologizing for the events of 1898 and the legislature's role in the disenfranchisement that followed[3]. The names on the buildings began to come down. Wilmington's 1898 dead are still being counted.