At times, Manly played race relations for laughs. In the same September 28 issue, he published a story about W. C. Coleman, “the wealthiest colored man in the state,” under the headline: COLEMAN’S JOKE . The article described how Coleman, who was often mistaken for a white man, was escorted to the finest room in an expensive white hotel one evening. Coleman “humored the joke,” Manly wrote, until finally informing the porter that “it was not customary for Negroes to be entertained at hotels in this state.”
Despite its focus on black-themed news, the Record attracted white advertising. The paper carried a broad range of ads—for patent medicines, toy dealers, ladies’ corsets, coal deliveries, wine merchants, and grocers. Clawson, the white Messenger reporter and editor, called the Record a “worthwhile publication, patronized by the leading white merchants of Wilmington.” In an especially charitable moment, Clawson pronounced the Record “a very creditable colored paper.”
By 1897, black readership was reliable enough for the Manly brothers to begin publishing the Record as a daily, sold for 2 cents a day or $3 a year, from a small building at the corner of Water and Princess Streets. The Daily Record ’s front-page banner proclaimed, “The Only Negro Daily in the World!”
In August 1897, Manly rattled blacks and whites alike with a provocative Record column about sex, race, and lynchings. It was a critical response to an appeasement offered earlier that month by a group of black Baptist pastors outside Raleigh. The clergymen had announced that they were willing to cooperate with “all law-abiding citizens” in arresting and convicting black men accused of raping white women. The ministers seemed convinced that black complicity in apprehending black men who had sex with white women would somehow halt all the lynchings of black men.
“Outrages on defenseless women” by accused black rapists “threaten to perpetuate the greatest alienation of the two races,” the pastors wrote in a resolution published in the Raleigh Gazette, under the headline: DESTINY OF THE NEGRO . Their resolution included a pro forma condemnation of lynching. But the pastors also accepted the entrenched white supremacist principle that no sexual union between a black man and a white woman could possibly be consensual. The only question was how to punish the black brute—with a lynch rope, or by a court-imposed execution?
The Gazette agreed. In a column in the same edition, under the headline THE NEGRO PROBLEM , the black-run paper concluded: “There is but one remedy for rape, and that is the death penalty, speedily executed.”
Manly struck back quickly. In a Daily Record editorial headlined MISTAKEN POLICY , he accused the pastors of abandoning their race to curry favor with whites. He pointed out that they had failed to mention the white men who raped black women with impunity. If the pastors were so concerned about rape and punishment, Manly wrote, then the law should apply equally to blacks and whites, not just to unfortunate black paramours caught with white women.
The Gazette warned Manly that he was stirring up trouble: “Be careful, young man, ere you critcise the sages of your race.” It would not be Manly’s final word on race and sex.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A Yaller Dog
A LEX MANLY was hardly the only successful black man in Wilmington with middle-class aspirations and a position of prominence. He was merely the most outspoken.
Whites in Wilmington often complained that blacks behaved as if they owned the city. Every January, on Emancipation Day, blacks marched through the city to celebrate Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863—a day that for the white planter class signaled the beginning of the end of an ingrained and cherished way of life. In 1895, blacks had held one of the largest annual Emancipation Day rallies in Wilmington’s history. A musical group known as the Convivial Cornet Band led a loud procession that marched into the downtown Opera House, filling the hall from pit to dome. Poetry was read, and a forty-voice choir sang. A black newspaperman read Patrick Henry’s speech on liberty and death. Alex Manly wrote a formal thank-you note to the progressive whites who had allowed blacks to gather in the sanctity of the Opera House.
Blacks and whites honored their war dead in separate public ceremonies. Every May, Wilmington’s blacks made a point of commemorating Memorial Day, ignored by most whites as an oppressive federal holiday for fallen white and colored Union soldiers. Blacks decorated graves in the national cemetery on Market Street on Memorial Day, even as Wilmington’s whites considered moving the street so that they would not have to pass by the cemetery. White citizens gathered later in May on Confederate Memorial Day to honor their dead.
Another public display of black culture that upset Wilmington’s whites occurred every Christmas Day, when Wilmington blacks paraded through the streets dressed in African costumes, their faces painted in bold colors or obscured by wild masks. The parade celebrated Jonkonnu, a tradition passed down from West Africa via the West Indies. During slavery, black plantation workers had used the holiday to slyly mock the social pretensions of their white masters. These and other displays of black expression conveyed a strong spirit of community and belonging among free blacks and former slaves in the face of widespread white hostility. But they underscored the fragility of Wilmington’s segregated black experience in a city where whites wrote the rules.
In 1896, the US Supreme Court upheld separate but equal public accommodations for blacks and whites in its landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Homer Plessy, a Creole shoemaker in Louisiana, had been charged in 1892 with violating the state’s segregation statute, which required blacks and whites to travel in separate railway coaches. Plessy challenged his arrest, arguing that it violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Supreme Court ruled that while the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal treatment under the law, this guarantee applied only to political rights such as voting and not to social rights such as public accommodations. In the eyes of the nation’s highest court, blacks had attained political equality but not social equality.
The court pointedly rejected Plessy’s contention that the Louisiana law stamped blacks with “a badge of inferiority.” The justices noted that blacks and whites not only were provided equal facilities but were also punished equally for violating the separate but equal law. Their decision endorsed state-mandated racial segregation. Separate but equal was now the law of the land.
For Wilmington, Plessy v. Ferguson merely confirmed public accommodation practices that had been in place for generations. Many jobs were apportioned by race as well. By 1897, Wilmington’s city directory listed forty-two separate labor categories open to blacks—from cooks and porters to draymen and coopers. Literate blacks, many of them women, found work teaching black children in the segregated school system. In 1898, black teachers were paid an average of $32 a month, versus $34 a month for whites in a city school district that spent $858 a year per school to educate white children and $523 to educate blacks. Black children typically were permitted to study only through the sixth grade, whites through the twelfth grade.
A common accusation from whites in Wilmington, particularly the working classes dominated by Irish immigrants, was that blacks did not pay taxes or did not pay enough. But the city’s 1895 tax rolls listed 2,238 blacks who paid their taxes in full. In 1897, at least 13 blacks, one of them a woman, owned at least $2,000 in property and paid taxes on every parcel. Tax revenues paid for street improvements, electric lights, sanitation, and other city services—but primarily for white neighborhoods. Predominately black neighborhoods were denied most public conveniences, including reliable police and fire services. Black homeowners often paid twice as much as whites for fire insurance.
Wilmington in 1898 was inching slowly toward the twentieth century. The first telephones had been installed in 1879. Electric streetlights had arrived in 1886. Horsecar lines began converting to electric trolleys in 1892. But many of the city’s residents, black and white, had recently moved from the countryside and clung to their agrarian ways. They visited relatives on farms, returning to the city with c
ows, chickens, pigs, and crops that they grew in the dirt behind their homes. Livestock roamed the streets, grazing contentedly. Chickens and hogs were kept in backyards, perfectly legally under local ordinances. After complaints about the stench of hog manure downtown between Market and Dock Streets in April 1898, the city board of health warned the animals’ owners to keep the pens cleaned out or risk losing their livestock.
As the city modernized, enterprising black men rode a rising economic tide to prosperous lives. The richest black man in Wilmington—and one of the wealthiest men of any race—was Thomas C. Miller, a pawnbroker and auctioneer who built a small real estate empire. Miller was light skinned and charming and was thus considered a nonthreatening “good Negro” by some whites, at least for a time. As early as 1880 , Miller was a respected deputy sheriff. By 1889, he owned a combination saloon and restaurant on Dock Street—the only such establishment in Wilmington operated by a black man at the time. Though not well educated, Miller was a savvy negotiator and an astute businessman. He accumulated property, buying and selling lots as he built a small cash fortune. His estate was valued at $10,000 at his death—about $280,000 today. He loaned money and charged interest to men of both races. It was a hardened belief in the black community that many whites, including some of the city’s most prominent businessmen, owed Tom Miller money.
At the pinnacle of black economic and social life in Wilmington stood professionals educated at black universities—doctors, lawyers, pastors, and funeral directors. It was a small but proud class of some sixty-five men. Most of them dressed in the same style as prosperous white citizens. They wore dark wool suits, starched white collars with cravats, and long snug overcoats in the winter. Their well-barbered heads were topped year-round with the distinctive, narrow-brimmed hats in style among the elite.
The city’s most prominent black lawyer was William Everett Henderson, a tall, striking, fair-skinned man with chiseled features. His hair was dark and wavy and swept back from his forehead. He had hazel eyes, a strong jaw, and an imposing mustache. It would have shocked whites, and many blacks, in Wilmington to learn that William Henderson was not a Negro at all. His father was a white man in Salisbury, North Carolina, known as “Colonel Henderson.” His mother was a Cherokee. Born in Salisbury in 1858, Henderson was pronounced colored at birth and was sent to a Presbyterian mission school for coloreds. He lived the rest of his life as a black man.
At about age twenty, Henderson traveled to California, where he earned a law degree at Hastings College of the Law. Back in North Carolina, he was active in Republican politics, securing a position as an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1888. The next year, the incoming Benjamin Harrison administration rewarded Henderson by appointing him deputy tax collector in the town of Statesville, North Carolina. He lost the job three years later, when Democrat Grover Cleveland won the 1892 presidential election.
By the mid-1890s, Henderson was practicing law in Salisbury. In one case, he defended a black man accused of killing a white man at a corn shucking. After white residents threatened mob justice, Henderson sent for a white lawyer from a nearby town to help with the case. It made no difference. Whites threatened to kill Henderson as well as his client. He fled with his wife and children to Wilmington, hoping that a black majority city with a thriving black middle class would provide both safety and opportunity.
In 1897, Henderson opened a law practice in downtown Wilmington. By the following year, he spent $400 in cash on a comfortable house with a yard and parlor, where he lived with his wife, Sally Bettie, the granddaughter of a slave; and their four young children. The children attended colored schools, Henderson represented black clients, and the family settled into Wilmington, surrounded by black neighbors, with a white family living on the next block. “Wilmington was a fine city,” Sally Bettie wrote in her dairy.
Henderson plunged into Republican politics. He became an unofficial spokesman for black professionals in their wary dealings with white Republicans. He was pleasant and conciliatory but still insisted on a role for blacks in political party affairs. He became the most successful black lawyer in the city, the man whites went to see when they needed to deal with Wilmington’s black professionals.
Over time, Henderson became a friend and confidant of Alex Manly. And that friendship would soon mark Henderson as a target of white resentment and rage.
Not all of Wilmington’s black professionals were advocates for their race. John C. Dancy, the highly paid federal customs collector, was a careful, conservative man—and no friend of Alex Manly. The son of a free black man, Dancy dressed well, was polite and deferential toward whites, and jealously protected his elevated status as a political appointee. The customs sinecure was the pinnacle of a political career built from the ground up. Dancy began in a low-level job at the US Treasury Department in Washington after graduating from Howard University in Washington, DC. Back in his hometown, Tarboro, in eastern North Carolina’s Black Belt, Dancy ran for county registrar of deeds and won two terms. His prominence in the state Republican Party brought him to the attention of President Harrison, who appointed him to his first stint as federal customs collector in 1889.
In Wilmington, Dancy represented the accommodationist faction of the city’s black population. These men were grateful to whites for providing jobs. They lived in fear that their comfortable lives would be upended if blacks offended white men. They kept their heads down—literally—and did not look whites in the eye. They avoided conflict, acquiesced to white wishes, and, in the view of whites, knew their place. Dancy was especially sensitive to white resentments because he had replaced a white supremacist Democrat, Captain William Rand Kenan Sr., as customs inspector in 1897. He chose to lie low. “The colored man looks on the situation with equanimity and satisfaction, since he hopes to cease to be the bone of political contention much longer,” Dancy wrote in a church newsletter.
Dancy was a deeply religious man. He required his children to recite a verse from the Bible before sitting down to their meals. He attended the local African Methodist Episcopal Church and was appointed editor of the AME Zion Church’s two publications, the Star of Zion and the Quarterly Review. From those platforms, he espoused a philosophy of restraint, rectitude, hard work, and common sense. He often lectured his children, “If I had the money, I would establish a school of common sense, because this is something that so few people have.”
Dancy was a friend and supporter of Booker T. Washington, who rejected open confrontation with whites in favor of education and entrepreneurship—the fundamental building blocks of black progress. On Dancy’s block in Wilmington, only the neighbors next door were black. All other residents of the block were white. That was fine with Dancy.
Dancy moved easily among blacks and whites alike, and he adopted upper-middle-class ways. His rented home on North Eighth Street had a fine parlor. He visited the white officers of schooners and cutters that docked at the Wilmington port and took his family to the beach. He sent his son, John Jr., to an elite prep school.
But even as cautious a man as John Dancy could not always anticipate how his words might be interpreted by whites. He once gave a speech extolling the achievements of Booker T. Washington, a seemingly innocuous tribute. But Washington’s second wife happened to be white, and this detail did not escape the attention of Wilmington’s whites. They accused Dancy of endorsing interracial marriage or sex, commonly referred to by Southern whites as “amalgamation.” Dancy had unwittingly touched on the single most incendiary taboo among whites and now struggled to explain himself. “I had never advocated mixed marriages because I am content always to marry in my own race,” he wrote to the News and Observer in Raleigh.
Dancy’s brand of accommodation was welcomed by many whites and some blacks, but he was not universally admired. His habit of deferring to whites repulsed Henderson, who called Dancy “a large souled sycophant.” The two men would take divergent paths—and meet different fates—during the
heat of the white supremacy campaign, but Henderson expressed no regrets. Afterward, the stubborn lawyer said of the deferential customs collector: “I’d rather be a yaller dog and bay at the moon than such as he.”
Wilmington’s poisonous racial history had taught cautious black men like John Dancy to avoid antagonizing whites, for such behavior could prove fatal. At the same time, the city’s violent past had also instilled in Wilmington’s white men an abiding fear that their deferential black neighbors might one day rise up and slit their throats. For all their dominance over blacks in the city, whites had never extinguished the malignant dread of black rebellion—“a nightmare constantly haunting the American imagination,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. By 1898, white memories of a momentous black rebellion half a century earlier still had not faded.
In August 1831, the slave preacher Nat Turner mounted a slave uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, near the North Carolina border. He and his disciples murdered at least fifty-five (some accounts said fifty-seven) white men, women, and children before Turner was captured and executed on November 11. His body was flayed and quartered. Scraps of his skin were later fashioned into a purse. His bones were handed out as souvenirs. His head was hacked off and put on public display.
But while Turner and his band of fugitive slaves were still at large, rumors of a statewide slave uprising spread throughout North Carolina. White newspapers published sensational stories of slave armies marching south toward Wilmington, butchering white families and recruiting and arming local slaves along the way. Terrified whites in one town telegraphed an urgent request for assistance to the governor, warning of a slave “invasion and slaughter.”
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