Captain James, with a sense of relief, told the armed civilians at the armory that the infantry would not lead the march. But suddenly the captain’s own militiamen objected. They demanded to be part of any attack on the newspaper that had defamed their wives and daughters. James quickly devised a plan to keep the militiamen bottled up at the armory. He ordered them to march, over and over, around the grassy armory grounds.
As soon as they realized that the infantry was standing down, several men in the crowd began to chant for Roger Moore. They had been told that Moore would lead the attack on the Record, and now they demanded that he follow through. Waddell intervened. He told the mob that Moore could not be located. There was a long pause, and then a new chant arose: “Waddell! Waddell! Waddell!”
Waddell seized the opportunity to outflank Moore. He ordered seventy-five men to line up and join him in a march to the newspaper. But instead of seventy-five, more than five hundred men began forming columns four abreast that stretched for nearly two blocks.
Waddell walked to the head of the column, joined by Mike Dowling and Silas Fishblate, the Jewish former mayor, who was eager to demonstrate his white supremacist bona fides. Behind Fishblate and Dowling were several members of Waddell’s Committee of Twenty-Five, formed a day earlier. Many of the men knew that the Committee of Colored Citizens had agreed to their demands—and that Alex Manly had fled—but they saw an opportunity to unleash the enraged white mob.
Few people realized it, but the final issue of the Record had been published the previous day, November 9. With Alex Manly gone, his brother Frank had taken over the operation with the help of John Goins, a twenty-nine-year-old black printer who was a member of the Committee of Colored Citizens. Frank Manly and Goins decided not to publish on November 10, hoping that a few days of silence—and Alex’s exit—might cool white resentment.
Frank and Goins were having breakfast near the Record office on the morning of November 10 when they heard shouts and gunshots. They were warned that a mob was bearing down on the newspaper, intent on burning the press and lynching Alex Manly. The two men abandoned their breakfast, climbed into a buggy, and fled to the outskirts of the city. They later made their way to Washington, DC, where Frank was told, falsely, that Alex had been murdered by a mob.
Waddell, Dowling, Fishblate, and the committeemen marched in tandem, followed by columns of gunmen. The mob had now grown to nearly a thousand people. Several men fired their Winchesters into the air. The gunshots summoned more white men, who ran from their homes, rifles in hand, to join the march. The columns paraded for three blocks east on Market Street, drawing cheers and whistles from white onlookers. Black residents retreated to their homes and locked their doors.
As soon as Colonel Taylor was informed that the mob had set out for the Record office, he rushed to the armory to confer with Captain James. Taylor had already set in motion a plan to induce Governor Russell in Raleigh to authorize the infantry to suppress a purported black riot. The day before, Taylor had told Russell in a telegram that because racial tensions were so high, he was holding the infantry ready while awaiting the governor’s orders. Russell had not responded. Now, at about 9:00 a.m. on November 10, Taylor tried again. He sent another telegram to Raleigh: “Situation here serious . I hold military awaiting your prompt orders.” If the governor ordered the infantry to intervene, Taylor would then be free to attack blacks as planned.
It was only seven blocks from the armory to the Record office on the second floor of Love and Charity Hall at South Seventh and Church Streets. The building, mocked by whites as Free Love Lodge, was owned by the Grand United Order of Love and Charity, a black fraternal organization dedicated to helping poor and sick blacks. Some of the white men later regretted targeting the building, saying it was owned by “respectable negroes.”
The marchers had by now entered a black neighborhood, where residents clustered at windows or hid behind outbuildings to watch the procession. The police chief, John Melton, walked out onto Market Street to monitor the mob. The columns were so long—at least fifteen hundred men by now, Melton thought—that they took nearly an hour to pass him. With just a handful of police officers under his command and with his job and perhaps his life in jeopardy, Melton felt powerless to stop them. He did not intervene.
As the columns approached the Record office, Waddell recalled the night the previous August when black men, some of them armed, had surrounded the newspaper building to ward off rumored white attacks. He summoned his military training from three decades earlier: Protect your flanks. He dispatched several men to set up checkpoints on street corners to cut off any black men who might rush to the Record ’s defense.
With the perimeter secured, Waddell marched slowly to the front of the Record building, a Winchester on his shoulder. He called out, “Halt!” Gripping his rifle, he knocked on the front door. He waited, then knocked again. There was no reply. With the Manly brothers gone and with white gunmen patrolling the neighborhood, the Record staff had fled.
Several men beat the door down. The lead column rushed into the building, the men cheering and hooting. They clambered upstairs and smashed office furniture and began to tear apart the Hoe printing press. As more men crammed into the building, they tossed out items from inside—a beaver hat, a crayon drawing of Alex Manly, a sign that read: RECORD PUB . CO . Broken furniture and fixtures followed, with cheers erupting as each piece of debris sailed through the air and tumbled across the dirt roadway.
Two men discovered a container of kerosene stored in a closet. They poured it across the wooden floor. Other men ripped down oil lamps from the ceiling and dumped the contents. Someone struck a match. Flames shot up.
As the fire spread, men raised their rifles, hollering and laughing. They were amused by the sight of an elderly black woman on the street who flapped her arms and cursed them and by black schoolchildren who raced through the streets, screaming for their mothers. Soon embers from the burning building wafted to surrounding properties. Flames flickered on the roof of nearby St. Luke’s AME Church. Small fires broke out on the roofs of surrounding homes. Someone sounded an alarm from a firebox at the corner of Seventh and Nun.
Several men from the mob tried to put out the flames. The nearest fire brigade was the Cape Fear Steam Fire Engine Company, formed in 1871 as the country’s first all-black steam engine company. The firefighters rushed with their horse-drawn tanker wagon, their fire bell clanging, up North Seventh Street toward the Record building. A white fire chief ordered W. T. “Tuck” Savage, a powerfully built white man with a reputation for brutality, to intercept the black crew. The firemen, alarmed by the size of the mob, halted two blocks from the fire.
After Savage was told that the fire had consumed the Record building, the black firefighters were permitted to proceed. They were met by rifle fire and pistol shots aimed over their heads. As men in the mob jeered, the firefighters sprayed water from the tanker, dousing the embers and saving surrounding structures, including St. Luke’s AME Church. The entire second floor of the Record building was gone, with only a blackened back wall and the charred printing press still standing. The bottom floor was gutted, framed by a rickety picket fence and the spectral remains of a burned, leafless tree.
Before moving on to attack other black neighborhoods, the white men posed for photographs. Many were dressed in dark suits and ties. Others sported red shirts or jackets. Each man wore a stern, satisfied look, as if he had just completed a hard day’s labor. And nearly every one stood with a rifle or shotgun resting on his shoulder, like a soldier at a drill.
With the Record in ruins, Waddell led the mob back to the armory. In a first-person account he wrote two weeks later for Collier’s Weekly, he claimed that he ordered the men to disband and go home: “Now you have performed the duty to which you called on me to lead you to perform. Now let us go quietly to our homes and about our business, and obey the law, unless we are forced in self defense to do otherwise.” A few men departed, but hundreds of othe
rs remained in the streets, still armed.
The sounding of the fire alarm next to the Record office could be heard in Brooklyn, and at the two-story brick Sprunt Cotton Compress, about three-quarters of a mile away. The black men who worked at the compress could see gray smoke twisting skyward from the torched newspaper building, and they could hear white men shouting and cheering. Rumors quickly spread that white mobs were torching black homes and businesses—when, in fact, only the Record office had been burned. The wives of several Sprunt workers, some with children in tow, ran to the compress to warn their husbands that white mobs were descending on their homes.
The Sprunt Cotton Compress was the city’s biggest employer. Its daily output was essential to Wilmington’s economy. Even a single day’s lost work would prove costly if the highly efficient system of compressing cotton, baling it, and loading it onto ships bound for Europe and the Caribbean was disrupted. James Sprunt, the owner, was one of Wilmington’s wealthiest citizens. A tall, narrow-faced man with a white walrus mustache, Sprunt was a committed white supremacist. But he adopted a paternalistic attitude toward his black workers. They belonged to him, and he would permit no one to harm them.
The workday had begun normally. Workers manned the compresses and stacked and hauled heavy bales of cotton. But all worked halted when the fire alarm sounded. White supervisors huddled and whispered. A black man ran among the workers, screaming that Red Shirts had killed a black man. “They are going to get us all!” he shouted.
Several black workers approached Sprunt. They reminded him that they had always been compliant and hardworking. They complained, respectfully, that whites should not be permitted to terrorize them so brazenly. Sprunt climbed onto a cotton bale and ordered his employees to resume work. He promised to protect them.
Some workers abruptly left the compress with their wives, hoping to find a way home through white checkpoints. Several hundred more black employees gathered outside the compress, looking anxiously at the smoke in the distance.
The sight of a large gathering of black men sparked rumors among whites that black mobs were gathering to attack white homes and businesses. Word sped across the city in seconds, in many cases relayed by telephone. The rumors reinforced what many whites had long believed based on newspaper reports: blacks were plotting to take over the city. The white men who had burned the Record office now rushed to the Sprunt Cotton Compress on the river.
George Rountree had slept in that morning. He had no reason to rise early because he knew the Committee of Colored Citizens had agreed to white demands the day before. But now, as he sat up in bed, Rountree heard the fire alarm and gunshots. He dressed and ran outside. He was hurrying past the post office when he encountered William H. Chadbourn, the postmaster. Chadbourn was a Republican, but he had bowed to intimidation by Rountree and other whites a month earlier when he apologized in print for saying there was no Negro rule in Wilmington. Now Chadbourn surprised Rountree with an offer: if Rountree arranged for white leaders to select a new Democratic mayor and board of aldermen, Chadbourn would help force Mayor Wright and the Fusionist aldermen to resign. Chadbourn could sense that Wilmington’s Fusionists were doomed. He aligned himself with the ascendant Democrats.
Rountree agreed, but on his way back home he heard shouts from the workers at the nearby Sprunt Cotton Compress. He grabbed his Winchester and walked down the street with the gun on his shoulder, “feeling very much like a fool,” he wrote later. If there was any trouble with blacks, he realized, there were plenty of whites with guns to handle it. Rountree returned the gun to his home, then walked to the Sprunt building.
At the compress, Rountree saw Sprunt and Roger Moore struggling to calm the black workers while also trying to keep the swelling white mob at bay. Rountree joined in, hoping to persuade the blacks to return to work. One worker glanced at the armed white men assembled on the street and asked Rountree: “What have we done? What have we done?” Rountree did not respond. “I had no answer,” he wrote later. “They had done nothing.”
Even so, Rountree feared that the workers would go home and arm themselves with whatever guns they could muster. He found a telephone and called the armory, directing the Wilmington Light Infantry to haul its Colt rapid-fire gun to the compress “to have it convenient for use if necessary.” Rountree regretted the call almost immediately. He realized he had brought into play a murderous weapon at a time when hundreds of whites were armed with rifles, shotguns, and pistols. It was “a fool thing to do,” he admitted later.
The deputy sheriff, Gizzard French, arrived at the armory at considerable personal risk. Mayor Wright and Police Chief Melton had by now ceded control of the city’s streets to the white mobs and the Red Shirts. But French, an irrepressible sort, tried to take command of the situation at the compress. He deputized Rountree and several other white men and told them to get control of the black workers. It was a peculiar order. It was the enraged white men, not the cowed black employees, who were threatening violence. But Rountree took advantage of his newly granted authority as a sheriff’s deputy. He “read the riot act to the negroes,” as he put it. This seem to mollify the white mob but only momentarily.
Soon several white men approached Colonel Moore and pressured him to issue an order to shoot the black workers. If he refused, they said, they would open fire anyway. Moore reminded the men that they had chosen him as their commander and that no one would shoot anybody without being ordered to do so. He warned that anyone who fired a weapon at the compress would be arrested. Most of the men backed down.
But others in the mob persisted. One man told Captain Donald MacRae, the brother of the white supremacist leader Hugh MacRae, that he and his friends planned to “kill the whole gang of Negroes.” MacRae was still a federal military officer. He was commander of a militia unit composed of local men from the Wilmington Light Infantry. The unit had joined the US service the previous May for the Spanish-American War. On November 10, the soldiers were still members of the US military. They would not be formally released from federal service until eight days later.
Captain MacRae had rushed that morning to the Sprunt Cotton Compress armed with a riot gun, two pistols, a Bowie knife, and five pounds of riot cartridges. He assumed the black workers were rioting.
But now MacRae realized that any role by his troops in the day’s events could prompt federal intervention. Beyond that, he saw that the black men were terrified and wanted only to go home and protect their families. “It was little less than murder that they proposed,” he said later of the mob. He refused to get involved.
As Sprunt continued to beseech the black men to return to work, he dispatched a white supervisor and a black worker to tour black neighborhoods in his personal buggy to find out what was happening there. He also ordered his white workers to bring his private boat around to the wharf so that its four guns were pointed at the white mob. The US military had provided weapons to private vessels and steamers during the Spanish-American War.
Soon the two employees returned in Sprunt’s buggy and reported that only the Record office had been burned. Brooklyn was not on fire. The news seemed to calm the black workers. Sprunt arranged with Colonel Moore for armed white men from the Vigilance Committee to escort small groups of black workers to their homes, past the white sentinels. Coincidentally, the white mob suddenly abandoned its siege of the compress and began rushing to Brooklyn, driven there by yet another rumor: a hostile gang of armed black men was said to be gathering at North Fourth and Harnett Streets.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Situation Serious
T HE COMMOTION at the Sprunt Cotton Compress alarmed other black workers along Wilmington’s crowded waterfront. These men toiled for low wages at white-owned lumberyards, shipping companies, railroad yards, and turpentine and pitch plants. As rumors of a white riot swept the riverfront, the sight of Sprunt workers running home to head off white gunmen sent other wharf workers sprinting toward their own houses.
At the same t
ime, some of the white men who had torched the Record office raced on foot and in streetcars toward North Fourth and Harnett Streets in Brooklyn to confront the black men said to be gathering there. Though Brooklyn was home to both blacks and whites, many sections were almost entirely black, prompting some whites to refer to much of Brooklyn as Darktown. The whites in the mob were still stoked with adrenaline from the Record torching and eager for an opportunity to shoot black men. From streetcar windows , they fired rifle shots into black homes and storefronts along Castle Street.
It was just after 11:00 a.m. when several dozen white gunmen arrived at North Fourth and Harnett to find a crowd of anxious and aroused black men gathered outside Brunjes’ Saloon. A few were armed with old pistols and rifles. The men were angered by the burning of the Record. They shouted across the street, cursing the white men who had destroyed the voice of Wilmington’s black community.
The whites assembled on the opposite corner, displaying their rifles and shotguns, trying to intimidate the black men. Aaron Lockamy, the middle-aged white police officer on temporary duty, tried to calm the situation. But the two sides continued to exchange taunts and curses. The whites ordered the blacks to disperse. They refused and cursed the white men again.
It did not take long for the standoff to erupt in violence. Moments later, four white men unleashed a fusillade from a .44-caliber navy rifle, two 16-shot repeating rifles, and a double-barreled shotgun loaded with buckshot. Three black men toppled to the wood-slatted walkway. Two bled to death there, one on the walkway beneath the awning of Walker’s grocery and the other after tumbling into the gutter nearby. They were later identified as Charles Lindsay and William Mouzon. The third man crawled inside a nearby home and died on the floor. Other men ran from the corner in all directions, pursued by whites shooting wildly at their fleeing figures.
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