Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  “Kill the niggers! Kill the damned niggers!” they screamed.

  The next morning, the city’s white newspapers, quoting white witnesses, reported that blacks had fired first. George Rountree claimed he had seen “a half-grown negro boy” fire the first shot, although Officer Lockamy later said he had seen the white men open fire. Whoever had fired first, the black men of Wilmington were now hopelessly outgunned.

  Less than a block from the corner at North Fourth and Harnett, Dr. Bernice C. Moore operated a busy drugstore on North Fourth Street. Dr. Moore was a proud white supremacist whose small shop formed a white island surrounded by a sea of black faces in that part of Brooklyn. Like other white men in Wilmington during the summer of 1898, Dr. Moore had purchased a small arsenal of guns and ammunition—not just for himself but also for other white men in the area. A group of white businessmen and citizens had raised $2,600 for Dr. Moore to purchase riot guns and repeating rifles to distribute to local white men, many of them too poor to afford the weapons.

  As the proprietor of a white outpost in Brooklyn, Dr. Moore had been tasked by the city’s leading white citizens to serve as trip wire for any trouble arising from black men living there. Along with selected white men elsewhere in the city, Moore had been instructed to notify white leaders if blacks began to riot, as the newspapers had been predicting all summer.

  Shortly before noon on November 10, Dr. Moore was inside his drugstore when he heard the sudden rattle of gunshots from North Fourth and Harnett. He rushed to his telephone and called the armory of the Wilmington Light Infantry.

  “They’re fighting over the road!” he shouted into the receiver.

  More gunshots sounded. Five or six black men dressed in workers’ overalls fell dead. One wounded man, Samuel McFallon, crawled under a house on North Fourth Street and later bled to death. Clawson, the Messenger reporter, ran through the streets, trying to keep up with the wild shooting. “Gunfire rattled all around us and bullets whistled closely,” he wrote.

  Several black men fired back at the whites while trying to run to safety. William Mayo, a young white man who had been standing on his porch at the corner of North Third and Harnett, took a bullet through his left chest, piercing both lungs. A white correspondent for Collier’s Weekly reported that Mayo had been shot by “a ‘bad nigger,’ running amuck.” A second white man, George Piner, was struck in the left arm by a .44-caliber round. Another .44-caliber bullet pierced the abdomen of a white man named N. B. Chadwick. The three men, who all survived their wounds, may have indeed been shot by black men. But it is also possible that they were accidentally shot by white gunmen, who were firing in all directions.

  A city ambulance bearing a white cross bounced through the rutted streets, collecting the wounded, both black and white. Fourteen bleeding men , twelve black and two of the three whites who had been shot, were delivered to Wilmington’s City-County Hospital. The hospital was understaffed—many of the white nurses and medical assistants had fled, fearing they would be shot by black rioters. The white resident on call, Dr. R. E. Zachary, treated the patients, the whites in the white ward, the blacks in the colored ward. Two of the black men died just after they were admitted. Every other patient survived. Dr. Zachary made a notation: “All except the two white men were shot in the back.”

  The city’s white residents had no doubt who had shot the three white men. Word spread quickly through Wilmington’s white community that Negroes were shooting at whites. Wilmington’s streets were overrun by white men rushing with their guns to help put down the anticipated black rebellion. The long-planned killing of Wilmington’s black population had begun.

  Thomas Clawson, the white reporter, followed a wounded black man from North Fourth and Harnett into a home at 411 Harnett Street. He encountered three distraught black women. On the floor behind them was a black man named Bizell, dead of his wounds. On a bed, Clawson found the owner of the house, George H. Davis, also a black man, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest, just above his heart, and another to his left thigh. An embedded bullet was visible just beneath the skin of the man’s chest. Clawson ran his finger over it. Davis opened his eyes and told Clawson that the white men had fired first. Before returning to his reporting on the street, Clawson sent for both a white doctor and a black one, to tend to the wounded man. Davis survived, though Clawson later remarked that “it appeared impossible for one so desperately wounded ever to recover.”

  Some of the fleeing black men ran down North Third Street. One of them, Sam Gregory, stumbled upon a group of white men firing into the roadway. He toppled over , dead, between Harnett and Swann Streets. Other black men from the neighborhood, hearing the shots at North Third and Harnett, raced toward the corner. They were intercepted at North Second and Harnett by white gunmen, who warned them to turn back. Several black men opened fire, and the whites shot back. One of the black men, a laborer, was wounded but managed to stumble to nearby railroad tracks before he fell dead.

  At the first sound of gunshots, block captains under Colonel Roger Moore’s command set in motion a long-standing plan to protect white women and children. White families were escorted to designated collection points, then transferred to the First Baptist Church, located next to the Wilmington Light Infantry armory. Armed guards were posted around the church property. Along the riverfront , the tugboats Marion and Navassa were ordered to patrol the wharves to prevent black arsonists from setting them afire.

  By this time, Colonel Taylor had received a telegram in response to his own earlier “situation serious” telegram to Governor Russell.

  Russell knew that whites were predicting a black riot—a highly unlikely event, he reasoned, given his familiarity with the city’s cautious black leadership. But the governor was by now thoroughly cowed by the white leaders of his hometown. Once again, he capitulated. Russell accepted, without argument, white supremacist claims that blacks—not whites—were rioting. The governor’s response was relayed to Colonel Taylor by the state’s acting adjutant general in Raleigh, who wrote: “The governor directs that you take command of Captain James Company at Wilmington and preserve the peace.”

  At midday on November 10, Russell told his advisers in Raleigh that the Wilmington Light Infantry was unable to put down the purported black riot on its own. Wilmington’s white leaders wanted reinforcements. Russell seemed to have accepted, against all evidence, Colonel Taylor’s claims of an armed black uprising. He decided to dispatch state militiamen from two nearby towns. The detachments he chose were as committed to white supremacy as the Wilmington units—as Russell knew all too well from his harrowing train ride on Election Day. Russell sent telegrams to state militia units in Clinton and Maxton, two white towns where night riders had threatened and beaten potential black voters throughout the summer and fall.

  “Hold your company in readiness to move to Wilmington,” Russell instructed. The governor’s adjutant general followed up by ordering the Clinton and Maxton units to report to Colonel Taylor in Wilmington. They boarded trains to Wilmington early that afternoon. The Maxton militia left behind a group of disappointed Red Shirts who had just sent a telegram to Wilmington: “Maxton has 159 red shirts who want to get on the train.”

  Colonel Taylor wanted every armed white man available. He telegraphed the governor again: “I need two companies here for patrol duty to-night. Situation still very serious. I need Kinston naval reserves with their rapid-fire gun. Rush assistance.”

  From towns across the state, white men sent telegrams to the governor’s office or to Wilmington’s white newspapers, offering to help put down the purported black riot. “Hold your ground. Will carry hundred Winchesters if needed,” read a telegram from Rockingham, 130 miles northwest of Wilmington. Whites in Granville County, 170 miles north, offered to send five hundred armed men. Whites in Atlanta and New Orleans also promised armed assistance. And from Washington, DC, came a cryptic offer: “Can bring fifty Tar Heels and Winchesters; if need, wire.” In Fayetteville, the men of t
he Fayetteville Light Infantry, a state militia, did not wait for a reply to their offer of assistance. They grabbed their guns and boarded a train for Wilmington.

  Russell’s order to the Clinton and Maxton militias was a sideshow. It was his earlier decision to mobilize the Wilmington militia that provided Colonel Taylor with the pretext he needed to launch attacks on blacks. Russell never fully explained his actions that day. But because of his order, Colonel Taylor was able to declare martial law and order the Wilmington Light Infantry to proceed from the armory to Brooklyn—armed with the Colt rapid-fire gun, paid for by the city’s white supremacist businessmen. Before they left , the infantrymen gathered next to the Colt to pose for a photograph.

  After telephoning the Wilmington Light Infantry, as he had been instructed by the secret committees, Dr. Moore called the Naval Reserves from his drugstore on North Fourth Street. He reported the gunshots he had heard from the nearby corner. The naval commander , George L. Morton, ordered his men to prepare to deploy to North Fourth and Harnett Streets to assist in “quelling the negro riots,” as he put it. But Morton did not want to act without first obtaining formal authorization from a city official. Morton later said he was unable to locate Mayor Wright or Police Chief Melton. He decided to track down the county deputy sheriff, Gizzard French, to persuade him to order the Naval Reserves into the streets.

  Morton and his men found French in his room at the Orton Hotel. As one of the targeted Big Six, the sheriff was in no position to turn down Morton’s request. But he refused to go out himself to restrain the white gunmen; he had no intention of offering himself as a target. Instead, French provided Morton with a handwritten order instructing him to “use all the force at your disposal to quell the existing violation of the peace in the city.” French did not specify who had violated the peace, but it was understood to be black men. The Naval Reserves now had authorization—from a white Republican—to secure the peace with every weapon at Morton’s disposal, including the Hotchkiss rapid-fire gun delivered two days earlier.

  Before Morton deployed his troops, he sent a telegram to Governor Russell, informing him that the deputy sheriff had authorized the Naval Reserves to restore the peace. The telegraph system proved crucial to the city’s white leaders that day. It provided a means of almost instant communication among whites within Wilmington and among their confederates in Raleigh and other towns. Telegraphs had been in use in the United States for half a century, and by the late 1890s telegraph operators were common sights in downtown Wilmington—the gatekeepers of the internet of the day. Visiting white reporters from New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and elsewhere filed their dispatches by telegraph, providing not only moment-to-moment updates but also a nearly unanimous portrayal of the white supremacy campaign as a welcome corrective to corrupt Negro rule. Readers hundreds of miles away kept abreast of events in Wilmington in something approaching real time. A correspondent for the Washington Evening Star, for instance, transmitted a detailed account, by telegraph, of the events of November 10 in time to be published in the evening edition that same day.

  In response to naval commander Morton’s telegram, Russell’s adjutant general wired back: “Your action ordering out naval reserves to preserve the peace is approved by the Governor, who directs that you place yourself under orders of Lieut. Col. Walker Taylor.” Between them, the infantry and the Naval Reserves were able to deploy 140 trained and armed white men. Russell’s decision was pivotal: he gave a committed white supremacist unchecked authority to unleash state troops against black citizens—the very men whose votes had put Russell in office.

  Captain Donald MacRae was still resisting efforts by white gunmen to unleash his military unit on black residents in and around Brooklyn. But when several white men told MacRae that whites and blacks were exchanging gunfire near the railroad tracks in Brooklyn, the captain headed toward the site, trailed by an assortment of white men—his Light Infantry soldiers, Red Shirts, and armed citizens.

  When Captain MacRae reached the tracks, he saw a crowd of black men on a rise of land known as Dickinson Hill. Men in the mob asked MacRae to take charge. He quickly organized a group of gunmen in a military formation designed to drive the blacks off the hill and toward the river. But just as MacRae’s position as a federal officer had compromised his role at the Sprunt Cotton Compress earlier that day, someone again raised an objection.

  “I had just gotten the line formed,” MacRae recalled later, “when someone came up and said, ‘This is not right, Don MacRae [is] an U.S. Army officer and if found in this business, he will be gotten after by the President.’ So they said , ‘We will put someone else in command and you can get in ranks.’”

  A white supremacist leader later explained: “As Captain MacRae ’s Company … had not been mustered out of Federal service, the white leaders realized that his leadership might involve the United States government in the Wilmington Rebellion, and they feared that such a contingency would result in serious complication that might frustrate the objectives of the revolt.” MacRae stood down.

  Meanwhile, Captain Thomas James had been ordered by Colonel Taylor to lead another Light Infantry unit in Brooklyn—the unit with the horse-drawn wagon fitted with the Colt rapid-fire gun. James marched his men down Market Street to North Third Street, where several white women waved and yelled: “Godspeed!” The column stopped at Princess Street, outside a funeral home, and waited for the Naval Reserves to arrive.

  Once the sailors joined the infantrymen, the combined procession of more than a hundred military men marched to the Fourth Street Bridge leading into Brooklyn. Captain James halted the march and told the assembled men: “Boys I want to tell you right now I want you to load and when I give the command to shoot, I want you to shoot to kill.”

  James and his men marched across the bridge. Members of the Light Infantry later claimed that a large gathering of black men opened fire nearby. The infantrymen raised their rifles and unleashed a volley of shots. George Rountree later recalled seeing “several negroes lying on the street dead and a good many white people about with arms.” By some accounts , up to twenty-five black men were shot dead near the bridge.

  J. Allan Taylor and Hugh MacRae, Captain MacRae’s younger brother, had already made their way to Brooklyn to take charge of the white gunmen there. Both men were members of the Secret Nine. Taylor and Hugh MacRae began by trying to take control of several men who were searching for the black man they believed had shot the wounded white resident, William Mayo. A local man, described by one white man as “a half-breed Indian,” approached J. Allan Taylor and told him a black laborer named Daniel Wright had shot Mayo. The man led Taylor and a collection of infantrymen and Red Shirts to Wright’s home nearby, at 810 North Third Street.

  Wright was regarded by many whites as a troublemaker and an instigator of black rebellion. He had been spotted earlier that morning, chastising blacks who had cowered in their homes rather than going out into the streets to confront white men. The mob descended on Wright’s small two-story house. White witnesses later claimed that Wright fired on the whites from his attic, wounding two white men.

  Men in the mob fired into the attic, then set the house alight. Wright emerged from the flames and was shot instantly. He fell, his blood soaking the packed earth. Several men yanked him to his feet. Wright begged for mercy. Someone smashed him over the head with a gas pipe, drawing more blood and slamming him back to his knees. Several men yelled for him to be lynched from a nearby lamppost. They searched for a rope. But another man suggested that Wright be given a chance to run for his life. He was released. “Run, nigger, run!” a man shouted.

  Bleeding profusely, Wright stumbled through the packed sand at the edge of the street. He struggled about fifty feet before gunshots sounded. He tumbled to the ground, felled by thirteen bullets, five of them through his back. He lay in the dirt bleeding for about thirty minutes before several men took him to a hospital. Wright survived through the night but died early the next morning. Doctors
who treated him told the Messenger : “They never saw one man with as many shots in him as he had.”

  By the time Wright was shot, the Light Infantry and Naval Reserves had been deployed as a single military unit, backed by bands of armed white civilians. At the same time, J. Allan Taylor and Hugh MacRae continued to command gunmen roaming black neighborhoods. Separately, Colonel Roger Moore had taken charge of the armed Vigilance Committee groups, which included several Red Shirts. White sentinels acting under various commands set up checkpoints, where they searched every black man, woman, and child they encountered. White housewives walked from one checkpoint to the next, supplying the men with hot coffee, served in fifty-pound lard cans; fried ham and eggs; and buckwheat cakes smothered with butter.

  The Reverend J. Allen Kirk, the black minister, saw black men lying dead in the streets and gutters as he tried to make his way home. He planned to load his wife and niece into a carriage and try to flee the city, but he was stopped and searched by white sentinels. Kirk was shocked by the white men’s rage. He had assumed that the Committee of Colored Citizens’ compliant response to Waddell’s demands the day before had soothed their anger.

  Kirk had come to Wilmington from Boston and had always assumed that Southern whites would tolerate small measures of black success and achievement so long as blacks ultimately bowed to white authority. But now, it seemed to Kirk, black appeasement had only stoked a more malevolent strain of white ferocity: