The little white boys of the city searched them [blacks] and took from them every means of defence, and if they resisted, they were shot down … they went into a colored man’s house … then took up a stick of wood and bursted his brains out …
Colored women were examined and their hats taken off and search was made even under their clothing. They went from house to house looking for Negroes that they considered offensive; took arms they had hidden and killed them for the least expression of manhood … One fellow was walking along a railroad and they shot him down without any provocation. White ministers carried their guns to kill Negro Christians and sinners.
At Tenth and Princess Streets, located across the street from the Wilmington Seacoast Railway depot, stood Morro Castle, a well-known whorehouse. The madam asked an officer of the Wilmington Light Infantry to dispatch three militiamen to protect her black prostitutes from attack. Her request was politely refused.
At Second and Castle Streets, J. F. Maunder, a Light Infantry militiaman, stopped a black man and asked him about a bag slung over his back. The man told Maunder he was carrying onions and potatoes. Maunder grabbed the bag and peered inside. “I found onions, potatoes and an old case knife,” he recalled. He confiscated the knife and passed the black man on to the next sentinel, who again searched both the man and his bag.
Maunder also told an elderly black woman that he suspected she had concealed a razor in her stocking. When she offered to bare her leg, he passed her on to be searched by a group of white women on the next corner. Nearby, a group of Red Shirts stopped a black woman and demanded to search the soiled laundry in the basket she carried. She showed the men a pair of panties and told them they belonged to the white woman who employed her. The Red Shirts told her to move along.
At another intersection, a black mail carrier in uniform was forced by two white sentinels to kneel at gunpoint. They laughed as the postman begged for his life. One sentinel wanted to shoot the man, but his partner hesitated. They finally set the postman free, with a warning not to return.
At the Sprunt Cotton Compress, Jim Reeves, a powerfully built black man who weighed cotton bales for James Sprunt, was badly shaken by the sight of enraged white men and their Winchesters. He asked his white foreman, James D. Smith, to escort him home past the white sentries. Reeves enjoyed a respectful relationship with the whites who ran the compress and was a personal favorite of James Sprunt. He was alert and quick-witted. He had been raised by a white boardinghouse keeper who taught him to read and write and to speak what he called “proper English.” Smith agreed to help Reeves get safely to his home on Eighth Street, just eight blocks from the compress.
The two men crept to the corner of Red Cross and Second Streets, two blocks from the compress. But as they approached, Reeves saw that the corner had been overrun by white men wielding rifles, shotguns, and pistols. He panicked and begged Smith to take him back to the compress. He would try to hide there until the streets were safer. After they had returned, Smith left to try to find something for dinner for himself and Reeves, leaving the black man alone inside the compress office. Reeves tried to remain calm. He sat quietly until he glanced out a window and saw a cluster of armed white men marching toward the compress. He jumped up, leaped over a rail, and tumbled into the private secretary’s office, which was not visible from the main office entryway.
Soon Reeves heard a noise. He raised his head and looked out a window to see armed white men milling in the street outside the compress. Some of the men noticed movement through the window and peered inside at Reeves’s frightened face. For a moment Reeves stared back. Then he dashed through the office and up a set of stairs that led to the cotton samples room. He burrowed his way fifteen feet deep into a stack of cotton and settled in at the bottom. He tried to control his breathing while listening for sounds on the stairway. He cowered there for a long time—he did not know how long—but the white men from the street did not come searching for him.
At last, Reeves climbed out of the cotton pile and crept silently back down the stairs. The compress seemed empty. The black workers had run home. With production shut down, most of the white supervisors had left as well. Reeves was surprised to encounter one of his white bosses, a man he trusted. He begged the man to escort him home. The boss agreed to accompany Reeves to the first checkpoint, where he said he would arrange for him to be passed safely from there through the final checkpoint nearest Reeves’s home.
Reeves managed to pass the first checkpoint, then another. As he approached the next, near a narrow passageway known as Five-Point Alley, he did not see any sentries. But as he entered the alley, two fifteen-year-old white boys with guns emerged from the shadows.
“Halt! Throw up your hands!” one of them shouted.
Reeves felt faint. His legs went weak. He dropped to his knees and raised both hands so that the boys could see he was not armed. He said a silent prayer. “I knew these boys didn’t have no better sense than to shoot me dead,” he recalled later. “My heart was in my mouth. I thought that my time had come.”
The boys asked, “Do you have a pistol?”
Reeves sputtered. “Yes sir … No sir … Yes sir, no sir.”
The boys seemed amused by the big distraught black man cowering before them. Reeves weighed 225 pounds and could easily have throttled the boys under other circumstances. But now he was just a helpless black man at the mercy of white schoolboys. The sentries laughed and told Reeves to go home.
Breathing heavily, he rose and walked away quickly, praying that he boys wouldn’t shoot him in the back. He was only a couple of blocks from home. He made his way down the street, trying to spot the next checkpoint. There was nothing. He reached his house, ducked inside, and slammed and locked his front door.
Reeves hid inside his home for the next three days and nights with almost no food or water. On the fourth day, the streets were quiet, and he slipped safely out of Wilmington.
To back up the rapid-fire guns, Colonel Taylor had ordered the Naval Reserves to roll out two howitzers behind his columns. The howitzers were field guns, useless in tight urban quarters, but Taylor found them helpful in intimidating black residents. Given the killing efficiency of the two rapid-fire guns, the howitzers were hardly necessary to send crowds scattering. But Taylor had decided to bring out every weapon in his arsenal.
The crews who manned the two horse-drawn rapid-fire guns were known as flying machine-gun squadrons. A half dozen militiamen sat in the back of each wagon, clutching their hats and their rifles as the horses cut across street corners in pursuit of blacks. In most cases, black residents fled the instant they saw the gun squads—usually before the military men could aim the powerful weapons, much less fire them.
“The appearance of the machine gun was impressive and magical,” the Messenger reporter Thomas Clawson wrote. “Wilmington’s forethought in being prepared with a machine gun to meet any emergency was a display of wisdom … The fiery big horses drawing the outfit were cutting corners and racing at a rapid rate through every section of Brooklyn. It was really a dramatic and thrilling spectacle.”
As the flying squadrons and white mobs searched for black men, rumors spread that armed blacks had taken up firing positions in several black churches, where guns and ammunition were said to have been stored in anticipation of a black uprising. Colonel Taylor ordered the Infantry and the Naval Reserves to search the churches. At each location, the men lined up in military formation behind the rapid-fire guns, with the barrels aimed at the front doors. In every case, black clergymen quickly opened the doors.
One flying squadron aimed a rapid-fire gun at the entrance of St. Stephen AME Church at Fifth and Red Cross Streets. With sixteen hundred members, it was one of Wilmington’s largest black churches. The squadron threatened to blow a hole through the structure. The doors swung open and the militiamen rushed inside. They found no guns or ammunition—only stacks of flyers reading “Vote for Dockery,” the losing Republican candidate for Congress.
After t
heir churches were searched, black clergymen were ordered to walk through black neighborhoods and instruct residents to succumb to white authority. Reverend J. Allen Kirk watched his fellow ministers meekly obey.
The mob took the leading colored ministers and compelled them to go around the city with them and ask the colored people to be obedient to the white people and go in their homes and keep quiet. This was a great humiliation for us and a shame upon our denominations.
Although rumors about gunmen and arsenals inside black churches had proved false, Colonel Taylor continued to respond to other unconfirmed reports. When he was told that three hundred to five hundred “fully armed” black men were marching toward Wilmington from neighboring Brunswick County, Taylor ordered the flying machine-gun squadron to set up the gun on the banks of the Cape Fear, aimed at bridges leading into the city from Brunswick County. Later, the rapid-fire Colt gun was hauled to the middle of the span on the river’s main bridge, known as Hilton Bridge. Then the drawbridge was raised to block access to Wilmington’s waterfront. After waiting in vain for the advancing black columns, the gun squad withdrew in disappointment.
But soon the infantry was summoned again, this time to investigate reports of a gunshot fired at white men from inside a shack at Sixth and Bladen Streets. The militiamen searched the area and found no sign of a black gunman. But across the intersection stood Manhattan Park, a black dance hall that had long been regarded by whites as a den of scoundrels and troublemakers. Someone started a rumor that blacks were firing on whites from inside the hall. The militiamen opened fire on a tall wooden fence that surrounded the hall, tearing ragged holes in the boards. More rounds pitted the wooden walls of the hall and shattered its windows.
From the rear of the hall, a black man emerged from a doorway and raced across the yard. He was trying to climb over a section of fence when he was felled by a fusillade of fifteen to twenty gunshots. One of the militiamen ran over to examine the man’s body. “When we tu’nd him ove’ Misto Niggah had a look of s’prise on his count’nance,” he recalled in an account related by a reporter for Collier’s Weekly.
A detachment of militiamen wielding axes hacked down the remainder of the fence and pushed inside the hall, where they encountered five terrified black men. The militiamen ordered them to raise their hands. Four complied and were arrested. The fifth man, Josh Halsey, bolted for the doorway and fled into the street. According to some accounts, Halsey was deaf and had not understood the militiamen’s commands. A squad was dispatched to track him down. The militiamen searched the area, house by house, until someone provided them with Halsey’s address.
Halsey had run home and climbed into bed. When his young daughter spotted the militiamen marching toward the house, she begged her father to run. Halsey ran out the back door and was cut down by a stream of gunfire. “The poor creature jumped up and ran out the back door in frantic terror to be shot down like a dog by armed soldiers ostensibly sent to preserve the peace,” Jane Cronly, a white neighbor, wrote in her diary.
In another version of Halsey’s murder, recounted by the militiaman J. F. Maunder, Halsey was captured on the street. The militiamen offered to release him if he agreed to run through gunfire. One militiaman, Bill Robbins, was appalled. “I am sick to my stomach,” he said. Maunder said he told Robbins not to “show the white feather or I will shoot you myself.” Halsey was set free and began to run. The militiamen raised their rifles. Robbins fired over Halsey’s head, muttering, “I hope I did not hit that man.” But Maunder and others aimed directly at Halsey. Their gunshots tore off the top of his head. He was dead before his body hit the street.
A few white men tried to reason with the mobs and halt the killings. James Sprunt and Mayor Silas Wright drove a carriage through the city, following the sounds of gunshots as they sought to “abate the excitement and prevent needless bloodshed.” Some accounts said Wright claimed to be a British subject so that he could seek protection from Sprunt, who served as the British vice consul in Wilmington. From the moment the mob stormed his compress, Sprunt had been trying, with little success, to convince fellow white supremacists that his workers posed no threat. Now, as he again pleaded for calm, Sprunt and Wright were rebuffed. Some of the gunmen responded by firing at their carriage.
A white Catholic priest, Father Christopher Dennen, confronted Mike Dowling, the belligerent Red Shirt brigade commander. Dowling and many of his men from Dry Pond had been drinking most of the day. They expected all white men, including clergymen, to support them. Indeed, several white ministers had fetched their guns and joined the mob. But Father Dennen calmly prevailed on Dowling, an Irish Catholic, to refrain from killing anyone. Dowling reluctantly agreed.
Buck Burkhimer, a Light Infantry militiaman, was upset that soldiers were shooting at unarmed civilians. He rode on horseback among his fellow militiamen, screaming at them, “Shame, men! Stop this! Stop this!” He pointed to several black corpses. “Don’t you see these dead men?” The soldiers responded by pointing their weapons at Burkhimer.
Jane Cronly, the sister of the reluctant white sentinel, witnessed several killings that afternoon, including the bloody execution of Josh Halsey after he fled the Manhattan Park dance hall. In her diary, Cronly described how white men had shot blacks “down right and left in a most unlawful way, killing one man who was simply standing at a corner waiting to get back to his work.” She overheard one white man shout to others as they fired at fleeing blacks: “We are just shooting to see the niggers run.”
Cronly watched Red Shirts cheer some of the killings and then parade in triumph, rifles on their shoulders, as they searched for more blacks to shoot. She felt ill. “For the first time in my life,” she wrote, “I have been ashamed of my State and of the Democratic Party in North Carolina.”
As a white woman whose brother had been compelled to serve as a sentinel, Cronly understood, to her horror, the murderous motives of the white supremacists who directed the killings. And she had clearly observed the effect on her black neighbors. “The whole thing was with the object of striking terror to the man’s heart, so that he would never vote again,” she wrote. “For this was the object of the whole persecution; to make Nov. 10th a day to be remembered by the whole race for all time.”
The killings continued throughout the mild, sunny afternoon.
John L. Gregory, a black laborer, was shot dead on North Third Street, between Harnett and Swann, a few blocks from his house on North Fifth Street. He had been trying to reach home from work.
Sam Macfarlane, another laborer, was shot as he crossed the Seaboard Air Line Railroad tracks on Harnett Street on his way home for dinner. He died later in the colored ward of the City-County Hospital of “four terrible wounds.”
A black man, possibly a tavern owner named Tom Rowan, was shot and killed on a Cape Fear wharf after he was accused of having “sassed” two white men. His body was dumped into the river.
A black man was shot and killed near a railroad repair shop on North Third Street. White witnesses said he had fired at a group of white men.
A black man was shot dead on the Fourth Street Bridge and fell onto the railroad tracks. White witnesses said he had pointed an old musket at a white man.
A black man was killed on Fourth Street near Red Cross Street for reasons unknown. Another was shot at Tenth and Princess, purportedly for failing to stop for white sentinels.
A black man was shot and killed by a Light Infantry militiaman on a railroad track.
A black man was killed at Tenth and Mulberry Streets for failing to stop for a white patrol.
A member of a Red Shirt brigade saw his comrades shoot six black men at the Cape Fear Lumber Company and bury their bodies in a ditch.
Another Red Shirt watched a single white sniper shoot and kill nine black men, one by one, as they filed out of a shack.
A Red Shirt said he had watched a white gunman in Dry Pond wait four days to shoot a black policeman named Perkins, finally killing the officer when he emerged
from his home in an alley near Second and Castle Streets.
A white teenager shot and killed a black “rabble-rouser” as the man spoke to a gathering of blacks near Fourth and Nixon Streets. The city’s newspapers did not record the black man’s words.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Strictly According to Law
A S THE PALE AUTUMN SUN dimmed at midafternoon on November 10, white gunmen were still tramping through the streets. They were in pursuit of black men hiding in the warren of tidy frame homes, cramped yards, and narrow alleys of Brooklyn and nearby neighborhoods. The worst of the killing was over. Black corpses were left where they had fallen, “stretched on their backs with their eyes open as a warning to other blacks,” one witness wrote. The black men of Wilmington were trapped. The main roads leading into the city were blocked by Red Shirts intent on intercepting the columns of black rioters rumored to be descending on the city from outlying areas.
Hundreds of black families had begun abandoning their homes and possessions. They fled the city in wagons and carriages or on foot, seeking safety in cemeteries and swamps just outside the city. The Red Shirts and other sentinels did not try to stop them. They were focused on confronting columns of armed black men purportedly invading the city. Other blacks were more than welcome to leave Wilmington.
White leaders turned their attention to the Fusionists still holding elected and appointed municipal offices. They began discussing ways to enforce the ultimatum, issued by the coup leaders the day before, that the mayor and police chief resign. Members of the Committee of Twenty-Five, appointed by Colonel Waddell and others, jockeyed for selection as replacement aldermen as they plotted to forcibly remove the current council.
Colonel Waddell had by now surrendered control of the men who had burned the Record office that morning. They had raced away on their own to confront the black men gathered at North Fourth and Harnett Streets. That left Waddell bereft of armed men to command. Seeking to reassert his authority, he called a meeting of the Committee of Twenty-Five at the Seaboard Air Line building.
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