Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  John C. Dancy, the customs collector, knew that his name was not on the banishment list. The coup leaders did not wish to invite federal intervention by harassing a federal appointee. Even so, Dancy was uneasy. He did not believe the leaders of the white supremacy campaign could control the Red Shirts, especially those who had been drinking.

  To complicate matters, Dancy was out of town on November 10. He had gone to Tarboro, North Carolina, the city of his birth, 150 miles north of Wilmington. Whether Dancy had left home because he felt threatened or because he was visiting relatives, his wife and children were left unprotected at the family home in Wilmington.

  The first indication of trouble for Dancy’s wife, Florence, came when black boys from the neighborhood ran past her home, shouting and waving. The Dancys were one of only two black families on their street, though other blacks lived elsewhere in the neighborhood.

  “There’s something terrible going on!” one boy yelled. “You’d better stay in the house!”

  Florence decided that she and the children should join Dancy at once. She had no way of knowing what was happening downtown, but she knew from reading the papers that whites were primed for violence. She managed to secure a horse and buggy to take the family to the train depot. They took nothing with them. It was only about a ten-block ride, but the buggy was stopped and searched several times by white men at checkpoints. There were more white gunmen at the station, but the family was not harmed. The white men may have recognized Florence as the wife of a federal official. Late that night, the family arrived safely in Tarboro.

  Dancy was worried that blacks in Wilmington would meet violence with more violence. The next morning, November 11, he wrote a letter to the Wilmington Messenger.

  Every good citizen of this city regrets the difficulties of the past two days. Every good citizen is also anxious that perfect peace be restored at once. I therefore appeal to my own race to do nothing that will in the slightest degree inflame new passions or revive old ones. Let us be quiet, orderly, submissive to authority and refrain from any utterance or conduct that will excite passion in others.

  Let us abstain from loud talking or undue excitement and go to and fro from our homes, where the Mayor and city authorities pledge us every protection … The whites, led by the Mayor, pledge us their aid in such a direction. Let us keep the peace at all hazards.

  The Messenger published Dancy’s letter prominently on its front page under the headline: DANCY’S COUNSEL TO NEGROES . On the same page, the headline above the day’s main news story read: ORDER is RESTORED . THE NEW CITY GOVERNMENT IS PROVING THOROUGHLY EFFECTIVE .

  Captain Furlong and the Light Infantry detachment continued to round up black men on the banishment list late in the day on November 10. But the six most recent captives were not taken to the train depot, because passenger trains had stopped running for the night. Hugh MacRae and J. Allan Taylor decided to hold the men in the city jail overnight “for their protection,” then put them aboard trains when service resumed the next morning. The captives were charged with “using language calculated to incite the negroes.”

  Several black men on the banishment list had managed to get out of town ahead of Furlong and his soldiers. Among them was Robert Reardon, a barber so popular among blacks that he was often referred to as a “tonsorial artist.” Reardon was a mulatto, the son of an Irishman and a black woman. He had a strong entrepreneurial spirit, operating an advertising agency in addition to his barbershop. He also managed a pavilion on a segregated beach at nearby Wrightsville Beach. He was a member of the Committee of Colored Citizens, and brash and successful enough to warrant banishment. The News and Observer described Reardon as “an objectionable negro barber.”

  Reardon hid inside his home on November 10 until he learned that a squad from the Light Infantry was on its way to search his residence. The soldiers were delayed by confusion over the exact location of Reardon’s dwelling. That gave Reardon an opportunity to run out his back door, climb over a fence, and disappear. The soldiers took off in pursuit but never found him. One of them, George Boylan, was amused by Reardon’s desperate flight to safety: “All we saw was a flit of his coat tail as he went over the fence … that was one badly frightened negro.”

  The Secret Nine had carefully selected the successful black men whose banishment would most grievously undermine Wilmington’s thriving middle class. The Indianapolis Freeman, a black newspaper, later wrote: “Four or five of the Negro men whom they made leave are worth from two to eight thousand dollars. They are all business men … All were good Negroes, dealing constantly with the whites.”

  Among the six black men rounded up and jailed by Captain Furlong and his soldiers was Ari Bryant, an enterprising butcher who, according to the Messenger, “was looked upon by the negroes as a high and mighty leader. He was of vicious temperament toward the white people and counseled his race to strife … inciting the blacks to violence.”

  Also arrested were Robert B. Pickens and Salem J. Bell, partners in a prosperous fish and oyster wholesale operation. Both men, along with Miller and Bryant, had helped recruit black voters for the Republican Party and were also members of the colored committee. Furlong’s men also arrested the Reverend I. J. Bell, a black minister. Bell, obeying orders from white leaders, had gone house to house that morning, trying to persuade blacks not to oppose the mob. The next day’s Messenger described “commendable efforts” by Bell and other black ministers to “pacify their race.” But Bell nonetheless retained a reputation among whites as subversive and thus too dangerous to remain in the city.

  Word of the jailed black men soon reached squads of Red Shirts roaming the streets. As the shootings died down, the Red Shirts had grown frustrated. They had certainly shot their share of black men, but they had yet to conduct a single lynching. Many had been disappointed the day before, when the lynching they had planned for Alex Manly was aborted after they learned that Manly had fled. Now, just twenty-four hours later, they were elated by news that the city jail had provided them with a fresh batch of captive black men.

  The Red Shirts mounted up and rode to the jailhouse.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Justice Is Satisfied, Vengeance Is Cruel

  A HARD RAIN was still pounding the city streets after nightfall when a brigade of Red Shirts descended on the city jail late on the night of November 10, cursing and taunting the six black men held inside. The faces of some of the white men were florid from liquor. They hooted as they raised their Winchesters and set up ragged picket lines around the jail. They shouted insults at the white jailers, asking why they were defending criminal Negroes. They demanded the prisoners so that they might be properly lynched.

  Word quickly reached Colonel Walker Taylor at the armory, just a block away, that Red Shirts were causing a ruckus. He rounded up a detachment of the Wilmington Light Infantry and led the soldiers to the jail, located next to the county courthouse, across Princess Street from city hall. Though Taylor’s soldiers had pursued and shot at blacks all afternoon on November 10 in league with Red Shirts, he now believed circumstances obliged him to bring the Red Shirts under control. In Taylor’s view, it was one thing to shoot black rioters, but it was quite something else to lynch unarmed black men arrested under martial law that he himself had imposed.

  His soldiers surrounded the jail, creating a buffer between the black prisoners and the Red Shirts. There was no hostility. Many of the Red Shirts and infantry soldiers were relatives or lifelong friends.

  At city hall, Mayor Waddell was also undergoing a change of heart. Less than a month earlier, he had vowed to clog the Cape Fear with black carcasses. Now he felt compelled to protect the lives of black men imprisoned under his hours-old authority. Waddell turned for help to his Civil War adversary, Colonel Moore. Waddell no longer had armed men under his direct control, save a city police force that was in disarray with the resignation of its chief and the dereliction of white officers who had abandoned their posts to join the riot. Moore, on
the other hand, commanded scores of armed citizens serving in the Vigilance Committee groups.

  Waddell found Moore at his home. The mayor explained that any lynching would undermine the new administration and possibly prompt federal intervention and thus needed to be prevented. Moore agreed. He dispatched several armed men to help the Light Infantry soldiers set up posts around the jail. Waddell followed directly behind them. He wanted to prevent Moore from taking control of the standoff.

  At the jail, the Red Shirts refused to disband. Whooping and cheering drunkenly in the dark, they continued to demand the prisoners. The Reverend Robert Strange, the white Episcopal minister, told the Red Shirts that if they lynched the prisoners, “it would be a lasting disgrace to the town.” Waddell discussed the situation with the minister and Moore, and with Walter MacRae, who had been elected sheriff two days earlier. MacRae was the uncle of Hugh MacRae of the Secret Nine and was a white supremacist himself. But at that moment, in his new position, he was responsible for the safety of prisoners, black or white. Sheriff MacRae agreed that the black men should be kept alive until they could be taken to the train station the next morning.

  Waddell decided to deliver a short speech, addressed not just to the Red Shirts but to all his new constituents surrounding the jail.

  “My position has been radically changed. I am now a sworn officer of the law. This jail and these people must have protection,” Waddell said from the front door of the jailhouse.

  Moore stood with his back against the jail entrance. When Waddell had finished, he addressed the Red Shirts directly.

  “Men, we may as well understand each other,” Moore told them. “You are here to lynch these men and I am here to prevent it. You can only carry out your purpose over my dead body.”

  Moore’s remarks appeared to carry more weight than Waddell’s. Some of the Red Shirts began to drift away. Others remained, rifles in hand. For the next few hours, they continued to try to persuade the soldiers and armed guards to abandon their positions just long enough for the Red Shirts to slip inside and seize the prisoners. But the soldiers held their ground throughout the night. Waddell, Moore, and Reverend Robert Strange stood outside the jail door until dawn, when the remaining Red Shirts finally gave up and dispersed.

  Early that Friday morning, November 11, Waddell delivered a mayoral proclamation from the jail, signed at midnight and addressed to the “Good People of Wilmington.” He wanted to make a public appeal to tamp down the white rage he had been stoking for months.

  The undersigned upon whom has been placed a great responsibility by the action of his fellow citizens, takes this method of assuring the good people of this city that all the power with which he is invested will be exercised to preserve order and peace in this community, and that power is amply sufficient for the purpose.

  At nine o’clock that Friday morning, a squad from the Naval Reserves escorted the six captives from the jail to the train depot. Waddell accompanied them. The black men were marched through the streets in a straight line and paraded before the town’s white citizens. Dressed in dark suits and hats, the prisoners walked with their heads up. There was the moneyman Miller, the fishmongers Pickens and Bell, the butcher Bryant, the preacher Bell, and one unidentified black man, all flanked by khaki-uniformed Naval Reserves militiamen. Some whites on the street jeered and heckled the captives, showering them with racial slurs.

  At the depot, Waddell said later, he bought six tickets for Richmond. Surrounded by jeering whites, he referred to the six passengers as “the scoundrels.” The black men were loaded aboard the train at gunpoint, accompanied by an armed guard who had been ordered to make sure they were taken all the way to Richmond. Separately, J. Allan Taylor telegraphed mayors along the rail line, alerting them that banished black men would be passing through their towns. Before the train pulled away, its shrill whistle cutting through the chilled air, Waddell warned the six men, one at a time, never to return to North Carolina.

  A correspondent for the New York Times watched them leave. “The negroes are thoroughly terrorized,” he wrote.

  The Secret Nine disregarded Colonel Waddell’s midnight plea for peace. Hugh MacRae and J. Allan Taylor continued to round up the remaining men on the banishment list. One of the targets was Wilmington’s United States commissioner, Robert H. Bunting, a white Republican. Bunting should have been exempt from banishment because of his federal position. But he had committed a grave sin—he had a black common-law wife. Josephus Daniels’s News and Observer had referred to Bunting as “vermin of the white race” for living “in open adultery with a negro woman.” Bunting had also supported black suffrage, another affront.

  On the morning of November 11, a white mob surrounded Bunting’s home. Some of the men were already drunk. They screamed Bunting’s name, demanding that he and his wife show themselves. Bunting, aware that he had been targeted for banishment, had fled the house with his wife the night before. When there was no reply from inside, several men proposed tearing down the house. Others in the mob decided that it would be easier to break in. They crashed through the front door and began smashing furniture and stealing valuables. Someone ripped down gold-framed portraits of Bunting and his wife. These were nailed to a tree at Seventh and Market Streets. A handwritten sign was attached: R . H . BUNTING —WHITE . MRS . R . H . BUNTING —COLORED .

  The mob finished ransacking the Bunting home, then moved on in search of the missing commissioner and his wife.

  Another target, the deposed police chief John Melton, did not attempt to hide, though he knew his name was on the banishment list. Melton had spent the previous night at his rented home with his wife and children after his forced resignation at city hall. At dawn on the eleventh, he rose and had breakfast, then walked to city hall to turn over his keys to the new police chief, Edgar Parmele. On the way, Melton passed several Red Shirts, who warned him they would later track him down and kill him.

  Melton was unnerved, but he convinced himself that the men were drunk and only blowing off steam. He walked to a small corral outside city hall that housed impounded livestock. He told the janitor there to give grain to the animals, which had not been fed the previous day because of the riot. Melton was about to walk inside to his former office when a group of white men armed with Winchesters confronted him.

  They told him he was being placed under arrest.

  “All right, for what? Where is your authority?” Melton asked.

  One of the gunmen said he had been authorized to take Melton to the office of a local magistrate, John J. Fowler.

  Melton began to argue, but he quickly realized that he was surrounded by a crowd of nearly three hundred men. He was escorted to the magistrate’s office, trailed by the mob.

  Melton was brought face-to-face with Magistrate Fowler. Melton considered Fowler a friend who he thought might treat him fairly, perhaps even let him go. He asked Fowler why he had been brought before him. Fowler shrugged. He said he wasn’t sure what was going on. He had issued no warrant for Melton’s arrest, but he advised Melton to heed the gunmen’s demands. It was out of his hands, he told Melton. The city was under new authority.

  Melton was dragged outside and marched up Market Street to the armory, where a detachment of Light Infantry soldiers took charge of him. The arrival of the soldiers may have saved Melton’s life. The Morning Star reported the next day that the military prevented the commission of “grave threats of violence” by the mob against the ousted police chief.

  The soldiers ordered Melton to follow them. He was hauled down Front Street, where he noticed a white man with a rifle wearing a special police badge. The man’s face was contorted with rage. He sprang at Melton and smacked him in the temple with the rifle butt. Melton was stunned and bloodied by the blow but remained on his feet. The man tried to strike him again, but the sergeant in charge of the detachment reached across Melton and jabbed at the man with his sword. “None of that!” he shouted.

  His head pounding, Melton was escorted t
o the national cemetery downtown. A dozen soldiers remained there with him as he nursed his wound. Though he was a captive, Melton felt relieved when the soldiers told him that part of their duty was to protect him from the mobs until he could be banished from the city. He overheard one of them mutter, “God help Melton.”

  Just after midday, a group of armed men delivered Commissioner Bunting to the custody of the infantry guards holding Melton. Bunting had been tracked down by J. Allan Taylor and Hugh MacRae, who found him hiding behind city hall. They searched Bunting’s backyard nearby and found two pistols buried in the dirt. They later gave these to one of the out-of-town-militias. Bunting and Melton were then marched down Market Street to the armory and told to sit in the yard. A few minutes later, soldiers brought them sandwiches, oysters, and coffee. Melton was too upset to eat, but he sipped some coffee. Bunting wolfed down the oysters and sandwiches.

  Melton asked the soldiers several times what they intended to do with him. They did not reply. One of the soldiers felt a stab of pity for the ousted chief.

  “I shall never forget how Melton looked as he sat under a tree in front of the Armory,” he said later. “He could not eat and when some of the boys went upstairs and took a rope with a noose in it and threw it at his feet, he turned just as white as a sheet.”

  Shortly after 1:00 p.m., one of Melton’s white former police officers, Charles H. Gilbert, rushed into the armory yard and asked the soldiers for protection. He said he had just escaped capture by a band of Red Shirts. Gilbert, too, was placed under guard.

  At about 2:00 p.m., Melton, Bunting, and Gilbert were ordered to accompany the soldiers back down Market Street. Melton caught a glimpse of his wife and children in the throngs of whites watching the spectacle. He was not permitted to stop and say good-bye. He felt humiliated , and he feared the Red Shirts would torment his family now that he was in custody.