Some whites felt a Christian duty to aid their black neighbors; several families ventured into the woods, bearing food and clothing. A Messenger reporter wrote that he had provided shelter to three black women he had hidden, as well as to a black man who had been threatened by one of the reporter’s own relatives. And, according to the Messenger, the few blacks who had returned from the swamps had been protected by their white neighbors. But hundreds more remained in hiding, too afraid to return home.
With the killings completed and their enemies banished, Wilmington’s whites began crafting a lasting narrative of a heroic victory over dark and malevolent forces. The city’s white ministers led the way. The Reverend James W. Kramer, a member of the Committee of Twenty-Five, had fetched his rifle from home on the morning of November 10 and joined the mobs in the streets. Another prominent white minister, Peyton H. Hoge, had carried a Winchester on his shoulder during the shootings. But by Sunday morning, November 13, both ministers had put away their weapons and prepared their sermons for a momentous day—the first Sunday since white rule had been redeemed in their city.
The pews were filled at Brooklyn Baptist Church that morning. Well-dressed white families were eager to hear their minister’s reflections on the violence that had played out in the streets of their city just three days earlier. Kramer, gazing from the pulpit at his congregation, told the men seated before him that they were the vanguard of a dominant race chosen by the Creator.
“God from the beginning of time intended that intelligent white men should lead the people and rule the country,” Kramer said. “I am not a friend of lawlessness and have put forth indefatigable efforts to prevent bloodshed, but the expected has happened. In the riot the negro was the aggressor. I believe that the whites were doing God’s services, as the results for good have been felt in business, in politics and in the church. We will give the negro justice and will treat him kindly, but never again will we be ruled by him.”
Nearby, at the First Presbyterian Church, Hoge opened his sermon by speaking not as a minister but as a member of the Committee of Twenty-Five.
“Since we last met in these walls we have taken a city,” he told his congregation. “That is much.”
Hoge described the events of November 10 as a pivotal battle. He invoked the recent Spanish surrenders in Cuba and the Philippines and compared the conquest of Wilmington to that of Jerusalem.
“This city we have taken, not by investment and siege, not by shot and shell, but [taken] as thoroughly, as completely, as if captured in battle. It has been redeemed for civilization, redeemed for law and order, redeemed for decency and respectability … For these things, let us give God glory.”
Hoge urged his congregants to show compassion for “our colored neighbors,” whom he considered ill equipped for citizenship and misled by white carpetbaggers. When properly guided, blacks were a simple, agreeable, and obedient people, Hoge said. “[W]ho can quietly and dispassionately consider their history and conditions and not pity them, not sympathize with them, not lend them a helping hand?” he asked, and his congregation murmured in agreement.
Earlier that Sunday morning, the new police chief, Edgar G. Parmele, spoke privately with the ministers and deacons of several black churches in Wilmington. By the standards of the white men who now ruled Wilmington, Parmele was a moderate. On November 10 , he had complained of what he called the “atrocious treatment of colored citizens” and had tried to restrain several drunk and belligerent Red Shirts. Now the chief advised the black ministers to tell their congregations to help lure their friends and neighbors from the woods and back to their homes and jobs. Parmele also instructed them to preach acceptance of the new racial and political order in Wilmington.
The ministers needed little prodding. They were deferential men who had survived on November 10 by bowing to white demands. They had been spared the banishment inflicted upon more obstinate preachers like Reverend J. Allen Kirk and Reverend W. H. Lee. The ministers seemed buoyed; they had assumed the white authorities would ban them from preaching that first Sunday for fear they would stir black passions so soon after the killings.
Guy Carleton Lee, the white correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, visited several black churches that morning. Lee had falsely reported a week earlier that blacks were stockpiling weapons in churches. Now he was surprised at the ministers’ utter lack of resentment toward a white outsider who had spread lies about them and their congregations. Lee was greeted warmly. He was invited to attend services.
“The sermons were generally moderate in tone,” he reported. “The congregations were large and orderly.”
Lee then stopped at St. Luke’s AME Church in Brooklyn, which had escaped the flames that consumed the Record office next door. He reported that Deacon Briscoe Harris assured his congregation that “if the negro trusted in God and minded his own business, all would be well. If not, terrible consequences would follow.”
At another Brooklyn church, Mt. Zion Afro-American AME, Lee watched Pastor J. K. Telfy preside over a solemn funeral service for Sam Macfarlane, one of the black men shot dead three days earlier. The killings that day were a mark of God’s wrath, Telfy explained, and must not be avenged. “The people must obey the law and keep the peace,” he instructed his congregants.
Nearby, at Central Baptist Church, Lee listened as Pastor A. S. Dunston advised acquiescence and silence: “Let the past bury the past … Be still, be quiet; all will be well.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Better Get a Gun
A S WILMINGTON’S WHITE MINISTERS celebrated the return of white supremacist rule, and as black preachers counseled obedience, the city’s Democratic newspapers continued to frame the coup not as a violent overthrow but as a return at last to law and order and responsible government.
At the forefront was the Messenger, edited by Theodore B. Kingsbury, who claimed that he was “the man who had brought about the revolution.” Kingsbury complained to his friends that Colonel Waddell had appropriated “undue credit” for the coup. Kingsbury had placed his newspaper at the center of the white revolution and accepted words of thanks from white citizens. In print, the Messenger ’s coverage of the killings celebrated both white superiority and white benevolence.
Never more shall Sambo and Josh rule rough-shod over the white men who helped and befriend them. Henceforth the rule of the White Race will not only be asserted but with benignancy and mercy. The rule of the Master Builders will be full of goodness and charity.
A few blocks away, at the Morning Star, the editors insisted that “not the hair of any man’s head was hurt” on November 10 but quickly backtracked to clarify that no unarmed black man had been shot. “It was not a mob, it was simply the unanimous uprising of the white people against conditions that had become intolerable,” the Star reported.
In Raleigh, the News and Observer compared the coup in Wilmington to the French Revolution.
In this Wilmington upheaval, just as in Paris, there was a frantic crowding toward town-halls, dethroning of those who mis-rule, a banishment of those who are obnoxious and a destruction of places hated for their association. But unlike the French Revolution everything was done in Wilmington in due form and strictly in accordance with law.
In their haste to justify the violent outcome in Wilmington, some Democratic newspapers, including the News and Observer, did not always hew to the version of events dictated by the city’s white leaders—that the coup was a spontaneous eruption of white rage. Instead, they described how white leaders had instructed their followers to refrain from overthrowing the city government until Democrats had first won county and state elections. “They bided their time,” the News and Observer reported. “‘After the election ,’ they said.”
The Wilmington Messenger reprinted an article from the Charleston News and Courier, whose correspondent had shared drinks and meals with Wilmington’s white supremacists in the days leading up to the killings. Under the subhead: IT WAS ALL PLANNED IN ADVANCE , t
he Charleston reporter detailed the secret white strategy in Wilmington:
All of this sounds very cold-blooded, but nevertheless it is grounded on mighty good horse sense.
One of the few Southern newspapers to express remorse at the loss of life in Wilmington was the Richmond Times. “Some negroes were killed by lawless white men for the sport of the thing,” the paper reported.
Waddell arranged to have his version of events published in Collier’s Weekly, which described itself as a source of “fiction, fact, sensation, wit, humor, news.” Collier’s Weekly was a useful tool for disseminating the white narrative that the killings were necessary to remove a corrupt government dominated by blacks plotting an armed insurrection. That version was virtually unassailable in the South, but it had not yet been fully embraced in the North, where Collier’s was widely read.
Waddell’s bylined article was published on November 26, just two weeks after the killings. It was spread over two pages, with a cover illustration depicting two black men firing revolvers, flanked by other blacks wielding pistols and clubs. The headline read: THE STORY OF THE WILMINGTON , NC , RACE RIOTS . Waddell wrote that he had been swept up by events, as though he had been standing idly by when gunshots rang out.
“When the crisis came, there was universal demand that I should take charge … I never dreamed the time would come when I would lead a mob,” he wrote.
Waddell wrote that he reluctantly led armed men to Alex Manly’s newspaper office, intent solely on destroying the printing press inside. He had nothing to do with smashing down the front door, he wrote, “For I have not the strength.” Nor did he take part in setting the building on fire. The torching was “purely accidental,” he wrote.
In Waddell’s account, no black men were shot. Indeed, no shots were fired at all. Anyone reading his article would have assumed that the day’s only untoward event was the accidental burning of the Record office. It was a tidy, efficient little coup, Waddell wrote. He quoted a United States Army officer he said had witnessed the day’s events: “It’s the most orderly performance I ever witnessed!”
Northern newspapermen seemed torn between their scorn for Southerners and their widely held contempt for black capabilities. Most deplored the violence in Wilmington but not the outcome. Many Northern editors wrote that they did not consider blacks, in the North or the South, capable of holding public office. They welcomed the return of what they regarded as the natural order in America—whites ruling blacks. They seemed aggrieved only by the way Wilmington’s whites went about it.
The Washington Post said whites were justified in rebelling against an “insufferable situation” in Wilmington. But the newspaper asked why they weren’t resourceful enough to avoid violence: “There has been too prompt use of the rifle, too swift a wreaking of angry vengeance … the revolution in Wilmington, which could have and should have been accomplished by peaceful means, is stained with blood.”
The Philadelphia Record called the white riot “deplorable” and “disgraceful.” But it said bloodshed could have been avoided if the United States had not “armed the ignorant negro with the right of suffrage.” That miscalculation served only “to halt negro advancement by making the white population antagonistic as a matter of self-preservation … The weaker race must bend to the stronger. This is a law that no act of Congress can repeal.”
The New York Herald declared the Fifteenth Amendment all but dead in North Carolina. The Washington Evening Star and New York Journal were among the few white-run Northern newspapers to express unreserved outrage. The Evening Star headlined its editorial on Wilmington: NORTH CAROLINA’S SHAME . It said the violence “had the desired effect of keeping the negroes away from the polls on election day.”
The New York Journal correspondent on the scene equated the killings of November 10 to mass murder:
The 10th was a bloody day in this one-horse town. They talk of culture and refinement. But could you have seen them on Thursday you would have thought them the bloodhounds of hell turned loose. There was no riot; simply the strong slaying the weak and helpless. The negroes had no firearms of any kind but every white man from 12 to seventy was handling guns … From every town around the whites poured in to exterminate the Negroes.
The nation’s black newspapers roundly condemned Wilmington’s white supremacists, but from a distance. It had been too dangerous to send black correspondents to Wilmington. Most black papers had relied on reports from blacks still in Wilmington or from relatives who had taken in blacks who had fled.
In Virginia’s capital, black journalists at the Richmond Planet relayed eyewitness accounts provided by black refugees from Wilmington:
It was a slaughter, useless slaughter, and A. M. Waddell was the leader of this murderous outrage … Does anyone doubt that if the men killed at Wilmington had been white instead of colored that the government at Raleigh, N.C., and Washington, D.C., would have stumbled over itself in suppressing the “insurrection”?
The black-readership Washington Bee asked why Governor Russell had failed to aid not only his fellow Republican officeholders, but the black voters who had helped put him in the governor’s mansion: “The Governor of North Carolina was no more than a baby in the hands of the hot-headed rebels of the South. He was not man enough to exercise his authority as governor of a great State.”
The Indianapolis Freeman, which billed itself as “the Highest Mark of Negro Journalism,” ridiculed pious whites in Wilmington and urged blacks to take up arms:
The shotgun and the Bible have never been separated by the Caucasian … It is not the Christianity that makes the Negro forgiving, it is two hundred and fifty years of forced coercion, cowardice and damaging instructions to play into the favor of the white man. Better get a gun for Christmas. Insure your lives Negroes, and then you are in line of equality.
In Washington, DC, and in Pittsburgh, Chicago, East St. Louis, and Denver, black leaders organized rallies to spread the word about the killings in Wilmington. They sent resolutions of protest to President McKinley, to the Justice Department, and to members of Congress. The National Anti Mob-and-Lynch Law Association, formed in 1897 by black residents of Columbus, Ohio, wrote to the president’s 1896 campaign manager to seek help persuading the Justice Department to investigate the killings: “The treatment of the Armenians by the Turks and the cruelties of the Spaniards is nothing to the willful murders at Wilmington, N.C.” In Brooklyn, a black minister suggested that someone lynch Colonel Waddell.
In New York, T. Thomas Fortune, a former slave who cofounded and edited the black newspaper New York Age, organized a mass meeting at the Cooper Union, coordinated with similar gatherings in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other Northern cities. Before a large crowd of blacks and a few whites, Fortune condemned the “mobocracy” in Wilmington and urged blacks to resist white violence. Another speaker proposed a constitutional amendment that would allow the president to send federal troops, without a formal request from a governor, to any state where mobs violated the rights of citizens.
Organizers of the Cooper Union meeting sent a resolution to every member of Congress “condemning the white people of Wilmington for the shooting of unoffending black men and their cruelty toward fleeing negroes.”
There was no response.
On November 15, five days after the killings in Wilmington, Josephus Daniels welcomed thousands of white men and women from across the state for a parade his newspaper called the “Victory, White Supremacy and Good Government” jubilee. A front-page headline called the celebration in Raleigh: THE MOST REMARKABLE DEMONSTRATION EVER SEEN AT THE CAPITAL .
White visitors arrived on special reduced-fare trains. They were greeted by hundreds of flaming tar barrels and bonfires that sent dark orange flames skyward. Fireworks lit up darkening skies on a crisp autumn evening. “Every man had a torchlight which gleamed and blinked like the eye of some mighty Cyclops,” the News and Observer reported.
The tar fires illuminated American flags fluttering fro
m offices and shops, and red-white-and-blue bunting draped over storefronts. An orange glow lit up the News and Observer building, where Daniels had affixed brooms to the facade to commemorate the sweeping Democratic victory.
At city hall, the ladies of the Chrysanthemum Committee had decorated a towering arch with a crest of fresh white mums. On Fayetteville Street, two thousand men carried torches to light the way for a hundred men on horseback, followed by a marching band and dignitaries in horse-drawn carriages.
The torchlit line of men and horses and carriages stretched for two miles. More than an hour passed before the procession made its way from the Carrollton Hotel to the capitol building at the head of Fayetteville Street. The men on horseback were trailed by men and boys on bicycles decorated with patriotic bunting and by men who toted brooms and pitchforks. Several white men pushed through the crowds packed along the sidewalks to raise handmade signs for all to see.
White Supremacy Means Work for All
Down with Negro Rule
No More Crucifixion on Colored Crosses
One man held aloft a sign taunting Russell, who remained holed up inside the Queen Anne–style governor’s mansion: It’s a Hard Pill, Governor, but Shut Your Eyes and Swallow It .
There were more fireworks as the procession ended at Nash Square, two blocks southwest of the capitol. Thousands of white men and women gathered on the brown grass beneath bare branches of oak trees to eat and listen to speeches. A troupe of Democratic politicians took turns denouncing “Negro rule” and “race traitors” and “the alien and servile Negro race.” Then came the event’s featured speaker, Furnifold Simmons. As Daniels mounted the speaker’s stand to introduce Simmons, several men grabbed the editor and hoisted him onto their shoulders. The crowd roared.
Wilmington's Lie Page 27