Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  On November 20, Dancy granted an interview to a reporter from the New York Times who had approached him after a church service in Manhattan. Without prompting, Dancy blamed Manly and his editorial for unleashing bloodshed.

  “Manly is responsible for the whole unfortunate condition of things,” he said. “When he published his editorial reflecting upon the white women of the State, I with other leading colored men of Wilmington held a conference with him and urged him to retract the article. We even went so far as to write an editorial retracting the one written by Manly, but he would not take our advice and publish it. If he had done so there would have been no race war in Wilmington.”

  Dancy said the city’s black leadership had failed to understand that “the intelligent colored people of the State” were deeply offended by Manly’s views on race and sex. Prior to Manly’s editorial, Dancy said, relations between blacks and whites were “most cordial and amicable … but the white men of the South will not tolerate any reflection upon their women.”

  Dancy was not a politician, but he understood the importance of quickly carving out a public position to reflect prevailing political currents. Through the Times, he was telling the white supremacists ruling Wilmington that he was their Negro. As a federal appointee, he would retain his lucrative custom collector’s position while hundreds of blacks in Wilmington were losing their jobs. But to do so Dancy would have to return to Wilmington, and he wanted to ensure a cordial welcome.

  Later that week, Dancy wrote an editorial for his AME church newsletter that justified the white violence in Wilmington. “The manhood of a race that will not defend its womanhood is unworthy of the respect of that womanhood,” he wrote.

  Dancy was hardly the only prominent black man to abandon Manly. John Edward Bruce, a former slave who gained a reputation as a journalist and orator under the name Bruce Grit, suggested that Manly was foolhardy in matters of race because he was a mulatto. Blacks and whites could coexist peacefully, Bruce wrote, if only “these gentlemen with large Caucasian reinforcement would cease in their efforts to revolutionize the social order.”

  Cyrus D. Bell, editor of the Afro-American Sentinel in Omaha, also denigrated Manly’s white ancestry. He attributed the violence in Wilmington to “that element that are so nearly white that they are miserable anywhere except in the white race. They are the meanest animals unhung.”

  Other leading black men proceeded carefully. The National Afro-American Council declared a nationwide day of fasting to commemorate the victims in Wilmington. But rather than condemn the city’s white supremacists, the council asked blacks to embrace “a hearty confession of our own sins.”

  And then there was Armond Scott. Manly had been buoyed when he read in the press that Scott, the black lawyer who had mailed the Committee of Colored Citizens’ statement to Waddell’s house, had reached Washington, DC, after fleeing Wilmington. Down to his last hundred dollars, Scott rented a top-floor room in a cheap apartment building for $3 a month and slept on a secondhand couch.

  Several newspapers reported that Scott intended to petition President McKinley for federal action on behalf of Wilmington’s beleaguered blacks. Scott had read the same reports, but he was not inclined to take a public stand. He intended to build a new life as a lawyer in the capital. He wanted to bury the past. He did not want to risk stirring up racial animosities by appealing to the president for help that was unlikely to materialize.

  Scott wrote a short statement and delivered it to the Associated Press.

  It has been stated in the several newspapers of this city that I am here preparing to present the Wilmington race trouble to the President, and I desire through your courtesy to make a correction of the same. I am here in no official capacity whatever and have no intention of saying anything to the President or taking any action in the matter at all.

  It would be left to other exiles to petition the president.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Old Scores

  J OHN MELTON , Robert Bunting, and Charles Gilbert sat slumped in a train car, staring out the windows at the coastal plain of eastern North Carolina late in the day on November 11. They had no baggage and few possessions. They were hungry and exhausted as they approached New Bern, where Melton knew the local sheriff and hoped he would rescue them. But the sheriff didn’t want any trouble in his city—and he refused to intervene.

  At the New Bern station, the three exiles were abducted from the train, manhandled, jeered, and paraded through town by a white mob, then put aboard a boat headed north. A telegram was sent to their next stop, Elizabeth City, warning town leaders there of the impending arrival of the “Dirty White Republican scoundrels.” Before the boat pulled out, a futile search was mounted for Alex Manly, who was rumored to have stowed away.

  That same evening, the sky above the New Bern waterfront lit up with fireworks as the ship slid down the Neuse River toward Pamlico Sound. New Bern was welcoming its native son, Furnifold Simmons. The Democratic Party chairman had returned home that evening on a postelection victory tour. He was met at the depot by the city band, which escorted him to his hotel with a blast of marching music, trailed by wisps of gray smoke from the fireworks.

  The three exiles traveled from New Bern to Elizabeth City to Norfolk and across the Mason-Dixon Line to Washington, DC, where they arrived on Monday, November 14. For the first time on their journey, there was no mob to confront them. They found lodging at a cheap hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and, for the first time in four days, were able to sit quietly and ponder their future. They decided to keep their location secret for fear they were being stalked by Washington confederates of Wilmington’s white supremacists.

  As seasoned politicians and public servants, the three men believed they possessed the credentials to demand the attention of United States attorney general John W. Griggs and perhaps McKinley himself. On their first day in the capital, they lodged a complaint at the US attorney general’s office, then met with reporters. They complained that they had been seized without charge or warrant “and told in forcible language that if ever again they set foot in Wilmington they would be shot on sight.” They demanded federal intervention.

  Back in North Carolina, Democratic newspapers taunted the three Republicans. A front-page headline in the Morning Post of Raleigh read: MELTON , BUNTING ET AL . TELL THEIR TALE OF WOE TO UNSYMPATHETIC EARS . With no attribution, the newspaper reported that the McKinley administration had decided not to act on the men’s request for federal intervention.

  There is no record that McKinley ever met with Melton, Bunting, or Gilbert. The president had other matters on his mind. The bloodshed in Wilmington was overshadowed by several crises confronting McKinley that week. Negotiations with Spain in Paris for a peace treaty to formally end the Spanish-American War were proceeding poorly. Some American troops who had fought in Cuba were dying of yellow fever, prompting an investigation into the War Department’s combat tactics in Cuba and its handling of food and sanitary facilities for troops. In the Philippines, insurgents were defying American occupation. An American general , serving as military governor, sought to ease tensions with the natives by ordering his troops not to refer to Filipinos as “niggers,” at least to their faces.

  McKinley did not publicly address events in Wilmington, but the killings had commanded the attention of one member of his cabinet. On the evening of November 10, a correspondent for the Charlotte Observer had interviewed Secretary of War Russell A. Alger as he emerged from a meeting with the president. Asked about the Wilmington killings, Alger called them “a disgrace to the State and to the Country.” McKinley was “much exercised over the startling reports” from Wilmington, the Observer correspondent reported, citing his conversation with Alger. But Alger emphasized that federal troops could not be dispatched unless Governor Russell requested them.

  The next day, November 11, the killings in Wilmington were discussed at the day’s cabinet meeting. “Cabinet officials, in their remarks, greatly deplored the s
ituation, and unhesitatingly stated that the white people had gone too far,” the Washington Evening Star reported. The Star reporter speculated that McKinley would send federal troops if the killings continued.

  A day later, on November 12, McKinley convened a rare Saturday cabinet meeting to discuss tensions at the peace talks in Paris and a troubling military report on the botched evacuation of American troops from Puerto Rico. The situation in Wilmington was mentioned only in passing. Questioned by Southern reporters after the meeting, Attorney General Griggs said he had heard nothing from Governor Russell or anyone else to warrant dispatching federal troops to North Carolina.

  Back in Raleigh, Russell’s political position was precarious. He could not risk antagonizing the white supremacists who now controlled the state legislature and who had already threatened to impeach him. Russell feared for his life and kept a loaded pistol close at hand. He wrote to a colleague that his “friends in Wilmington” were plotting to assassinate him. For the first three days after the Wilmington killings, Russell and his wife, Sarah, barricaded themselves inside the governor’s mansion as jeering whites paraded up and down the streets of the capital.

  Russell was trapped. He did not dare return to Wilmington to investigate the killings or to check on his home and plantation. Both had been vandalized. “Devils are breaking up our business and it looks like we will be driven from our home,” he wrote. Finally, on November 14, the Russells retreated to the mountain city of Asheville in western North Carolina. Russell cited Sarah’s condition: “Mrs. Russell has been through such a terrible ordeal that I am getting uneasy about her.”

  The respite in Asheville gave Russell time for a sober assessment of his predicament. He was more than halfway through his term as governor and would face reelection in a hostile political environment. He began considering other employment. He wrote to a friend , the tobacco and textile baron Benjamin Duke, to inquire about a job with Duke’s American Tobacco Company in New York. Russell complained to Duke that “the irritations incident to being a Republican and living in the South are getting to be too rank to be borne.”

  The killing of blacks in Wilmington was not the only Southern racial violence to make headlines in Northern newspapers that month. On Election Day, November 8, a bloody racial confrontation had erupted in the hamlet of Phoenix, South Carolina. A white Republican, Thomas Tolbert, had spent the day taking depositions from black men at a polling station in Phoenix, documenting attacks by white vigilantes. White supremacist Democrats had confronted Tolbert. He was beaten, then shot and wounded. In the ensuing melee, the local Democratic Party boss was shot and killed. In retaliation, white supremacists burned Tolbert’s home and killed at least eight black men.

  On November 11, McKinley met at the White House with Tolbert’s brother. Robert “Red” Tolbert was a prominent Republican politician who had been appointed federal customs collector in Charleston. “The President listened attentively to the recital, but gave no indication of what action, if any, might be taken,” the New York Times reported in a front-page dispatch.

  Encouraged by Tolbert’s visit with the president, Melton, Bunting, and Gilbert persisted in their efforts to secure their own meeting with McKinley. But on Christmas Eve, they finally abandoned their pleas for federal intervention. They sent a plaintive letter to McKinley, begging him to appoint them to federal positions in Washington. They reminded the Republican president that they had been loyal Republican officeholders.

  We the undersigned , were driven from Wilmington, N.C. our home for the reason, we were republicans and stood up for the Republican Party … We can’t return to our families, and have been notified through the public press at Wilmington, N.C. that if we return we would be killed … We would have called on you and laid our troubles before you, but we know your time is too valuable, hence we take this method of reaching you.

  McKinley did not respond.

  The president was petitioned by other citizens across the country who demanded justice in Wilmington. Many of the letters came from blacks asking McKinley to send federal troops to Wilmington—letters from Asbury Park and Elizabeth, New Jersey; Mount Vernon, New York; Washington, DC; Pittsburgh; East Saint Louis; Chicago; Cincinnati; and elsewhere.

  Harry Jones, a black man, wrote from Denver to remind McKinley that black soldiers from Wilmington and elsewhere had served during the Spanish-American War that summer: “Is it possible we must leave our homes and go and fight a foreign foe and not get any protection at home by the government we are defending?”

  Another black man, Samuel E. Huffman, wrote from Springfield, Ohio: “The Republican party always posed as a friend of the Negro, and the Negro has so regarded that party, and he allyed himself with that party, believing it to be his friend, yet that friend stands by and sees him robed [robbed] of both his political and civil rights, without making a protest Against such treatment.”

  There were letters from Wilmington, too. Most were from black citizens, who left many of them unsigned for fear of retribution. A black woman from Wilmington, who did not sign her name, wrote: “[T]hat old confradate flage is floating in Wilmington North Carolina. The city of Wilmington is unde the confradate laws. We are over powered with the rapid fire of the guns, and they had cannons, in wagons, and they set fie to the almost half of the City.”

  Perhaps the most anguished letter from Wilmington was sent by a black woman who wrote that she was afraid she would be murdered if she identified herself: “The outside world only knows one side of the trouble here, there is no paper to tell the truth about the Negro here, in this or any other Southern state. The Negro in this town had no arms (except pistols perhaps in some instances) with which to defend themselves against from the attack of lawless whites.”

  The woman described Waddell’s leadership of the mob that burned the Record office, adding: “The Man who promises the Negro protection now as Mayor is the one who in his speech at the Opera house said the Cape Fear should be strewn with carcasses.” She mentioned the Colt and Hotchkiss guns and provided details of the attacks on blacks by white Spanish-American War veterans in the Wilmington Light Infantry: “The men of the 1st North Carolina were home on a furlough and they took high hand in the nefarious work also. The Companies from every little town came in to kill the negro. There was not any Rioting Simply the strong slaying the weak.”

  The woman concluded: “I cannot sign my name and live. But every word of this is true. The laws of our state is no good for the Negro anyhow. Yours in much distress.”

  McKinley also heard from whites who asked him not to interfere in Wilmington. He met privately with Mrs. A. B. Skelding, the wife of a prominent white supremacist in Wilmington. Mrs. Skelding, who had been a neighbor of McKinley’s in Ohio, told the president that the Wilmington rebellion, as she called it, had been necessary to eliminate a corrupt and incompetent city government and to return the city to white rule. She reported that McKinley had responded: “Daughter, I understand the conditions and have neither the wish nor intention to interfere.”

  The president also heard from Julian Shakespeare Carr, the financier who had bankrolled Josephus Daniels’s purchase of the News and Observer. Carr wrote to McKinley the day after the Wilmington killings:

  Sir:

  Men with white skins, sons of revolutionary ancestors, who drafted the original Magna Charter of American Independence, lovers of the Union and the constitution … are leading the victorious column this morning, and will rule North Carolina ever hereafter. No need of troops now.

  Praise God!

  A day later, Carr followed up with a telegram to McKinley sent from a hotel in New York City. Carr told the president that he employed hundreds of black men, “and they would die for me.” He claimed that he paid $1,000 a year in federal taxes to cover “every day in the year, including Sundays.” He said he had read newspaper reports that McKinley was considering sending federal troops to North Carolina.

  “Don’t do it ,” Carr wrote. “It is the lawless, v
icious, bad element of the negro race that is being suppressed … the property-owners and the taxpayers will not submit to the domination of the vicious element of the black race.”

  Another telegram, sent to federal officials in Washington, DC, by an anonymous white supremacist in Wilmington, warned that if federal troops were sent, “Caskets should be included in their equipment.”

  It would have been out of character for McKinley to be unmoved by the Wilmington killings and the suppression of black voting rights in North Carolina. He was the son of Ohio abolitionists who imbued in him a visceral hatred of slavery. As a young man, McKinley confronted Democratic-voting workers at a local tannery and challenged them to spirited debates about slavery. At Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, he responded to a student who raised a glass to Jefferson Davis by vowing to fight treason on Southern soil. In 1861, McKinley joined the Union army as a private, rising to major and leading troops in battle. His final promotion was for “gallant and meritorious service.”

  Later, as a national political candidate, McKinley courted black votes. In 1879, he accused Southern Democrats of stealing elections by suppressing the black vote. At the 1888 Republican National Convention, he received a standing ovation after he condemned violence against Southern black voters. McKinley later championed a proposed “force act” that would require federal supervision of elections in the South to protect black voting rights. During his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1895, McKinley became the first presidential candidate of either party to campaign before black voters, at a church in Savannah.