Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  Aycock understood that white voters appreciated simple concepts and straight talk. He framed the suffrage amendment as the inevitable—and perfectly legal—outgrowth of the terror and fraud of the white supremacy campaign two years earlier.

  “There are three ways in which we may rule—by force, by fraud or by law,” he said in a one speech. “We have ruled by force, we can rule by fraud, but we want to rule by law.”

  To reassure white voters, Democrats published an amendment catechism, a question-and-answer propaganda sheet that described the goals of the amendment with brutal honesty.

  Question: Will the Amendment, if adopted, disfranchise the Negro?

  Answer: The chief object of the Amendment is to eliminate the ignorant and irresponsible Negro vote.

  Question: Will the Amendment disfranchise the uneducated white man?

  Answer: Why certainly not. The object of the Grandfather Clause is to protect forever the entire body of the uneducated white vote of the state in their right to vote.

  On the hot, suffocating evening of Election Day, August 2, 1900, several hundred men and women gathered on the sidewalk along Princess Street in downtown Wilmington. As the night wore on, the crowd swelled. By 11:00 p.m., people were forced to spill into the street to avoid being trampled. They jostled and craned their necks to get a clear view of images flickering on a canvas sheet hung outside the newsroom of the Wilmington Messenger .

  The images were projected by a marvelous device called a stereopticon, popularly known as a magic lantern. Viewers typically paid 10 cents for the privilege of watching the machine’s twin lenses project images from a glass plate. On this evening, a newspaper clerk slid the day’s suffrage amendment voting returns under the plate, and the lenses projected them onto the sheet screen. With each burst of light upon the canvas, a cheer of delight rose up from the onlookers—for the beauty of the magic lantern and for what the results revealed.

  The suffrage amendment had easily passed into law statewide, 182,852 to 128,285, or nearly 60 percent to 40 percent, if the reports of Democratic poll officers were to be believed. Of North Carolina’s ninety-seven counties, sixty-six were reported as voting in favor of the new law. In the Black Belt, every single county reported decisive vote totals for the amendment. It somehow passed even in Black Belt counties with black majorities of up to 68 percent.

  It seemed that North Carolina’s blacks had voted to disenfranchise themselves. In fact, they had barely voted. Many who tried were beaten, threatened, or intimidated, just as they had been in 1898. Others were turned away by Democratic registrars on various pretexts. In Snakebite, a township in the Black Belt’s Bertie County, several black men who had tried to register were rejected because they could not cite the day and month of their birth. In another Black Belt county, a black man was told he could not register until he produced two witnesses who could prove that he had been born in the county.

  In many counties , black ballots were thrown away by Democratic registrars and replaced by phony Democratic ballots. Some registrars used ballot boxes with false bottoms to discard black votes that had been cast. In the Black Belt town of Scotland Neck, registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats nearly two to one, but ballot stuffing produced a stunning eleven-to-one margin for the amendment, with 831 “yes” ballots reported in a city where only 539 residents had registered to vote.

  After black men won the right to vote in the state in 1868, nearly eighty thousand registered. By 1900, the two white supremacy campaigns had whittled that number to just fifteen thousand. Perhaps half of them were able to vote. For the first time since just after the Civil War, no black man was elected to either the state house or the state senate in the 1900 election. Not a single black man was elected to a local office in the Black Second.

  In Wilmington, the pro-amendment margin reported by Democratic officials strained credulity. In a city where the number of males of voting age was evenly divided between whites and blacks, at about 3,100 each, there were a remarkable 2,967 “yes” votes. Officials reported that just two people had voted against it. The Messenger claimed that only five black men voted, all five to disenfranchise themselves.

  In addition to deciding the suffrage amendment, voters also selected their new governor. Charles Aycock won easily, defeating the Republican candidate by 60 percent to 40 percent. Aycock probably did not need fraud to win, but widespread fraud took place nonetheless. Polling stations run by Democrats reported margins of 91 and 88 percent for Aycock in two Black Belt counties with black majorities of 60 percent or more. In Halifax County , the recorded vote count exceeded the total population of voting-age men by nearly 250 votes. In three other Black Belt counties, the recorded vote for Aycock exceeded the total number of white men of voting age by several hundred.

  In Wilmington, Democratic officials reported that Aycock had won New Hanover County by a preposterous 2,960-to-3 margin. Just four years earlier, Republican Daniel Russell had easily carried the county by a 3,145-to-2,218 margin over his Democratic opponent.

  The following January , the Democratic legislature elected Furnifold Simmons to the US Senate with a vote of 124 to 26. (State legislatures elected US senators until the 1913 passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, which provided for a direct popular vote.) Simmons routed the state’s leading Populist, Marion Butler, who failed to persuade the legislature that Simmons had committed widespread voter fraud. “The stench is awful,” Butler said of Democratic race-baiting.

  The white supremacy campaign launched long, fruitful political careers for Simmons, Aycock, and Daniels. Simmons served thirty years in the US Senate, building and nurturing the Simmons machine, a relentlessly efficient system of patronage and bare-knuckle politics. Aycock was nicknamed North Carolina’s “Education Governor” for his campaign to build separate and decidedly unequal school systems. Josephus Daniels became a national political figure. He was appointed secretary of the navy in 1913 by Woodrow Wilson, a segregationist who had lived for eight years in Wilmington as a young man. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Daniels ambassador to Mexico.

  For many white Southerners, the 1900 election results were a validation of white privilege—“a glorious triumph for white supremacy,” the Messenger proclaimed. Democrats had seized control of North Carolina’s largest city, its capital, its legislature, its governor’s mansion, and one of its US Senate seats. White supremacists had eliminated most blacks from the voting booth and from public office. They had hardened segregation into law. And with the help of Daniels and his influential newspaper, they continued to promote white rule through the pages of the state’s most persistent voice of white supremacy.

  The killings in Wilmington inspired whites across the South. The white supremacy campaign demonstrated that determined whites could whittle down the black vote and black officeholders, first through terror and violence and then by legislation. Wilmington’s whites had proved that the federal government would reproach them but not stop them. Inspired by the sweeping success of North Carolina’s grandfather clause, other Southern states adopted variations of the law—Alabama in 1901, Virginia in 1902, Georgia in 1908, and Oklahoma in 1910.

  Even Charles Aycock was awed. “It’s a glorious victory that we have won,” he said. “And the very extent of it frightens me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  I Cannot Live in North Carolina and Be Treated Like a Man

  T HEY NEVER WENT BACK . Not Tom Miller or Armond Scott or William Henderson or Alex Manly. Not the white mayor, Silas Wright; or the white police chief, John Melton; or the white deputy sheriff, Gizzard French. Wilmington was dead to them.

  Tom Miller wanted to return home, but he knew his life in Wilmington was over. He had fled to Norfolk after his banishment. He almost certainly had been the wealthiest black man in Wilmington and one of the richest men of either race. He had grown accustomed to respect and deference in Wilmington, even from whites. But Miller had been arrested like a criminal and tossed aboard a train, st
ripped of everything—his home, his saloon and restaurant, his pawnbroker shop, his real estate properties, his manhood. Miller endured a miserable exile in Norfolk, depressed and in poor health.

  In 1902, Miller wrote to Colonel John D. Taylor, clerk of the superior court in Wilmington, pleading for help with a stalled real estate transaction.

  I have been treated not like [a] human but worse than a dog and someday the Lord will punish them that punished me without a Cause. I am Well and doing Well the only thing that worries me is just to think that I were not allowed to come to my Mothers funeral she being 95 years of age and the oldest Citizen on Wrightsville sound [outside Wilmington] just to think of it will last me to my grave if I were guilty of any Crime or was a Criminal it would not worri me in the least but oh my god just to think it is enough to run a sane man insane.

  Col I hope you will pardon me for the way I write you but when I think about it all knowing I am not Guilty it almost drives me mad—just to think how my own people could treat me as they have with out a Cause knowingly. Oh my god.

  A year later, Tom Miller was dead at fifty-two, felled by a stroke. His family was permitted to bring his body back home to Wilmington. He was buried in the black cemetery of Pine Forest where, five years earlier, black families had sought shelter from marauding Red Shirts.

  After fleeing Wilmington at age twenty-five, Armond Scott escaped to Washington, DC. But he struggled to find enough clients for his law practice there and soon gave up law and left the capital. He borrowed $5 from a friend and moved into the home of the friend’s mother in Germantown, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. He found a job as a butler, earning $5 a week. “I was desperate and I needed to eat,” he recalled years later.

  Scott hated the dreary, servile life of a butler, and soon he decided to try his luck elsewhere. He moved to New York City, where he took a job as a janitor in an apartment building on Morningside Drive. For $5 a week, he emptied trash and ran the elevator. He slept in a packing room. Later, he left the city and took a position as a bellman at the Grand Hotel in Saratoga, New York. One day Scott delivered a pitcher of ice water to a hotel guest—a justice of the North Carolina supreme court. The judge recognized Scott, whom he had appointed to the state bar in 1898. He reprimanded the younger man for abandoning his law career. “Is this what you’re doing after we gave you a license to practice law?” he asked.

  Stung by the upbraiding, Scott decided to move back to Washington, DC, to again try to make a living as a lawyer. He slowly built a successful practice, then married and bought a home. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Scott a judge in the District of Columbia court system—Roosevelt’s first black judicial appointment. Scott served as a judge for two decades, expressing sympathy for poor or alcoholic defendants and handing down harsh sentences to convicted bootleggers. He built a reputation as a theatrical courtroom figure who delivered homilies from the bench. When he died in 1960 at age eighty-seven, an obituary described Scott as “colorful, often fiery.”

  John C. Dancy, who was permitted to return to Wilmington and resume his duties as federal customs collector, often teased Scott about his post-Wilmington success, telling him: “Wilmington did you a favor by running you out of town; they ran you right into a judgeship.” Scott, too, seemed to recognize that his banishment, though devastating at the time, had delivered him from a small Southern city ruled by white supremacists and on to success in the North. “Had it not been for the riot,” he once said, “I might have remained a corn-field lawyer.”

  William Henderson also recovered from the loss of his home and law practice in Wilmington. After he was put aboard a northbound train the week of the riot, he and his wife and children sought shelter with relatives in Brazil, Indiana. The family later moved to Indianapolis, where Henderson established a flourishing law practice and became active in civic affairs. Many of his clients were freedmen. Henderson defended them vigorously, “his gray head wagging emphatically before the jury, his finger driving home his facts as his voice boomed all over the courthouse,” a local newspaper reported. He waged losing battles against lynching, voter disfranchisement, and segregation. Indianapolis established segregated public high schools despite Henderson’s vigorous protests. He remained a defiant activist the rest of his life. A newspaper obituary described him as a resolute man “long recognized as an able barrister, convincing talker and for the bull-dog tendency with which he was known to cling to his convictions.”

  The white riot in his hometown left Henderson embittered until the day he died in 1932. He never forgave his white neighbors. In December 1898, after a Northern newspaper called Wilmington’s blacks “cowards who lacked a leader,” Henderson reminded a black church congregation in Indianapolis that blacks from Wilmington had served during the Spanish-American War “while their parents at home were being murdered.”

  In his unpublished memoir, Henderson described the betrayal by and cruelty of whites in Wilmington. He singled out John D. Bellamy, the Wilmington white supremacist elected to Congress in 1898 through terror and fraud. Bellamy, Henderson wrote, “walks cheerfully to his seat over broken homes, broken hearts, disappointed lives, dead husbands and fathers, the trampled rights of freedmen and not one word of condemnation is heard.”

  The passage of the suffrage amendment in 1900 soon ended the political career of US representative George White, the only black man in Congress. If the black vote in the Black Belt could be suppressed even before the amendment went into effect, then White could hardly expect to muster enough black votes to be reelected to Congress.

  Not only had White fought the suffrage amendment and lost, but he also failed in his long struggle to outlaw lynching. In January 1900, with support from Attorney General Griggs, he had introduced a bill to make lynching a treasonable offense punishable by death. Like Alex Manly, White declared that white men committed more sexual assaults against black women than black men committed against white women. In fact, White told Congress, only 15 percent of lynchings involved a black man who had attacked a white woman. The clear implication was that most lynchings punished consensual sex between black men and white women.

  White’s argument was too much for Josephus Daniels. The editor had always despised White, primarily because he was black but also because he was intelligent and effective. The News and Observer described White’s “unworthy mind” and his “coarse and low utterances.” Daniels’s newspaper also falsely claimed in November 1898 that White’s wife, Cora Lena, had ordered rifles through the mail and that his daughter Della had instructed black women to stop working for white families.

  “It is bad enough that North Carolina would have the only nigger Congressman,” a News and Observer editorial complained after White’s antilynching speech. “Thus does Manleyism of 1898 show its head in 1900. Manley [that was how the paper spelled Manly’s name] slandered white women in a scurrilous negro newspaper having a local circulation; White justifies assaults by negroes on white women by slandering white men in a speech in the Congress of the United States.”

  Several days later, White responded on the House floor. He asked that the editorial be read aloud and reprinted in the public record to provide wide circulation for “that vile, slanderous publication.” To a round of applause, he said he regretted that men like Josephus Daniels were now ascendant in his home state.

  White also told Congress that he agreed with Daniels that any man who assaulted any woman should be hanged, “whether he be a white brute or a black brute.” He went on: “I think such a man ought to be hung—hung by the neck until dead. But it ought to be done by the courts, not by an infuriated mob such as the writer of that article would incite.”

  White’s performance did little to advance the prospects of his antilynching bill. It was buried in the House Judiciary Committee, where it languished and died. Yet Daniels continued to taunt White, publishing a cartoon in May that depicted the congressman as a black-faced elephant with a long tongue slurping from a jug labeled “
Term in Congress Worth $5,000 a Year.” The drawing was headlined: HE DOESN’T LIKE TO LET GO . The caption read: “But most people think our only negro congressman has had it about long enough.”

  Three weeks after the suffrage amendment was approved in August 1900, White gave a long, rueful interview to a New York Times reporter. He announced what everyone already suspected: he would not run for reelection. He was also leaving North Carolina for good, he said, and he advised other blacks to do the same. “May God damn North Carolina, the state of my birth,” he said.

  White told the reporter that the blatant racism in the state and the newspaper attacks on his character had ruined the health of his wife, Cora Lena.

  “I am certain the excitement of another campaign would kill her,” White said. “My wife is a refined and educated woman, and she has suffered terribly because of the attacks on me.” He predicted that fifty thousand blacks would follow him out of North Carolina over the next decade because of the suffrage amendment and “the general degradation of the Negro” in the state.

  The Times story, headlined: SOUTHERN NEGRO’S PLAINT , described White as “the only colored man now in Congress … a stalwart, good-looking man, and a good speaker.” White told the Times that he feared he would be the last black man in Congress for a very long time. And given the violence and racism in his home state, he said, “I cannot live in North Carolina and be treated as a man.”

  Whites rejoiced at the news. On March 4, 1901, as the clock struck noon inside the Greek Revival capitol building in Raleigh—the precise moment when Representative White’s term formally ended—Alston Watts, a Democrat, celebrated along with other white legislators.