Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  In 1936, Harry Hayden, a white supremacist writer who was a boy in Wilmington in 1898, solidified the white narrative in a pamphlet titled The Story of the Wilmington Rebellion. Hayden’s account was based exclusively on interviews with the perpetrators of the coup. Writing in an elegiac tone, Hayden’s narrator regrets that “the better elements” of the city’s white aristocracy were obliged, reluctantly, to “remove the stupid and ignorant Negros” from elected office. “Black rapists prowled the city … attacking Southern girls and women, those pure and lovely creatures who graced the homes in Dixie Land,” Hayden wrote. He sold the pamphlet for $1 a copy to a new generation of whites in the city, many of them born after 1898.

  J. Allan Taylor, who helped lead white rioters in 1898, added a typewritten postscript to Hayden’s account. Taylor described white rule in Wilmington as “an inherent and traditional right.” Confronted in 1898 by “negro domination,” he wrote, the city’s white men “pledged our manhood, at whatever sacrifice necessary, to reestablish white supremacy on a firm and enduring basis.” He boasted of stuffing ballot boxes and intimidating black voters. He scribbled a handwritten comment that read: “masterful duplicity.”

  The state’s school textbooks, presided over by white supremacists, ensured that the enduring myths of 1898 were passed down to each new generation of white pupils. A 1933 textbook placed the blame for the killings on elected black officials: “There were many Negro officeholders in the eastern part of the state, some of whom were poorly fitted for their tasks. This naturally aroused ill feeling between the races.” The textbook described Charles Aycock, whose speeches incited white supremacists at rallies in 1898 and 1900, as “one of the best friends that colored people had.” One passage suggested that black citizens were deprived of the vote for their own good: “Though Aycock was in favor of an amendment to take the vote away from illiterate Negroes, he had no ill feeling toward their race.”

  A 1940 public school textbook blamed black citizens for the misfortunes that befell them: “The mass of negroes became poor citizens. To keep their vote, the Carpetbaggers and Scalawags allowed them to do very much as they pleased. The worst crimes were not punished. The white people of the South were no longer safe.”

  The 1940 textbook went on to describe how the Ku Klux Klan and, later, the Red Shirts, addressed the problem:

  To put an end to this terrible condition white people all over the South joined together in a sort of club which they named the Ku Klux Klan. Members of the Ku Klux Klan, dressed as ghosts, scared lawless men into acting decently. On moonlit nights these men could be seen on horseback, riding to bring order back into the lives of their people … Such sights frightened the negroes into living better lives.

  The names of those men, negro or white, who had done wrong were listed. The next moonlit night the Ku Klux Klan would visit these men and punish them according to the wrongs they had done. After this, lawless men were not so bold and crime became less and less.

  In 1949, another North Carolina public school textbook glossed over white supremacist violence and portrayed black men as aggressors and whites as defenders of law and order in Wilmington. It ignored the killings and coup, describing instead an orderly change of government. “A number of blacks were jailed for ‘starting a riot’ and a new white administration took over Wilmington’s government,” one summary read.

  In 1951, for the first time since 1898, a North Carolina historian challenged the white narrative. Helen Edmonds, a black scholar at North Carolina Central University in Durham, debunked the white myths of 1898 in a meticulously researched doctoral thesis, “The Negro and Fusion Politics, 1894–1901.” Edmonds revealed that the purported spontaneous white response to a black riot was instead a carefully planned coup d’état that restored white supremacy. She demonstrated that the number of black officials in Wilmington and eastern North Carolina was far too small to constitute “Negro domination.” She exposed race-baiting by white politicians and newspapers. “The News and Observer led in a campaign of prejudice, bitterness, vilification, misrepresentation and exaggeration to influence the emotions of whites against the Negro,” she wrote.

  Edmonds’s thesis incensed the white guardians of Wilmington’s 1898 legacy. Louis T. Moore, chairman of the New Hanover Historical Commission, wrote an aggrieved letter to the president of the University of North Carolina, which had published Edmonds’s account.

  “The assumption is that this Dr. Edmonds is a Negress,” Moore informed the university. He described her account as “inflammatory, not in accord with real facts, distorted and sensational.” What happened in Wilmington in 1898, Moore wrote, “was distinctly a REVOLUTION and not a race riot as she terms it.”

  Edmonds’s revelations had no lasting effect on Wilmington’s white mythology, which had hardened like shellac in the years after 1898. It would take more than the determined research of a lone historian to dismantle the carefully constructed narrative that had sustained white Wilmington for nearly a century.

  As the hundredth anniversary of the 1898 coup approached, the faculty and staff at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, tried to bring black and white citizens together to discuss ways to commemorate the centennial. Organizers invited residents to express their views of 1898 at centennial events. Racial participation was carefully balanced. The white cochairs of the 1898 Centennial Foundation included Hugh MacRae II, the grandson of coup leader Hugh MacRae; and Katharine Taylor, the great-granddaughter of Colonel Walker Taylor. Among the black cochairs was Frankye Manly Jones, Alex Manly’s niece.

  The foundation trod carefully, coaxing whites and blacks into talking openly about the legacy of 1898. For many descendants of either race, it was an incendiary topic. More than a few whites said they bore no personal responsibility for their ancestors’ actions. Some asked why the city was heightening racial tensions by dredging up ancient history. But many black residents resented white descendants who refused to acknowledge the lasting damage inflicted on Wilmington’s black community. Some demanded reparations and a monument to the 1898 victims. Many whites dismissed reparations as a nonissue. One white man vowed to tear down any monument to the dead.

  Wilmington’s black weekly newspaper, the Wilmington Journal, protested the centennial effort. Founded in 1927 by Robert S. Jervay, a printer who was the son of a slave, the Journal succeeded the Record as the voice of the city’s black community. First published as the Cape Fear Journal, the weekly is published today by Jervay’s descendants from a white clapboard building on South Seventh Street, directly across from the spot where the Record was torched in 1898.

  In an editorial in November 1998, the Journal announced that it would have nothing to do with the 1898 commemoration. “The first step on atonement cannot take place,” the editorial said, “until an all out effort is made to determine all who were killed on that bloody night, all who fled the city, by force or by will because of fear, and all who lost their businesses and other property.”

  Even the very definition of what had happened in 1898 was disputed. For decades, it had been called a race riot. But by 1998 other terms were under consideration—revolution, rebellion, coup d’état, massacre. Centennial organizers sought a compromise. They cobbled together an artfully worded statement: “No one living in Wilmington today was a participant in the events of 1898.” Consequently, “none of us bears personal responsibility for what happened,” the statement said. Even so, the statement stressed that “all among us—no matter our race or history … all are responsible for 1898.” Organizers also settled on a compromise term for the events of 1898: “Racial violence.”

  In early 1998, there was a breakthrough of sorts. George Rountree III, the grandson and namesake of a coup leader, George Rountree, agreed to attend a “Wilmington in Black and White” lecture at St. Stephen AME Church. Built in 1866 by ex-slaves, the church stood just five blocks from where the first shots were fired in 1898. It was pivotal moment. Rountree was the first direct descendant of a riot leade
r to agree to speak at a commemorative event. The lancing of a century-old wound had raised old grievances and challenged long-held myths, but the participation of a prominent white descendant like Rountree suggested one possible path to frank discussion, if not reconciliation.

  Nearly every pew was filled at St. Stephen the night Rountree spoke. There was silence as he rose from his seat. He began by describing his lasting affection for a black nanny, then quickly absolved his grandfather, saying he was merely a product of his times. The disappointment was palpable among those in the audience who had expected a moment of racial healing. Inez Easom, a descendant of black residents targeted by white mobs in 1898, responded with a call for reparations. Rountree countered by suggesting that Wilmington’s citizens address racial inequalities by donating to local charities. Then he emphasized that he, personally, bore no responsibility for the events of 1898.

  In 2018, I spoke with Rountree inside his law office on Market Street in Wilmington. Like his grandfather, he was tall and imposing; he played varsity basketball at the University of Arizona. Rountree was eighty-five, a wealthy admiralty law attorney who had for years donated to charitable causes in the community. Among them were charities that benefited African Americans, he pointed out.

  Rountree told me that he had attended the centennial lecture in search of racial healing but instead felt unfairly harangued to apologize for 1898. “What role did I have in creating the environment that produced the hostilities which generated this anvil in which all kinds of frustrations were forged?” he asked.

  Rountree described his grandfather, who died when he was eight, as a powerful influence on his life—“a gruff, imperious, articulate, bright man,” he said. He remembered the old man telling him of his own father, Robert Rountree, a slave owner, who returned from the Civil War to find his plantation sacked. That seemed to instill a sense of grievance in the family, nursed by George Rountree Sr. as he helped plot the 1898 coup. Rountree said his grandfather had simply returned control of the city to men of property with a vested stake in society.

  “I am asked frequently: ‘Don’t you know all that occurred in 1898 was horribly wrong?’” Rountree told me. “My answer has always been, compared to today’s notions of propriety and lawfulness, yes. On the other hand, if you want me to criticize my grandfather a hundred and twenty years later, I am not going to do that. If you want me to take a detached view of whether maltreatment of other people is wrong in any civilized society, I would of course concur.”

  Rountree said he believed the events of 1898 had inhibited the commercial growth of Wilmington because they decimated the black middle class and “entrenched the old-line [white] families, maybe twenty or twenty-five of them.”

  I asked whether Wilmington had been able to move past 1898.

  “I think people under forty have basically moved on,” Rountree said. “I think people my age, eighty-five, might think they have, but they haven’t, not totally. I’m talking about whites and blacks. They haven’t forgotten.”

  Ultimately, the centennial groups reached an uneasy accommodation with 1898. There were several poignant moments. Two nieces of Alex Manly held polite, if painful, discussions with descendants of whites who had carried out the killings and coup. In November 1998, inside Thalian Hall, where Colonel Waddell delivered his notorious “Cape Fear carcasses” speech, black and white musicians and actors performed a play based on the events of 1898. Afterward, the audience joined in a dramatic counterpoint to the “White Declaration of Independence,” signed by white supremacists at Thalian Hall a century earlier. This time, more than a thousand people of both races lined up to sign a “People’s Declaration of Racial Interdependence.” The document asked the city’s leaders to “declare openly their common commitment to the path of interracial dialogue, inclusion and reconciliation.”

  On November 10, 1998—one hundred years to the day since the coup—whites and blacks held another ceremony at Thalian Hall. The combined choirs of the predominately white First Presbyterian Church and black St. Luke’s AME Church sang “Amazing Grace” and “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” It was a richly symbolic moment—not just for its exquisite timing but also for the painful legacy of First Presbyterian Church. Its white minister a century earlier had celebrated the coup by proclaiming: “We have taken a city.”

  In 2000, North Carolina’s legislature passed a bill, sponsored by two black legislators from Wilmington, to create a state commission to investigate the causes and impact of the 1898 coup. The commission spent the next five years trying to dig beneath the dominant white narrative and produce a historically accurate account.

  Achieving a balanced account was challenging. The coup’s leaders left a wealth of written accounts that justified and celebrated their own roles in the violence. But leaders of Wilmington’s black community, under attack and fleeing for their lives, produced far fewer letters, journals, diaries, or memoirs. And while white newspapers published minute-by-minute narratives, the Record had shut down before the riot. Few of its back issues survived the torching of November 10. The commission’s authors acknowledged the historical imbalance—and their reluctant dependence on white accounts.

  “Although white leaders attempted to justify their actions in every word and deed after November 10, the truth of what happened lies within their clouded narratives,” the commission wrote in its final 480-page report, published in 2006.

  The report upended white myths a century old. It concluded that the coup was a “documented conspiracy” by Wilmington’s white elite to overthrow a legitimately elected government “through violence and intimidation.” White supremacists statewide were incited to violence by Josephus Daniels and his News and Observer, the report said. Federal and state authorities failed “at all levels” to respond to the violence or punish the perpetrators. The report concluded that the coup and killings led directly to strict residential segregation in Wilmington, decades of Jim Crow discrimination, and the disenfranchisement of the state’s black citizens.

  The report also challenged an enduring black myth—that whites seized the property of hundreds of black residents who fled after the coup. Based on a detailed study of deeds and tax records by researcher Sue Ann Cody, the commission found no evidence of widespread property seizures. Wilmington’s whites sought to rob blacks of their civil rights, not their property.

  The commission also upended the myth that blacks in Wilmington’s city government in 1898 were corrupt, incompetent, and complicit in street crimes. It cited a 1997 study by the Research Branch of North Carolina State Office of Archives and History, which found “no conclusive evidence that the town’s finances were in danger of default” in 1898. The study also concluded that the city government, rather than presiding over corruption, had produced a “meticulous and fair tax code.” In addition, the study found no evidence of a significant increase in street crime and concluded that the judicial system tried and convicted both blacks and whites.

  The commission estimated that twenty-one hundred black residents fled Wilmington during and after the violence. It documented twenty-one citizens banished by the coup’s white leaders—fourteen blacks and seven whites. It identified, by name, thirteen black men killed during the riot and listed nine more dead men whose identities could not be confirmed. Noting that the bodies of many black victims were either quickly buried or never recovered, the commission estimated that the total number of blacks killed was at least sixty.

  The report noted “the ability of white leadership in Wilmington to develop long-range plans for instigating violence, a strategy to quell that violence and their subsequent ability to call the affair a riot—implying a sudden break in peacefulness rather than reveal its true character, that of a planned insurrection.”

  On November 8, 2008—110 years after the stolen election of 1898—an 1898 Memorial Park was installed. The memorial stands just a block from where the first black men were shot dead at North Fourth and Harnett Streets. An inscription describes the
white mob, the burning of the Record, and the restoration of white supremacy. Two short sentences engraved on the monument unraveled the city’s white mythology:

  Wilmington’s 1898 racial violence was not accidental. It began a successful statewide Democratic campaign to regain control of state government, disenfranchise African-Americans, and create a system of legal segregation which persisted into the second half of the 20th century.

  As Wilmington struggled to address the legacy of 1898, the News & Observer also confronted its central role in the riot and coup.

  After the death of Josephus Daniels in 1948, the newspaper continued to be published by the Daniels family. It remained loyally Democratic editorially, even after Southern segregationist Democrats migrated to the Republican Party. The News and Observer generally supported the civil rights movement and school desegregation. By the 1970s, it had earned a national reputation for strong local and regional reporting that held state government and powerful business interests accountable. Editorially, the paper was solidly Democratic and hewed to mainstream liberal positions. It remains so today; the News & Observer editorial page repeatedly condemned efforts by the Republican-led legislature to suppress black votes through voter ID laws and to dilute black voting strength through gerrymandering schemes.

  In 1995, the News & Observer was sold to the McClatchy newspaper chain, ending 101 years of Daniels family ownership. In 2006, the paper’s new owners published a sixteen-page special edition titled “The Ghosts of 1898—Wilmington’s Race Riot and the Rise of White Supremacy.” The eleven-chapter series punctured the white supremacist narrative, describing the events of 1898 as a “carefully orchestrated campaign that spread white supremacy across North Carolina and the South.”