In an accompanying editorial, the News & Observer apologized for its actions in 1898, referring to the murders and coup as “a milestone of shame.” The paper outlined the pivotal role of the white press “in firing the hatreds that led white vigilantes to overthrow Wilmington’s elected municipal government and wantonly to kill black residents. This newspaper was a leader in that propaganda effort under editor and publisher Josephus Daniels.” (The Charlotte Observer issued a similar apology and published the same special edition, written by historian Timothy Tyson.)
The News & Observer editorial described how racial hatreds unleashed in 1898 helped contribute to the spread of lynching: “And cynical, ruthless politicians rose to authority by fanning white fear and loathing of blacks. This, sadly, was Josephus Daniels’ stock in trade during those years in which he used The N&O to further the white supremacist cause and advance his party’s fortunes.”
The editorial referred to Daniels as “someone we continue to salute in a different context on this [editorial] page.” That was a reference to the newspaper’s motto, derived from Daniels’s will and printed daily at the top of the editorial page: “If the paper should at anytime [sic ] be the voice of self-interest or become the spokesman of privilege or selfishness it would be untrue to its history.”
Josephus Daniels never apologized for his actions in 1898, even as he built a twentieth-century reputation as a progressive on such issues as labor, public education, women’s suffrage, and open government. In a 1941 memoir, Editor in Politics, he expressed mild regret for manipulating news coverage. He wrote that the News and Observer, as the “militant voice of White Supremacy,” was guilty of “sometimes going to extremes in its partisanship.” He added, “We were never very careful about winnowing out the stories or running them down.”
At times, Daniels acknowledged, the News and Observer unfairly savaged his political enemies. “The paper was cruel in its flagellations,” he wrote. “In the perspective of time, I think it was too cruel.” He conceded that the bias bled into news coverage. “The News and Observer ’s partisanship was open, fierce, and somewhat vindictive, and was carried in news stories as well as in editorials,” he wrote.
While Daniels may have regretted some of his tactics, he made no apologies for what they achieved. Even with the benefit of forty-three years of reflection, he wrote glowingly of the white supremacy campaign in his memoir. He boasted that white supremacists had crushed “Negro domination.” He glorified Red Shirt attacks on black neighborhoods and praised white gunmen for creating “a reign of terror” among blacks in Wilmington.
Frank A. Daniels Jr., Josephus Daniels’s grandson, was the last member of the Daniels family to serve as publisher of the News & Observer. I spoke to Daniels at his office in Raleigh in 2018. Daniels, then eighty-six, had retired as publisher twenty-two years earlier, but he kept an office in a downtown building, decorated with newspaper mementos and photos of his grandfather.
Daniels told me that as publisher he had never considered an apology for the actions of his grandfather. “I didn’t think it was necessary,” he said. “No one ever talked about it. It never came up.”
Like George Rountree III, Daniels described his grandfather as a man who both defined and reflected the ethos of his time. He said Josephus sincerely believed that blacks in the 1890s were not qualified to vote or hold public office. In his grandfather’s view, Daniels said, only educated white men of property could create the conditions to properly educate blacks.
“It was primarily driven by the fact that blacks didn’t have the education,” Daniels said of his grandfather’s role in 1898. “He always said, not directly, but he clearly implied, that the main thing was to get the right people in office.”
Did Josephus ever express regret?
“He did,” Daniels said. “But there is a difference between apologizing and regret. At the time he did it, it made good sense.”
Daniels said that during his quarter century as publisher he made a point of hiring black employees. He mentioned the 1970s, when the newspaper had no black employees in the advertising department. Daniels said that under his instruction his classified advertising manager hired a black candidate with the next job opening.
Daniels also told me he was proud of the News & Observer ’s modern role in advocating for civil rights, its support for the Democratic Party and progressive issues, and the Daniels family’s charitable donations to civic causes. Whatever the paper stood for in his grandfather’s era, he said, it stood for something completely different in modern times.
I asked Daniels for his thoughts on the state commission report, particularly its criticism of his grandfather’s racial incitements and demagoguery. Did he agree with the report’s conclusions?
“I never read it,” he replied.
Another North Carolina institution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also faced a reckoning. Nearly thirty buildings on the school’s campus were named for white supremacists or supporters of white supremacy, among them Josephus Daniels, Charles Aycock, and William Saunders, the Ku Klux Klan leader in North Carolina in the nineteenth century.
After years of protests by student activists, Saunders Hall was renamed Carolina Hall in 2015. The school also altered the name of its football stadium, Kenan Memorial Stadium, which had honored William Rand Kenan Sr., who commanded a rapid-fire gun squad during the 1898 coup. In 2018, the stadium was renamed for Kenan’s son, William Rand Kenan Jr., an industrialist who had donated the money to build the stadium.
Those changes did not quell decades of turmoil over a Confederate Civil War monument erected on campus in 1913 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Nicknamed Silent Sam, the statue of a young Confederate soldier honored UNC students who had fought and died in the Civil War. The 1913 dedication speech was delivered by Julian Shakespeare Carr, the wealthy businessman who had described the Wilmington coup as “a grand and glorious event” and had warned President McKinley not to punish the city’s white supremacists. Carr had left the university to join the Confederate army. In his 1913 speech, he said the school’s fallen soldiers had “saved the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race in the South” and preserved the “purest strain of the Anglo Saxon.”
Carr also told of flogging a black woman near campus shortly after he returned from the war: “I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady.” He called it “a pleasing duty .”
Campus protests over Silent Sam had erupted from time to time during and after the civil rights era. In 2017, after white nationalists staged a deadly rally in Charlottesville, activists in North Carolina began staging frequent, raucous rallies next to Silent Sam, demanding the statue’s removal. They sometimes clashed with whites committed to commemorating the Confederate cause.
In April 2018, in a symbolic protest, an African American graduate student poured a mixture of red paint and her own blood on Silent Sam. Four months later, a group of about 250 protesters gathered to support the student, who faced criminal charges. Shortly after nightfall, several protesters strung a rope around the statue’s head and neck, then dragged Silent Sam to the ground. People stomped on the bronze head and whacked it with clubs. The toppled statue was placed in storage while the university struggled to decide whether to erect it again, display it elsewhere, or remove it permanently from the campus.
In 2018, a North Carolina state historical marker was installed in Wilmington to commemorate the events of 1898. The marker stands near the corner of Market Street and Fourth Street, outside the Wilmington Light Infantry Armory, where the white mob gathered before torching the Record office.
It was only the second state historical marker to address the killings and coup. The other is a marker for Alex Manly, installed in 1998 during the 1898 centennial. The Manly marker stands four blocks from the old Record site. Its brief inscription does not mention that black citizens were sho
t dead or that the city’s multiracial government was overthrown by white supremacists:
Alex Manly, 1866–1944. Edited black-owned Daily Record four blocks east. Mob burned his office Nov. 10, 1898, leading to “race riot” & restrictions on black voting in N.C.
In 2007, the Manly marker was ripped from its metal post and stolen. A replacement was soon installed. I visited the marker more than a decade later, in 2018. It was listing and partially obscured by overhanging tree limbs as traffic whizzed by on South Third Street, a busy four-lane artery.
A few blocks north, the 2018 installation of the second 1898 state marker addressed the shortcomings in the inscription on the Manly plaque. After considerable debate, agreement was reached on the new marker’s text:
WILMINGTON COUP
Armed white mob met at armory here, Nov. 10, 1898. Marched six blocks and burned office of Daily Record, black-owned newspaper. Violence left untold numbers of African-Americans dead. Led to overthrow of city government & installation of coup leader as mayor. Was part of a statewide political campaign based on calls for white supremacy and the exploitation of racial prejudice.
Faye Chaplin never met her great-grandfather, Thomas C. Miller, Wilmington’s wealthy black entrepreneur, who died before she was born. But the weight of Tom Miller’s life—from his triumphs as a businessman to his humiliating eviction from his hometown—still bears down on Chaplin 120 years later. Scraps of Miller’s existence live on inside her home—in the plaintive 1902 letter in which he says he was treated worse than a dog, and in a letter begging for permission to attend his mother’s funeral in Wilmington.
When I spoke to Chaplin in 2018, she was sixty-five, a retired bank manager living in Raleigh, the state capital, where she was born and raised. She had never lived in Wilmington, but what happened there in 1898 is never far from her consciousness. She told me she felt cheated out of her great-grandfather’s legacy.
“He was this great businessman and he had all this wealth, but where is it and what happened to it?” Chaplin told me. “Did they make him leave and just take everything from him? What happened? That’s what I want to know.”
Chaplin attended several centennial events in Wilmington in the late 1990s. She visited Miller’s two-bedroom home, which still stands on North Sixth Street. The tidy yellow frame structure is part of a historic homes tour. But Chaplin’s visits to Wilmington only compounded the pain and longing that the events of 1898 have instilled in her.
“The way they did things just because of the color of your skin,” she said. “He came out of slavery and built things for himself. So he was a threat to them. He was a successful black man and they couldn’t stand that. He was a black man who was doing well and who wouldn’t close his mouth. He’d speak his mind and stand up for what was right. He wasn’t afraid of them. And that’s why they went after him.”
Chaplin’s grandmother—her mother’s mother—was Lula Miller, Thomas Miller’s daughter. She was almost certainly the young girl who ran after the gun wagon that hauled her father from his home to the city jail in 1898, begging the white gunmen to release him. That event is part of a straight line of sorrow that connects Thomas Miller to his great-granddaughter.
That same connection also leads to the letters inside Chaplin’s home, among them Miller’s plea to attend his mother’s funeral. His letter mentioned that his mother had been the oldest resident of a sound-side community south of Wilmington—as if that somehow buttressed the case for allowing him to return to Wilmington to bury her. The white men who ran Wilmington were unmoved. Miller’s request was denied.
Alex Manly never revealed all that had befallen him in Wilmington—not to his wife or his two sons, his nieces, his sisters-in-law, or any friend or colleague. He died in 1944 at age seventy-five, nearly silent until the end, a weary man haunted by the past. His Pennsylvania death certificate listed his race as colored, his profession as painter, and his cause of death as carcinoma of the bladder. He had told his wife that he did not want to be buried in Wilmington—or anywhere in North Carolina. Alex’s secrets were buried with him, in an unadorned grave beneath a tombstone of Vermont granite in Fairview Cemetery in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. Beneath his name are the words: “At Rest.” Alex’s wife, Carrie, is buried beside him.
Alex Manly’s grandson, Lewin Manly Jr., was born eleven years before Alex died. Young Lewin lived with his grandfather until he was three years old. He remembers little of the man, except a vague notion, formed in Lewin’s youth, that something terrible had wrecked his grandfather’s life—so terrible that no one in the family spoke of it. Lewin later asked his father—Lewin Manly Sr., the younger of Alex’s two sons—what had happened to Alex in Wilmington. His father refused to discuss the matter. Only years later did Lewin Jr. realize that his father knew little more than he did.
Lewin Manly Jr. was born in Philadelphia and raised in Savannah, but he often visited his great-aunts, Felice and Mabel, the sisters of Carrie Sadgwar Manly, young Lewin’s paternal grandmother. The two women survived the riot and lived in Wilmington for the rest of their lives, though Mabel also spent several years in Philadelphia. Lewin Jr. pressed his elderly aunts for details about his grandfather’s life in Wilmington. If they knew anything, they did not share it. They regaled Lewin with family lore unrelated to events in Wilmington in 1898, but when he raised the subject, they fell silent. “As soon as I would mention 1898, they would just clam up,” Lewin Jr. told me in 2018.
As an adolescent and later as a young man, Lewin Jr. often visited his grandmother Carrie in Pennsylvania. Lewin sometimes asked her about Alex’s time in Wilmington. Carrie shared nothing. But in 1954, when Lewin Jr. turned twenty-one, Carrie wrote several letters to her sons, Milo and Lewin Sr. She briefly described the harrowing escape by Alex, then her fiancé, from Wilmington in 1898, and her own shock when she heard the news while preparing to sing onstage in London.
Carrie’s letters mentioned Alex’s 1898 editorial, but only to describe its explosive effects: “It turned the Southern cities from N.C. to Ala. upside down.” She offered little else regarding the events of 1898. “I should let the ‘dead past bury its dead,”’ she wrote. For Carrie and her late husband, the past was weighted with pain and regret, eased only by death. Carrie mentioned that she kept a yellowed, crumbling copy of the Record from 1898. “Every man connected with that paper,” she wrote, “has gone to his rest where there will be no more sorrow or riots.”
In a single sentence, Carrie reflected on the lifelong impact of her husband’s near-death experience in Wilmington: “How my poor boy went through all he did and came out cheerful and forgiving is a wonder to me.” And she offered a glimpse of Alex’s state of mind, relaying an arch comment he muttered one night in 1918 after reading that “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman had died. “Carrie, here is a notice of the death of old Ben Tillman,” he told her. “I wonder who is making hash out of him in hell tonight?”
Lewin Manly Jr. did not learn the full truth of the events of 1898 until 2006, when the state commission released its report. It pained him that his own family had kept so much from him, but he didn’t blame them. He concluded that his father and grandmother and great-aunts sought to spare him the burden that Alex had carried to his grave.
When I spoke to Lewin Manly Jr. in 2018, he was eighty-five years old. He was retired and living in Atlanta, where he tended a garden, dabbled in photography, and read voraciously. He had spent forty years as a dentist in Atlanta after graduating from Howard University’s dental school. He was so intrigued by his family’s refusal to discuss the events of 1898 that he wrote an essay for his college alumni newspaper about his attempts to pry details from relatives. I asked him why he thought his grandfather and other relatives so adamantly refused to dredge up the past.
“The stress from what they saw, they never got over it,” Lewin told me. “It scared the hell out of them. That’s why they never talked about it. My grandfather probably blamed himself for all the deaths i
n Wilmington and it probably sent him to an early grave. He had to deal with all that evil. Those were evil people.”
Lewin said he had no desire to spend time in Wilmington, except to visit his great-aunts. For him, the residue of 1898 is lasting and corrosive. In the late 1990s, he read news accounts of blacks and whites in Wilmington attempting to reconcile as the city prepared to commemorate the centennial in 1998. He said he did not believe true reconciliation was possible or that black descendants could ever recover from the crushing dislocation and racism stoked by the events of 1898. Nor did he believe that descendants of the white supremacists of 1898 would ever acknowledge the inherited status and privilege afforded them by the actions of their ancestors.
“There’s no hope for them,” Lewin told me. “You’re never going to change them.”
I asked whether he was prepared to forgive the white men who led the riot and drove his grandfather from Wilmington 120 years earlier.
Lewin thought for a moment, then said, “I’m not a very religious person, and I don’t forgive. If there’s a hell, I hope they’re burning in it, all of them.”
Fugitive slaves flowed into Wilmington at the close of the Civil War, drawn by the promise of jobs in the city’s port and in the naval stores industry in the Cape Fear countryside. Many initially lived in sprawling contraband camps.
An escaped slave, Union spy, and state senator, Abraham Galloway led the fight for black rights in Wilmington and eastern North Carolina. He commanded an ad hoc black militia that drove the Ku Klux Klan from Wilmington in 1868.
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