Wilmington's Lie

By the 1890s, Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina and an example of a mixed-race community that worked. It was a busy port with a growing African American middle class, and its Fusionist government, an alliance of Republicans and Populists, included black aldermen, police officers, and magistrates. Black-owned businesses were thriving, and the city had an African American newspaper, The Record. Across the state and the South, however, white supremacist Democrats were working to undo the gains made by former slaves and their descendants.

In 1898 a speech urged white men to defend Southern womanhood against supposed black predators. In reply, Alexander Manly, the outspoken young editor of The Record, wrote that some relationships between black men and white women were consensual. The editorial provoked outrage across the South, and there were calls to lynch Manly. North Carolina's white supremacist Democrats had a different plan. They intended to win back the state legislature in November "by the ballot or bullet or both," and then use Manly's editorial to set off a "race riot" that would topple Wilmington's multi-racial government.

Prominent citizens led the effort, among them Josephus Daniels, publisher of the state's largest newspaper, and former Confederate Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell. They ran a carefully orchestrated campaign of raucous rallies, race-baiting editorials and cartoons, and sensational, fabricated news stories. Through intimidation and violence, the Democrats suppressed the black vote and stuffed ballot boxes, or threw them out, and took the legislature on November 8. Two days later, more than 2,000 heavily armed Red Shirts swarmed through Wilmington. They burned the offices of The Record, terrorized women and children, and shot at least sixty black men dead in the streets. City officials were forced at gunpoint to resign and were replaced by mob leaders. Prominent blacks and sympathetic whites were banished, and hundreds of terrified black families took refuge in the surrounding swamps and forests.

The author argues that this was not a "race riot," as the events came to be called, but a racially motivated rebellion launched by white supremacists. It was a rare violent overthrow of an elected government in the United States. It halted the progress made by black citizens and restored racism as official government policy, cementing white rule for another half century.

Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino draws on contemporary newspaper accounts, diaries, letters, and official communications. He weaves together individual stories of hate, fear, and brutality into a narrative of a largely forgotten chapter of American history that most Americans have never heard of.