Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

by David Zucchino

For months, whites had been railing against what they called “Negro rule,” though black men held only a small fraction of elected and appointed positions in the city and the state. White politicians and newspapers warned that if blacks continued to vote and hold office, black men would feel empowered to seize white jobs, dominate the courts, and rape white women.

The city’s thriving population of black professionals contradicted the white portrayal of Wilmington’s blacks as poor, ignorant, and illiterate. In fact, Wilmington’s blacks had higher literacy rates than virtually any other blacks in North Carolina, a state in which nearly a quarter of whites were illiterate.

For whites in Wilmington, blacks had ceased to be slaves, but they had not ceased to be black. They were still considered unworthy, unequal, and inferior, still subservient to whites by any measure—social, political, or economic. For freed slaves, the defeat of the Confederacy and the end of slavery promised not just citizenship and the right of black men to vote but also the right to work for fair pay, and to live on something approaching an equal, if separate, status with the whites who had so recently enslaved them. They sought to be free citizens, not just free Negroes.

By 1880, Wilmington would boast the highest proportion of black residents of any large Southern city—60 percent, compared with 44 percent in Atlanta, 27 percent in New Orleans, and 17 percent in Louisville.

White politicians claimed there had been massive voter fraud. They demanded that the election results be invalidated. They vowed to renew their fight against a “mongrel race” and black suffrage.

For all their dominance over blacks in the city, whites had never extinguished the malignant dread of black rebellion—“a nightmare constantly haunting the American imagination,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. By 1898, white memories of a momentous black rebellion half a century earlier still had not faded.

In 1876, Democrats congratulated themselves on redeeming the state in the name of white supremacy. Well before the close of Reconstruction in 1877, the vengeance of the Redeemers had essentially suspended the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments in North Carolina. White supremacy was triumphant. For the next seventeen years, the Redeemers ruled North Carolina.

Fusionists managed to win the statewide election in 1894 and seize control of the North Carolina legislature.

“For a period of six to twelve months prior to November 10,” Clawson wrote later, “the white citizens of Wilmington prepared quietly but effectively for the day when action would be necessary.”

So was J. N. Jacobi. He was a prominent synagogue leader who could be counted on to promote the Democratic ticket. Jacobi profited from a record boom in gun sales in the late summer of 1898 at his hardware store, which normally relied on sales of paint, lumber, and tools. Like his fellow white gun merchants, Jacobi refused to sell weapons to blacks. Nor did he sell a single shotgun or rifle or pistol to a white Republican during the campaign. He restricted his gun sales to white Democrats.

And now, thirty-three years after the end of the Civil War and twenty-one years after the close of Reconstruction, Waddell urged the white men of Wilmington to take back the privileges of race that they believed, deep in their hearts, were rightfully theirs.

The white supremacy campaign had demonstrated to the nation that the federal government would reproach whites for attacking and killing black citizens, but it would not punish them or even condemn them. No one was ever charged, much less convicted, of a crime stemming from what whites called their “white revolution.” Wilmington’s leading white citizens had pioneered a formula that was soon duplicated across the South: deny black citizens the vote, first through terror and violence and then by legislation.

Victors indeed write history. From the moment the first black men fell dead at the corner of North Fourth and Harnett Streets on November 10, 1898, Wilmington’s white leadership portrayed the day’s events as a justified, spontaneous response to a black riot. The white supremacy campaign itself was depicted as a legitimate corrective to corrupt black politicians and the “black beast rapist.” More than a century would pass before those narratives were successfully challenged—