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

by David Zucchino

President Johnson, a white supremacist Southerner born in Raleigh and raised in Tennessee.

Abraham Galloway

In North Carolina, the black militia was known as the North Carolina State Militia, or

N.C.S.M.

Every May, Wilmington’s blacks made a point of commemorating Memorial Day, ignored by most whites as an oppressive federal holiday for fallen white and colored Union soldiers.

In August 1831, the slave preacher Nat Turner mounted a slave uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, near the North Carolina border.

In fact, not a single white citizen of North Carolina was killed by a slave that summer and autumn. But alarmed whites, primed

to believe any tale that described savagery by black men, rounded up and killed scores of slaves throughout eastern North Carolina.

“In fact, the people on every side were at such a key of fighting and hate that the Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality.”

He boasted that his

newspaper was “the militant voice of White Supremacy.”

The Atlanta Constitution correspondent on the scene wrote that the parade served “the

double purpose of teaching the negroes the utter foolishness of further resistance and would inspire the white people with confidence in the city government and its

ability to protect them and thei...

I said I was sorry that the nation had such a wide spirit of humanity that it could fight for the Cubans, but let the negroes be massacred at home.”

White Louisiana legislators argued that their grandfather clause did not explicitly discriminate against blacks, because it applied to both

races.

THE KILLINGS and coup in Wilmington inspired white supremacists

across the South.

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.

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 legi...

After 1898, North Carolina’s white supremacists suppressed the black vote through poll taxes, literacy texts, violence, intimidation, whites-only Democratic

primaries, and voter-roll purges. The

Jesse Helms, an ardent segregationist who once mailed postcards to black residents warning that

they could be prosecuted for fraud if they tried to vote.

In 2012, voters elected

a Republican governor. From that power base, white legislators reprised a tactic perfected by their forebears in 1898: suppressing the black vote.

Republicans spent months unearthing obscure statistics on black voting patterns, searching for vulnerabilities.

But they were thwarted by the Voting

Rights Act, which targeted states like North Carolina with a history of racial discrimination in voting.

But in 2013, the United States Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, gutted the law and eliminated

the preclearance requirement.

The so-called voter ID bill was passed into law in late 2013. It reduced early voting and Sunday “souls to the polls” voting, both used disproportionately by African Americans.

In July 2016, a three-judge federal appeals court struck down the law, ruling that its provisions “target African-Americans with

almost surgical precision.”

The judges emphasized “the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina.”

The state’s voters approved it by a margin of 56 to 44 percent.

Republicans crammed black voters into two contorted, serpentine congressional districts with the aid of sophisticated computer models.

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.

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 the...