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

by David Zucchino

Galloway would soon help raise three units in New Bern, the Thirty-Fifth, Thirty-Sixth and Thirty-Seventh Regiments of United States Colored Troops, whose soldiers were among the 180,000 black men, most of ...

Abraham Galloway had turned his attention to events beyond New Bern. He embarked on a new venture as a national advocate for expanded rights for blacks and especially for soldiers in the new colored regiments.

He attracted national attention, largely through the reporting of Robert Hamilton, a free black man from New York who published the Anglo-African, the most widely read black-run publication in the country.

In a signed petition—Galloway’s signature was the first of five names—the men asked the president to grant black men “the right of suffrage, which will greatly expand our sphere of usefulness, redound to your honor, and cause posterity.” Lincoln assured the men that he understood their position, but he was equivocal. He made no promises.

waiting to see if the Union victory would deliver true freedom or merely a different form of slavery.

Galloway was unlike any black man the whites of Wilmington had ever encountered. He was neither docile nor obedient—he had a reputation for carrying a pistol—and he defied racial customs.

In July 1867, almost two years after moving to Wilmington, Galloway spoke for an hour during a mass meeting in downtown Wilmington, warning freedmen of a growing danger: a militant new white supremacist threat had emerged in parts of the South, including North Carolina, that was more menacing and more violent than the Home Guard. A secretive band of former Confederate soldiers and white supremacists called themselves, variously, the White Brotherhood, or the Constitutional Union Guards or, more commonly, the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan.

Carolina who considered the Klan a noble and necessary endeavor mounted “to protect the South from ravages and depredations of the spoilers who came South immediately after the war.”

Carpetbaggers

The outfits were intended, in part, to terrorize blacks roused from sleep as their homes were besieged at night.

whipping blacks with tree branches, beating them with ax handles, stripping them naked, burning their pubic hair, strangling them, shooting them in the face. Violence and terror were ingrained in the oath sworn by new Klansmen. The penalty for violating the oath was death; for some initiates, a noose was looped around their neck as they held a Bible and swore fealty to the oath:

You solemnly swear, in the presence of Almighty God, that you will never reveal the name of the person who initiated you: and you will never reveal what is about to come to your knowledge … you will oppose all radicals and negroes in all of their political designs; and that should any radical or negro impose on, abuse or injure any member of this brotherhood, you will assist in punishing him in any manner the camp may direct.

In 1866, North Carolina’s legislature, controlled by reactionary whites, refused, on a vote of 138–11, to ratify the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, which would grant citizenship to former slaves born in the United States and guarantee equal protection under the law.

That same year, the North Carolina legislature passed a Black Code, which restored blacks to near-slave status. In fact, the new law referred to blacks as “lately slaves.”

The code prohibited blacks from serving on most juries or testifying against whites. It severely restricted blacks’ right to own firearms. Interracial mar...

“bound out” for work by whites without their parents’ permission, and the working rights of black adu...

North Carolina’s thirty thousand free blacks had once enjoyed limited rights; between 1776 and 1835, they had been permitted to vote.

Congress denied the right to vote and hold office to any former Confederate who did not sign an oath of allegiance to the Union. Many refused and stayed away from the polls, diluting white conservative voting strength just as blacks were on their way to winning the right to vote.

Of the 120 delegate seats, Republicans took 107—13 of them won by black men.

With former slaves now permitted to run for office, Galloway became the first black man in North Carolina to campaign in a statewide race.

By now, nearly 80,000 black men in North Carolina had registered to vote, versus 117,000 white men.

In the end, it all boiled down to race—specifically, the prospect of racial equality, which for whites meant interracial marriage and, ultimately, a “mongrel race.” “Shall MARRIAGE BETWEEN NEGROES and WHITES—amalgamation—be allowed?” the Wilmington Journal asked white readers. “Arise then, ye men of unmixed blood, the pure blood of the country, and put down this Radical platform.”

In other Southern states, among them Tennessee and Arkansas, former Union colored troops and other freedmen were organized into militias chiefly to protect blacks threatened by the Klan and by other white vigilantes. These black militias were commanded by state governors but were not often mobilized, for fear of antagonizing whites.

AT AGE THIRTY-THREE, Abraham Galloway was gone. He died in Wilmington on September 1, 1870, early in his second term as state senator. Newspapers speculated that the cause of death was fever and jaundice or perhaps rheumatism or a heart ailment.

Waddell had prevailed over an incumbent Republican who had antagonized black voters because he had failed to vote for the Fifteenth Amendment granting them suffrage.

Alexander Lightfoot Manly

they had failed to mention the white men who raped black women with impunity. If the pastors were so concerned about rape and punishment, Manly wrote, then the law should apply equally to blacks and whites, not just to unfortunate black paramours caught with white women.

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 1896, the US Supreme Court upheld separate but equal public accommodations for blacks and whites in its landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

blacks had attained political equality but not social equality.

Their decision endorsed state-mandated racial segregation. Separate but equal was now the law of the land.

Black children typically were permitted to study only through the sixth grade, whites through the twelfth grade.

A common accusation from whites in Wilmington, particularly the working classes dominated by Irish immigrants, was that blacks did not pay taxes or did not pay enough. But the city’s 1895 tax rolls listed 2,238 blacks who paid their taxes in full. In 1897, at least 13 blacks, one of them a woman, owned at least $2,000 in property and paid taxes on every parcel. Tax revenues paid for street improvements, electric lights, sanitation, and other city services—but primarily for white neighborhoods. Predominately black neighborhoods were denied most public conveniences, including reliable police and fire services. Black homeowners often paid twice as much as whites for fire insurance.

Thomas C. Miller, a pawnbroker and auctioneer who built a small real estate empire. Miller was light skinned and charming and was thus considered a nonthreatening “good Negro” by some whites, at least for a time. As early as 1880, Miller was a respected deputy sheriff. By 1889, he owned a combination saloon and restaurant on Dock Street—the only such establishment in Wilmington operated by a black man at the time.

Dancy was a friend and supporter of Booker T. Washington, who rejected open confrontation with whites in favor of education and entrepreneurship—the fundamental building blocks of black progress.

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

murdered at least fifty-five (some accounts said fifty-seven) white men, women, and children before Turner was captured and executed on November 11. His body was flayed and quartered. Scraps of his skin were later fashioned into a purse. His bones were handed out as souvenirs. His head was hacked off and put on public display.

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. Whether the murdered black men were even aware of Turner’s Virginia uprising was of little consequence to whites. They killed indiscriminately.

Four of the condemned men were accused as ringleaders. They were hauled from the county jail and decapitated. Their severed heads were mounted on poles along a public roadway. From that day on, throughout the 1890s and well into the 1950s, the roadway’s name served as an enduring warning to any rebellious black man in Wilmington who might dare challenge white supremacy: Niggerhead Road.

In 1868, universal male suffrage provided under the new state constitution had represented the culmination of generations of struggle for Black Belt blacks led by Abraham Galloway. But for whites, it had unleashed a terrifying new menace in the eastern counties—the majority black vote.

Blacks in eastern North Carolina voted overwhelmingly for the party of Lincoln, briefly helping Republicans take control of the state legislature from 1868 to 1870. The Conservative Party, dominated by white supremacists, reclaimed the legislature in the 1870 election. In 1876, Democrats (the Conservative Party was renamed that year) refined the race-baiting tactics of the 1868 constitutional convention campaign, rallying white voters by demonizing black men. Democrats returned to power statewide in 1876, taking over the legislature, the governor’s mansion, and county governments. It was a pivotal election, coming just a year before the last federal troops were withdrawn and Reconstruction lurched to an end.

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.

But by the early 1890s, during a punishing economic recession, Democrats had alienated white farmers and laborers of the Populist Party by supporting railroads, banks, and other powerful interests at the expense of jobs, workers’ wages, and schools. White farmers in the Populist Party, also known as the People’s Party, were driven to ruin during the devastating recession. Cotton prices collapsed—from 25 cents a pound in 1868 to 12 cents by the 1890s. Banks refused to loan money to most farmers, forcing them to borrow at usurious rates from the merchants who bought their crops. They turned against the bankers and railroad men who dominated the state’s white supremacist Democratic Party.

Populists demanded electoral and economic reforms and better education opportunities for the children of farmers and laborers. Many poor whites were as virulently racist as any Democrat, but Populists aligned themselves with Republicans against moneyed interests, even at the risk of aligning themselves with blacks, at least politically.

They teamed with Republicans, white and black, in an uneasy political and racial ...

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

The next year, the Fusion-dominated legislature restored the popular vote for county officials, reestablishing local black voting majorities in the Black Belt, the sixteen eastern North Carolina counties with black majorities.

By 1897, Wilmington had a Fusionist mayor and police chief, and Fusionists dominated city and county government. Wilmington was now 56 percent black. In a city of some twenty thousand people, there were three thousand more blacks than whites.

He recognized that publishing was politics.

Colonel William Saunders, the former state Klan leader and now North Carolina’s secretary of state.

Daniels brought a deeply partisan tone to the capital’s dominant daily, burnishing the reputations of his political allies and attacking his enemies. He made no pretense of journalistic impartiality. He met almost daily with Democratic politicians in his newspaper office or at party headquarters and served on the party’s executive committee. In time, Daniels became one of the most powerful men in North Carolina—a politician who published his own newspaper.