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

by David Zucchino

The Democratic legislature would soon restore legislative control over local appointed offices, ending the Fusionist experiment with elected local rule that had helped put black men in office.

a small notice printed on the back page of the Wilmington Messenger. Headlined ATTENTION WHITE MEN, the item announced a meeting of the “White Men of Wilmington” at the courthouse at eleven o’clock that morning, Wednesday, November 9: “A full attendance is desired, as business in the furtherance of White Supremacy will be transacted.”

The mild language only hinted at the meeting’s true purpose—to set in motion the long-standing plan to overthrow city government.

Rountree then read a short statement: “It is the sense of this meeting that Mayor S. P. Wright and Chief of Police Jno. R. Melton, having demonstrated their utter incapacity to give the city a decent government and keep order therein, their continuance in office being a constant menace to the peace and welfare of this community, they ought forthwith to resign.”

That's fresh, when THEY started and perpetuated the disorder and violence as a key element of their WS campeign.

The columns were so long—at least fifteen hundred men by now, Melton thought—that they took nearly an hour to pass him. With just a handful of police officers under his command and with his job and perhaps his life in jeopardy, Melton felt powerless to stop them. He did not intervene.

The nearest fire brigade was the Cape Fear Steam Fire Engine Company, formed in 1871 as the country’s first all-black steam engine company. The firefighters rushed with their horse-drawn tanker wagon, their fire bell clanging, up North Seventh Street toward the Record building. A white fire chief ordered W. T. “Tuck” Savage, a powerfully built white man with a reputation for brutality, to intercept the black crew. The firemen, alarmed by the size of the mob, halted two blocks from the fire.

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One worker glanced at the armed white men assembled on the street and asked Rountree: “What have we done? What have we done?” Rountree did not respond. “I had no answer,” he wrote later. “They had done nothing.” Even so, Rountree feared that the workers would go home and arm themselves with whatever guns they could muster. He found a telephone and called the armory, directing the Wilmington Light Infantry to haul its Colt rapid-fire gun to the compress “to have it convenient for use if necessary.” Rountree regretted the call almost immediately. He realized he had brought into play a murderous weapon at a time when hundreds of whites were armed with rifles, shotguns, and pistols. It was “a fool thing to do,” he admitted later.

“It was little less than murder that they proposed,” he said later of the mob. He refused to get involved.

As Sprunt continued to beseech the black men to return to work, he dispatched a white supervisor and a black worker to tour black neighborhoods in his personal buggy to find out what was happening there. He also ordered his white workers to bring his private boat around to the wharf so that its four guns were pointed at the white mob. The US military had provided weapons to private vessels and steamers during the Spanish-American War.

As the proprietor of a white outpost in Brooklyn, Dr. Moore had been tasked by the city’s leading white citizens to serve as trip wire for any trouble arising from black men living there. Along with selected white men elsewhere in the city, Moore had been instructed to notify white leaders if blacks began to riot, as the newspapers had been predicting all summer. Shortly before noon on November 10, Dr. Moore was inside his drugstore when he heard the sudden rattle of gunshots from North Fourth and Harnett. He rushed to his telephone and called the armory of the Wilmington Light Infantry. “They’re fighting over the road!” he shouted into the receiver. More gunshots sounded. Five or six black men dressed in workers’ overalls fell dead. One wounded man, Samuel McFallon, crawled under a house on North Fourth Street and later bled to death. Clawson, the Messenger reporter, ran through the streets, trying to keep up with the wild shooting. “Gunfire rattled all around us and bullets whistled closely,” he wrote.

The three men, who all survived their wounds, may have indeed been shot by black men. But it is also possible that they were accidentally shot by white gunmen, who were firing in all directions.

A city ambulance bearing a white cross bounced through the rutted streets, collecting the wounded, both black and white. Fourteen bleeding men, twelve black and two of the three whites who had been shot, were delivered to Wilmington’s City-County Hospital. The hospital was understaffed—many of the white nurses and medical assistants had fled, fearing they would be shot by black rioters. The white resident on call, Dr. R. E. Zachary, treated the patients, the whites in the white ward, the blacks in the colored ward. Two of the black men died just after they were admitted.

Every other patient survived. Dr. Zachary made a notation: “All except the two white m...

The city’s white residents had no doubt who had shot the three white men. Word spread quickly through Wilmington’s white community that Negroes were shooting at whites. Wilmington’s streets were overrun by white men rushing with their guns to help put down the anticipated black rebe...

Thomas Clawson, the white reporter, followed a wounded black man from North Fourth and Harnett into a home at 411 Harnett Street. He encountered three distraught black women. On the floor behind them was a black man named Bizell, dead of his wounds. On a bed, Clawson found the owner of the house, George H. Davis, also a black man, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest, just above his heart, and another to his left thigh. An embedded bullet was visible just beneath the skin of the man’s chest. Clawson ran his finger over it. Davis opened his eyes and told Clawson that the white men had fired first. Before returning to his reporting on the street, Clawson sent for both a white...

He decided to dispatch state militiamen from two nearby towns. The detachments he chose were as committed to white supremacy as the Wilmington units—as Russell knew all too well from his harrowing train ride on Election Day. Russell sent telegrams to state militia units in Clinton and Maxton, two white towns where night riders had threatened and beaten potential black voters throughout the summer and fall.

From towns across the state, white men sent telegrams to the governor’s office or to Wilmington’s white newspapers, offering to help put down the purported black riot. “Hold your ground. Will carry hundred Winchesters if needed,” read a telegram from Rockingham, 130 miles northwest of Wilmington. Whites in Granville County, 170 miles north, offered to send five hundred armed men. Whites in Atlanta and New Orleans also promised armed assistance. And from Washington, DC, came a cryptic offer: “Can bring fifty Tar Heels and Winchesters; if need, wire.” In Fayetteville, the men of the Fayetteville Light Infantry, a state militia, did not wait for a reply to their offer of assistance. They grabbed their guns and boarded a train for Wilmington.

because of his order, Colonel Taylor was able to declare martial law and order the Wilmington Light Infantry to proceed from the armory to Brooklyn—armed with the Colt rapid-fire gun, paid for by the city’s white supremacist businessmen. Before they left, the infantrymen gathered next to the Colt to pose for a photograph.

As one of the targeted Big Six, the sheriff was in no position to turn down Morton’s request. But he refused to go out himself to restrain the white gunmen; he had no intention of offering himself as a target. Instead, French provided Morton with a handwritten order instructing him to “use all the force at your disposal to quell the existing violation of the peace in the city.” French did not specify who had violated the peace, but it was understood to be black men. The Naval Reserves now had authorization—from a white Republican—to secure the peace with every weapon at Morton’s disposal, including the Hotchkiss rapid-fire gun delivered two days earlier.

Telegraphs had been in use in the United States for half a century, and by the late 1890s telegraph operators were common sights in downtown Wilmington—the gatekeepers of the internet of the day. Visiting white reporters from New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and elsewhere filed their dispatches by telegraph, providing not only moment-to-moment updates but also a nearly unanimous portrayal of the white supremacy campaign as a welcome corrective to corrupt Negro rule. Readers hundreds of miles away kept abreast of events in Wilmington in something approaching real time. A correspondent for the Washington Evening Star, for instance, transmitted a detailed account, by telegraph, of the events of November 10 in time to be published in the evening edition that same day.

Between them, the infantry and the Naval Reserves were able to deploy 140 trained and armed white men. Russell’s decision was pivotal: he gave a committed white supremacist unchecked authority to unleash state troops against black citizens—the very men whose votes had put Russell in office.

Using race as a pawn to get elected and then turning the other cheek and even ordering violence against them whenever it fit their agenda...

George Rountree later recalled seeing “several negroes lying on the street dead and a good many white people about with arms.” By some accounts, up to twenty-five black men were shot dead near the bridge.

White witnesses later claimed that Wright fired on the whites from his attic, wounding two white men.

Men in the mob fired into the attic, then set the house alight. Wright emerged from the flames and was shot instantly. He fell, his blood soaking the packed earth. Several men yanked him to his feet. Wright begged for mercy. Someone smashed him over the head with a gas pipe, drawing more blood and slamming him back to his knees. Several men yelled for him to be lynched from a nearby lamppost. They searched for a rope. But another man suggested that Wright be given a chance to run for his life. He was released. “Run, nigger, run!” a man shouted. Bleeding profusely, Wright stumbled through the packed sand at the edge of the street. He struggled about fifty feet before gunshots sounded. He tumbled to the ground, felled by thirteen bullets, five of them through his back. He lay in the dirt bleeding for about thirty minutes before several men took him to a hospital. Wright survived through the night but died early the next morning. Doctors who treated him told the Messenger: “They never saw one man with as many shots in him as he had.”

White ministers carried their guns to kill Negro Christians and sinners.

At Tenth and Princess Streets, located across the street from the Wilmington Seacoast Railway depot, stood Morro Castle, a well-known whorehouse. The madam asked an officer of the Wilmington Light Infantry to dispatch three militiamen to protect her black prostitutes from attack. Her request was politely refused.

two fifteen-year-old white boys with guns emerged from the shadows.

The mob took the leading colored ministers and compelled them to go around the city with them and ask the colored people to be obedient to the white people and go in their homes and keep quiet. This was a great humiliation for us and a shame upon our denominations.

“The poor creature jumped up and ran out the back door in frantic terror to be shot down like a dog by armed soldiers ostensibly sent to preserve the peace,” Jane Cronly, a white neighbor, wrote in her diary.

Buck Burkhimer, a Light Infantry militiaman, was upset that soldiers were shooting at unarmed civilians. He rode on horseback among his fellow militiamen, screaming at them, “Shame, men! Stop this! Stop this!” He pointed to several black corpses. “Don’t you see these dead men?” The soldiers responded by pointing their weapons at Burkhimer.

As a white woman whose brother had been compelled to serve as a sentinel, Cronly understood, to her horror, the murderous motives of the white supremacists who directed the killings. And she had clearly observed the effect on her black neighbors. “The whole thing was with the object of striking terror to the man’s heart, so that he would never vote again,” she wrote. “For this was the object of the whole persecution; to make Nov. 10th a day to be remembered by the whole race for all time.”

The black men of Wilmington were trapped. The main roads leading into the city were blocked by Red Shirts intent on intercepting the columns of black rioters rumored to be descending on the city from outlying areas.

Hundreds of black families had begun abandoning their homes and possessions. They fled the city in wagons and carriages or on foot, seeking safety in cemeteries and swamps just outside the city.

The Red Shirts and other sentinels did not try to stop them. They were focused on confronting columns of armed black men purportedly invading the city. Other black...

When Mayor Wright was tracked down and told to resign, he initially objected, saying he preferred not to step down during a crisis. He was told he had two options: resign or be forcibly removed from office.

Reluctantly, he agreed to quit.

The deputy told Melton he had just seen “a lot of men killed.” Waddell’s emissaries interrupted and told Melton not to worry about the dead black men, because he was no longer in charge. He was instructed to resign at once. Melton resisted.

While Waddell and his committeemen awaited a response from Wright and Melton, they began selecting their own mayor, police chief, and aldermen. An impromptu “election” was held. Eight white supremacists were selected as aldermen—seven of them from the Committee of Twenty-Five itself, including two men who had directed the rioters, Hugh MacRae and J. Allan Taylor of the Secret Nine. All that remained was for them to confront the current Fusion aldermen and force them to surrender their positions.

Chairman Waddell was the obvious choice. Waddell, feigning modesty, if not surprise, accepted their appointment as Wilmington’s new mayor. There was no objection.

Later, Waddell would insist that his election was entirely legal because Wright had “resigned” on his own volition: “It was certainly the strangest performance in American history, though we literally followed the law, as the Fusionists made it themselves,” he wrote. “There has not been a single illegal act committed in the change of government. Simply, the old board went out, and the new board came in—strictly according to law.”

The board convened, with Wright presiding. One by one, the five aldermen who were present resigned. They obeyed instructions to formally approve their replacements—the men selected an hour earlier by Waddell and his Committee of Twenty-Five.

“They resigned in response to public sentiment,” a front-page New York Times article explained the next morning.

In a matter of minutes, the eight Fusionists on the board—including three black men—had been replaced by eight white supremacist Democrats.

Told of Melton’s resignation, the new board of aldermen appointed Edgar G. Parmele as the city’s police chief.

Parmele would soon be tasked with restraining the white mobs that had been unleashed by his party.

But in the blank space for noting the expiration date of the new mayor’s term, Struthers wrote nothing. Then the new mayor was sworn in.

Rountree sent the governor a dismissive reply: “Mayor and Aldermen have resigned. Nominees of citizens chosen … Law will be maintained and peace restored.”

Waddell’s first act as mayor was to swear in 250 “special policemen” to restore order. He chose them from among the armed men who had spent the day chasing and killing black men—men who were described by the New York Times the next day as “reputable white citizens.” Waddell was also authorized to appoint twenty-five armed men to patrol the city on bicycles that night. Another twenty-five gunmen would be selected to patrol on horseback. Several Red Shirts offered their services. “The new Government will devote its attention to restraining recklessness among the whites, as well as keeping down lawlessness among the negroes,” the Times reported. “Further trouble of a genuine or serious nature is not expected.”

Some families broke away and bedded down among the worn tombstones of Wilmington’s colored cemetery, known as Pine Forest. They thought white men would not venture there.