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April 27 - May 7, 2023
They drew up a new list of nearly fifty men to be forever banished from Wilmington. It included the Big Six white Fusionists plus several other Fusionists, white and black, who were considered troublesome.
it was later estimated that more than sixty black men were killed on November 10. “Some were found by the stench and miasma that came forth from their decaying bodies,” Reverend J. Allen Kirk wrote.
“For the most part,” the Morning Star told its readers the day after the inquest, testimony had been provided by “good reputable citizens.” Their accounts, the paper said, “prove conclusively that the negroes were the aggressors in the unfortunate affair and that the white men were forced to fire as a matter of protection.”
With the killings completed and their enemies banished, Wilmington’s whites began crafting a lasting narrative of a heroic victory over dark and malevolent forces. The city’s white ministers led the way.
Hoge urged his congregants to show compassion for “our colored neighbors,” whom he considered ill equipped for citizenship and misled by white carpetbaggers.
Now the chief advised the black ministers to tell their congregations to help lure their friends and neighbors from the woods and back to their homes and jobs. Parmele also instructed them to preach acceptance of the new racial and political order in Wilmington.
Northern newspapermen seemed torn between their scorn for Southerners and their widely held contempt for black capabilities. Most deplored the violence in Wilmington but not the outcome. Many Northern editors wrote that they did not consider blacks, in the North or the South, capable of holding public office. They welcomed the return of what they regarded as the natural order in America—whites ruling blacks. They seemed aggrieved only by the way Wilmington’s whites went about it.
The Washington Evening Star and New York Journal were among the few white-run Northern newspapers to express unreserved outrage. The Evening Star headlined its editorial on Wilmington: NORTH CAROLINA’S SHAME. It said the violence “had the desired effect of keeping the negroes away from the polls on election day.” The New York Journal correspondent on the scene equated the killings of November 10 to mass murder:
The shotgun and the Bible have never been separated by the Caucasian … It is not the Christianity that makes the Negro forgiving, it is two hundred and fifty years of forced coercion, cowardice and damaging instructions to play into the favor of the white man. Better get a gun for Christmas. Insure your lives Negroes, and then you are in line of equality.
The National Anti Mob-and-Lynch Law Association, formed in 1897 by black residents of Columbus, Ohio,
Some children and elderly people had fallen grievously ill; a black minister reported that several infants born under the pines had died of exposure. The New York Times reported that many families “were in a starving condition.”
A black church newsletter edited by John C. Dancy put the number at more than fourteen hundred in the four weeks after November 10. Over that same period, fifty-five houses rented to blacks were vacated in Brooklyn,
By the end of April, an estimated twenty-eight hundred blacks had left since November 10.
A White Laborer’s Union was organized “to aid and assist white men in obtaining situations and work which previously had largely been occupied by negroes.”
In the first days after the coup, more than sixty white men were awarded unskilled or semiskilled jobs previously held by blacks, with many more promised.
“It is proposed to organize White Men’s Unions throughout the south for the purpose of encouraging the employment of white men and … cause the negro to segregate or emigrate to other sections of the United States, which is all the more desirable,” the paper suggested.
As seasoned politicians and public servants, the three men believed they possessed the credentials to demand the attention of United States attorney general John W. Griggs and perhaps McKinley himself. On their first day in the capital, they lodged a complaint at the US attorney general’s office, then met with reporters. They complained that they had been seized without charge or warrant “and told in forcible language that if ever again they set foot in Wilmington they would be shot on sight.” They demanded federal intervention.
The president had other matters on his mind. The bloodshed in Wilmington was overshadowed by several crises confronting McKinley that week. Negotiations with Spain in Paris for a peace treaty to formally end the Spanish-American War were proceeding poorly. Some American troops who had fought in Cuba were dying of yellow fever, prompting an investigation into the War Department’s combat tactics in Cuba and its handling of food and sanitary facilities for troops. In the Philippines, insurgents were defying American occupation.
McKinley did not publicly address events in Wilmington, but the killings had commanded the attention of one member of his cabinet. On the evening of November 10, a correspondent for the Charlotte Observer had interviewed Secretary of War Russell A. Alger as he emerged from a meeting with the president. Asked about the Wilmington killings, Alger called them “a disgrace to the State and to the Country.” McKinley was “much exercised over the startling reports” from Wilmington, the Observer correspondent reported, citing his conversation with Alger. But Alger emphasized that federal troops could
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Harry Jones, a black man, wrote from Denver to remind McKinley that black soldiers from Wilmington and elsewhere had served during the Spanish-American War that summer: “Is it possible we must leave our homes and go and fight a foreign foe and not get any protection at home by the government we are defending?”
Another black man, Samuel E. Huffman, wrote from Springfield, Ohio: “The Republican party always posed as a friend of the Negro, and the Negro has so regarded that party, and he allyed himself with that party, believing it to be his friend, yet that friend stands by and sees him robed [robbed] of both his political and civil rights, without making a protest Against such treatment.”
“The outside world only knows one side of the trouble here, there is no paper to tell the truth about the Negro here, in this or any other Southern state. The Negro in this town had no arms (except pistols perhaps in some instances) with which to defend themselves against from the attack of lawless whites.”
“The Man who promises the Negro protection now as Mayor is the one who in his speech at the Opera house said the Cape Fear should be strewn with carcasses.”
“The men of the 1st North Carolina were home on a furlough and they took high hand in the nefarious work also. The Companies from every little town came in to kill the negro. There was not any Rioting Simply the strong slaying the weak.”
McKinley had responded: “Daughter, I understand
the conditions and have neither the wish nor intention to interfere.”
Don’t do it,” Carr wrote. “It is the lawless, vicious, bad element of the negro race that is being suppressed … the property-owners and the taxpayers will not submit to the domination of the vicious element of the black race.” Another telegram, sent to federal officials in Washington, DC, by an anonymous white supremacist in Wilmington, warned that if federal troops were sent, “Caskets should be included in their equipment.”
in 1895, McKinley became the first presidential candidate of either party to campaign before black voters, at a church in Savannah.
During the 1896 campaign, McKinley focused on reconciliation to heal the lingering wounds of the Civil War.
White unity over civil rights.
By the autumn of 1898, as Spain challenged the United States in peace talks and American troops served in Cuba and the Philippines, a spirit of nationalism and patriotism—and often jingoism—prevailed over sectional interests.
He did not make a single public reference to the killings in Wilmington.
While McKinley was silent on the killings and coup in Wilmington, he did support black advancement within his administration. In his first seven months in office, he appointed a record number of blacks—179—to federal positions. Blacks served in almost every government agency, including the Treasury and the State Department.
It was clear to Bernard that Washington wanted nothing to do with any credible investigation into the Wilmington killings.
He had watched Republicans, cowed by the Democrats’ intimidation tactics, abandon blacks in Wilmington. He had predicted that Republicans in Raleigh and Washington would turn their backs on them as well.
When he realized that Manly was a Negro—and worse, the alleged instigator of the riot—the President ordered him out of the White House,” Milo Manly told a historian in 1977.
“I bought a ticket and went to Washington, there putting my case before the administration. I was told that the country was powerless,”Manly told the gathering. “Besides, it was too busy settling questions in the Philippines, and could not stop such pastimes as shooting down ‘niggers,’ or words to that effect. 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.”
fraud, and voter intimidation had been effectively legalized, so long as the targets were black.
new voter registration law gave registrars authority to ask a potential voter any “material” question regarding identity and qualifications. To help identify blacks for disqualification, the law required registrars to write down applicants’ race. The law enhanced opportunities for fraud and intimidation, but it did not eliminate the black vote altogether. The next challenge was to find a legal framework to suppress the black vote.
Rountree’s committee seized on two schemes to help disenfranchise black voters: the poll tax and the literacy test. Both had been imposed in other Southern states. The US Supreme Court had upheld Mississippi’s literacy test and poll tax in 1898; it ruled that both satisfied the Fifteenth Amendment because they applied to all voters, not just black men. But white politicians in North Carolina realized a poll tax would create financial hardships for poor whites, and a literacy test would disenfranchise illiterate whites at a time when nearly a quarter of the state’s whites could not read or
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Men who had voted before 1867—the year Reconstruction laws instituted universal suffrage—or whose fathers or grandfathers had voted before 1867 were exempted from the state’s poll tax and literacy test.
grandfather clause did not explicitly discriminate against blacks, because it applied to both races. But it punished only black men, of course, because the black vote did not exist before 1867.
A few Republicans and Populists objected, but it hardly mattered. Republicans held only thirty seats, the Populists just six. Democrats had 134.
On February 21, 1899, just seven weeks after the legislature convened, it approved the suffrage amendment and the grandfather clause by overwhelming margins: 42 to 6 in the state senate and 81 to 27 in the house.
The judge said of the law: “It does not deprive anyone of the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude but it catches the ignorant Negro just the same.”
the new law had helped reduce the number of black voters from 14,117 to 1,493.
Daniels reported that the amendment had not permitted every illiterate white man in Louisiana to vote. A group of immigrants, many of them Italian, had been stricken from the polls by the new law.
Daniels was told that the amendment had improved race relations by sharply reducing black votes, which whites considered divisive. In one parish that contained twenty-five hundred black men of voting age, not one had dared register to vote in the most recent election, he reported. In a neighboring parish, where blacks had held a five-hundred-vote advantage prior to the amendment, only forty blacks had registered to vote. “The election was perfectly fair,” a white judge assured Daniels.
It was only by an almost superhuman effort in 1876 that the white people were able to wrest control of the government from the blacks … they had a revolution not unlike that in Wilmington … They took their ballots and their guns and they drove out the negro politicians and carpet baggers just as the people of Wilmington did in 1898.
And with blacks removed from both the polls and public office, there was no need for white men to resort to violence.
In his final dispatch from Louisiana, Daniels summarized the achievements of the grandfather clause: 1. Eliminating the Negro. 2. Guaranteeing the right to vote to every white man, whether educated or not. 3. Purifying politics.
