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

by David Zucchino

Only twenty-one of Wilmington’s black citizens registered to vote, and only five turned up at the polls.

No Republican or Populist dared run against the aldermen appointed by the coup leaders. Running unopposed, the white supremacist aldermen who had been “elected” in November were “reelected” to two-year terms by the city’s white voters. Among those candidates were two of the men who had directed the mobs on November 10, Hugh MacRae and J. Allan Taylor.

But in 1899, the Democratic legislature passed the state’s first formal Jim Crow law, requiring segregated train compartments. Railroad companies complained that the law would require them to build separate cars for each race. They also pointed out that whites would lose the services of their black servants while riding on trains. The bill was amended to allow the use of partitions within train cars and to permit black servants to sit with their employers in white sections.

Democrats also proposed a bill to punish “fornication and adultery between the negros and whites,” punishable by a prison sentence of up to five years. The proposal was mocked mercilessly by Republicans. A white legislator from western North Carolina pointed out a fatal flaw: if the law passed, he said, almost every man in the state house would have to plead guilty. A white Republican judge joked that “nine times out of ten, if you will chase down the fellows who are trying to stir up race prejudice, you will find that the most vigorous one is sleeping with a negro woman.”

The bill died without a vote.

“There are three ways in which we may rule—by force, by fraud or by law,” he said in a one speech. “We have ruled by force, we can rule by fraud, but we want to rule by law.”

Question: Will the Amendment, if adopted, disfranchise the Negro? Answer: The chief object of the Amendment is to eliminate the ignorant and irresponsible Negro vote. Question: Will the Amendment disfranchise the uneducated white man? Answer: Why certainly not. The object of the Grandfather Clause is to protect forever the entire body of the uneducated white vote of the state in their right to vote.

The suffrage amendment had easily passed into law statewide, 182,852 to 128,285, or nearly 60 percent to 40 percent, if the reports of Democratic poll officers were to be believed.

After black men won the right to vote in the state in 1868, nearly eighty thousand registered. By 1900, the two white supremacy campaigns had whittled that number to just fifteen thousand.

In Halifax County, the recorded vote count exceeded the total population of voting-age men by nearly 250 votes. In three other Black Belt counties, the recorded vote for Aycock exceeded the total number of white men of voting age by several hundred.

(State legislatures elected US senators until the 1913 passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, which provided for a direct popular vote.)

Inspired by the sweeping success of North Carolina’s grandfather clause, other Southern states adopted variations of the law—Alabama in 1901, Virginia in 1902, Georgia in 1908, and Oklahoma in 1910.

Bellamy, Henderson wrote, “walks cheerfully to his seat over broken homes, broken hearts, disappointed lives, dead husbands and fathers, the trampled rights of freedmen and not one word of condemnation is heard.”

Before George White left Congress, he hired Alex Manly as his private secretary in Washington. The editor was distraught and desperate for work after months on the run. The new job helped stabilize his life.

Stationary Engineers Association to teach black men industrial skills. To promote black employment, the two men also set up the Armstrong Association of Philadelphia. It was later absorbed by the National Urban League, which sent Manly and others on a nationwide campaign to raise money and help establish chapters in other Northern cities with black enclaves.

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.

The number of registered black voters in North Carolina quickly plummeted—from 126,000 in 1896 to 6,100 in 1902. The state’s black citizens did not vote in significant numbers for at least six decades, until the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and, ultimately, after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

For seven decades after 1898, black citizens were denied political or appointed office in Wilmington and elsewhere in North Carolina. George Henry White was the last black U.S. Representative from North Carolina for ninety-one years—until Eva Clayton was elected in 1992 in a district that contained parts of the old Black Second.

After black carpenter John Norwood was forced to resign as alderman in 1898, no black man served on the council until Kenneth McLaurin in 1972. Ten years later, Joseph McQueen Jr., a police detective, was elected New Hanover County’s first black sheriff.

Almost overnight, the coup transformed Wilmington from an American mecca for blacks to a bastion of white supremacy virulently hostile to its black citizens. Before the 1898 coup, Wilmington was 56 percent black. That percentage dropped precipitously in the years after 1898. The 1900 federal census listed Wilmington as 49 percent black. The rate continued to plunge—from 47 percent in 1910 to 40 percent in 1930, 35 percent in 1950, 33 percent in 1990, and just 18.3 percent by 2018.

After Daniel Russell left office in 1900, North Carolina did not elect a Republican governor for nearly three-q...

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. It eliminated same-day registration and straight-ticket voting, two other provisions especially popular among African Americans. The new law also required a state-issued ID to vote. That requirement imposed a special burden on African Americans voters, many of whom lacked a driver’s license, birth certificate, or other official documents required to obtain a state-issued ID. In

“The Negro and Fusion Politics, 1894–1901.” Edmonds revealed that the purported spontaneous white response to a black riot was instead a carefully planned coup d’état that restored white supremacy.

First published as the Cape Fear Journal, the weekly is published today by Jervay’s descendants from a white clapboard building on South Seventh Street, directly across from the spot where the Record was torched in 1898.

the audience joined in a dramatic counterpoint to the “White Declaration of Independence,” signed by white supremacists at Thalian Hall a century earlier. This time, more than a thousand people of both races lined up to sign a “People’s Declaration of Racial Interdependence.” The document asked the city’s leaders to “declare openly their common commitment to the path of interracial dialogue, inclusion and reconciliation.”

It identified, by name, thirteen black men killed during the riot and listed nine more dead men whose identities could not be confirmed. Noting that the bodies of many black victims were either quickly buried or never recovered, the commission estimated that the total number of blacks killed was at least sixty.

On November 8, 2008—110 years after the stolen election of 1898—an 1898 Memorial Park was installed.

In 2018, a North Carolina state historical marker was installed in Wilmington to commemorate the events of 1898.