More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 29 - March 19, 2020
White planters and business leaders had vowed to remove the city’s multiracial government and black public officials by the ballot or the bullet—or both.
“It is doubtful if there ever was a community in the United States that had as many lethal weapons per capita as in Wilmington at that time.”
The city’s thriving population of black professionals contradicted the white portrayal of Wilmington’s blacks as poor, ignorant, and illiterate.
eager to fire their weapons.
The men moved in columns with their weapons raised, in something approaching a military formation.
antagonize the white men.
we are powerless,”
they are yet unable to conceive of the Negro as possessing any rights at all,”
the whites of Wilmington had not truly been defeated. He watched them return from the war unbowed, full of rage, and more committed than ever to white supremacy.
advising blacks not to expect to be granted suffrage or other civil rights immediately.
slavery technically outlawed but with white supremacy largely unchallenged
For whites in Wilmington, blacks had ceased to be slaves, but they had not ceased to be black. They were still considered unworthy, unequal, and inferior, still subservient to whites by any measure—social, political, or economic.
free citizens, not just free Negroes.
those terms were the same terms that had always circumscribed the daily lives of blacks under white domination: whites would continue to rule; blacks would continue to obey.
as proper in appearance as any white man.
he assured them that whites meant blacks no harm.
two races, one superior, one servile, but the two sides living in harmony.
Only a white person could think harmony possible in that situation.
all at once turned to be your enemies.”
I would hardly say it's "all at once" that black people felt whites were their enemies.
as intelligent a conception of what they were doing as many white men.
show the world that you deserve and can maintain the freedom and the privileges which have been bestowed upon you.”
So paternalistic and baldly racist. Why do black people have to earn their humanity? And why do white people think they get to "bestow" anything, especially freedom/dignity/humanity, which black people had before whites enslaved them....
fortunate to share a city as fine as Wilmington with white men:
influence upon you,
ought to cultivate the friendship and good will of the white people.”
Who are actively attacking you and don't believe you are as fully human as they are....
leave Wilmington for the whites who owned it.
demanded universal suffrage for black men, free of literacy tests or property requirements.
merely a different form of slavery.
neither docile nor obedient
highest proportion of black residents of any large Southern city
White politicians claimed there had been massive voter fraud.
entrenched white supremacist principle that no sexual union between a black man and a white woman could possibly be consensual.
There is but one remedy for rape, and that is the death penalty, speedily executed.”
white men who raped black women with impunity.
the law should apply equally to blacks and whites, not just to unfortunate black paramours caught with white women.
commemorating Memorial Day, ignored by most whites as an oppressive federal holiday for fallen white and colored Union soldiers.
political equality but not social equality.
Miller was light skinned and charming and was thus considered a nonthreatening “good Negro”
avoid antagonizing whites, for such behavior could prove fatal.
abiding fear that their deferential black neighbors might one day rise up and slit their throats. For all their dominance over blacks in the city, whites had never extinguished the malignant dread of black rebellion
primed to believe any tale that described savagery by black men,
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.
violence might be required.
Whites had to be persuaded that free blacks posed an imminent threat to their privileged way of life.
the negro race enjoyed peace and quiet, and had the full protection of the laws
black man who could vote or hold public office was a man who might, by their logic, become a rival for the affections of white women.
Years later, Daniels acknowledged that rapes of white women by black men were “few in number.”
white men “will take the law in their own hands
As if they haven't had it this whole time....
could not envision a consensual sexual relationship between a black man and a white woman. In her view, any black man who approached a white woman had rape on his mind.
Let virtue be something more than an excuse for them to intimidate and torture a helpless people.
they were already willing to kill all of the office holders and all the negroes,”
threats that never seemed to emerge.
