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February 29 - March 19, 2020
they were doing practically nothing,”
white life and white property.
To fight for the United States for colonial conquest was, for them, to fight to perpetuate the same system of racial segregation and discrimination that had brought misery to millions of blacks.
they sought to emphasize their whiteness by adopting their colleagues’ white supremacist views.
choose between their jobs and registering to vote.
their natural disposition when unmolested by mean white people is to know their places and keep in them.” Threatening them only drove them to mischief,
It was the duty of Red Shirts to crush any such black resistance.
they, too, had been whipped and beaten by white men.
“I was whipped out of politics.”
only to defend themselves.
“The negroes, as a rule, are peaceable, tractable citizens, and any disturbance that may arise on election day will not be of their inauguration.”
averting and overthrowing Negro domination.”
any white man who sought the support of black voters was “a negro inside.”
“We cannot outnumber the negroes,” he said. “And so we must either outcheat, outcount or outshoot them!”
take back the privileges of race that they believed, deep in their hearts, were rightfully theirs.
What did they ever lose??
who have done more for the Negro race than all the other peoples who have ever lived upon the earth,
their country
“Negro paradise.”
Some paradise ...
make them fiercer and more terrorizing in their conduct.”
opportune time to incite a race riot
There has never been Negro domination in any county in the State,”
if he refuses, kill him!
the black men they encountered were neither hostile nor violent, as the city’s newspapers had predicted.
Lee’s account was pure fiction. Virtually all the armed men who remained on the streets throughout the night were white, not black.
In a matter of months, their campaign had intimidated and terrified thousands of black men into staying home from the polls; of the state’s roughly one hundred thousand eligible black voters, fewer than half had voted.
the whites of Wilmington were quite prepared, even eager, for violence.
The rumors reinforced what many whites had long believed based on newspaper reports: blacks were plotting to take over the city.
he had seen the white men open fire.
also possible that they were accidentally shot by white gunmen, who were firing in all directions.
All except the two white men were shot in the back.”
he gave a committed white supremacist unchecked authority to unleash state troops against black citizens
“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.”
Parmele would soon be tasked with restraining the white mobs that had been unleashed by his party.
away from the river and white neighborhoods,
further resistance would only get him killed.
Waddell already knew the content of the Colored Citizens’ response and proceeded to attack the Record anyway.
DESERVING NEGROES WILL BE PROTECTED, the Evening Dispatch promised.
AKA subservient
if they lynched the prisoners, “it would be a lasting disgrace to the town.”
He wanted to make a public appeal to tamp down the white rage he had been stoking for months.
Seems a little late for that now....
The Secret Nine disregarded Colonel Waddell’s midnight plea for peace.
Shocking
He did not note the obvious irony—that some of the new police officers charged with restoring order carried the same weapons they had fired at black men the day before.
In his view, the white supremacist coup had made the city safer for both whites and blacks.
“We must hope that by far the greater part of negroes in this city are anxious for the restoration of order and quiet and ‘the old order’—the rule of the white people,”
the city’s Democratic newspapers continued to frame the coup not as a violent overthrow but as a return at last to law and order and responsible government.
“It was not a mob, it was simply the unanimous uprising of the white people against conditions that had become intolerable,
The New York Journal correspondent on the scene equated the killings of November 10 to mass murder:
Sounds like an accurate characterization
There was no riot; simply the strong slaying the weak and helpless.
whites weren’t up to the standards set by longtime black workers.
the federal government had no interest in punishing election violence in North Carolina.
the new law had helped reduce the number of black voters from 14,117 to 1,493.
