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

by David Zucchino

Violence and terror were ingrained in the oath sworn by new Klansmen. The penalty for violating the oath was death; for some initiates, a noose was looped around their neck as they held a Bible and swore fealty to the oath: You solemnly swear, in the presence of Almighty God, that you will never reveal the name of the person who initiated you: and you will never reveal what is about to come to your knowledge … you will oppose all radicals and negroes in all of their political designs; and that should any radical or negro impose on, abuse or injure any member of this brotherhood, you will assist in punishing him in any manner the camp may direct.

The Klan devised secret signals of recognition. Touching the head above the right ear was supposed to prompt a fellow Klansman to touch his own head above the left ear, signifying Klan membership. Another sign was thrusting the right hand into a trouser pocket with the thumb exposed. In response, a fellow Klansman was to jam his left hand into a pocket with only the thumb exposed. The nighttime password was: “I say.” The response was: “Nothing.” When challenged: “Who goes there?” The proper response was: “A friend.” When asked: “A friend of who?” The correct reply was: “A friend to his country.” Whether such parody was performed with any regularity is debatable, but the terror instilled by the Klan was not. One North Carolina Klansman distilled the essence of the organization: “To keep down the style of the niggers.”

THE KU KLUX KLAN’S election intimidation campaign in Wilmington began on Sunday, March 22, 1868. That morning, notices signed by the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan suddenly appeared at prominent locations in the city. The placards, described by one white supremacist newspaper as “done up beautifully in carmine writing fluid,” delivered warnings that were both ominous and baroque: K. K. K. Baker’s Tomb, Eastern Division, Windy Month, Cloudy Day, Bloody Hour. Ku Klux: The hour approacheth! Shake up, dry bones, and meet the Mysterious Circles of the Dry Sphere. From East to West, from North to South, they come. To measure justice for the traitor’s doom. When darkness reigns, then is the hour to strike. By order of the Great Grand Centaur.

White politicians claimed there had been massive voter fraud. They demanded that the election results be invalidated. They vowed to renew their fight against a “mongrel race” and black suffrage. They recommitted themselves to white solidarity and to vengeance against blacks and against the blacks’ white allies.

Four of the condemned men were accused as ringleaders. They were hauled from the county jail and decapitated. Their severed heads were mounted on poles along a public roadway. From that day on, throughout the 1890s and well into the 1950s, the roadway’s name served as an enduring warning to any rebellious black man in Wilmington who might dare challenge white supremacy: Niggerhead Road.

In 1876, Democrats congratulated themselves on redeeming the state in the name of white supremacy. Well before the close of Reconstruction in 1877, the vengeance of the Redeemers had essentially suspended the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments in North Carolina. White supremacy was triumphant. For the next seventeen years, the Redeemers ruled North Carolina.

well-refined strategy of racist demagoguery perfected by white supremacists of previous generations. For years, those white men had used a crude phrase for the time-tested tactic of frightening white voters by warning of the twin menace of black suffrage and black beast rapists: “Crying nigger.”

Simmons produced a two-hundred-page screed, the Democratic Party Hand Book. The booklet reflected Simmons’s ingrained belief that blacks were genetically doomed at birth as members of an inherently ignorant and incompetent race. It was distributed to thousands of white voters, with instructions to vote “the white man’s ticket.” Within its pages, Simmons distilled the Southern white man’s burden: It is no fault of the negro that he is here, and he is not to be punished for being here; but this is a white man’s country and white men must control and govern it … Under the benign rule of the Democratic Party during the long period it held unbroken power in North Carolina, the negro race enjoyed peace and quiet, and had the full protection of the laws … But there is one thing the Democrat Party has never done and never will do—and that is to set the negro up TO RULE OVER WHITE MEN … Republican rule in the East means negro rule; and negro rule is a curse to both races … It is useless to tell the people of Wilmington that there is no danger of negro domination, when they see the negro policemen every day parading the streets in uniform and swinging the “billy” … where you see the negro policemen and negro officers as thick as blackbirds.

The preamble of the “Wilmington Declaration of Independence” said the United States Constitution envisioned a government of enlightened men and “did not contemplate for their descendants a subjection to an inferior race.” After reading the preamble aloud, Waddell recited a list of seven resolutions: One—Because whites in Wilmington paid 95 percent of taxes, they would no longer be ruled by Negroes. Two—Whites would no longer tolerate “the actions of unscrupulous white men in affiliating with the negroes.” Three—“[T]he negro has demonstrated by antagonizing our interests in every way, and especially by his ballot, that he is incapable of realizing that his interests are and should be identical with those of the community.” Four—“[T]he giving of nearly all the employment to Negro laborers has been against the best interests of this County” and had retarded Wilmington’s economic growth. Five—Most jobs held by blacks were to be handed over to white men. Six—Blacks were to be treated “with justice and consideration” so long as they obeyed “the intelligent and progressive portion of the community.” Seven—The Daily Record would cease publication and its printing press would be shipped out of the city. Alex Manly would be banished from Wilmington as punishment for “publishing an article so vile and slanderous that it would in most communities have resulted in the lynching of the editor.” If Manly obeyed within twelve hours, he would be guaranteed “forbearance on the part of all wh...

Louisiana, where in 1898, the state legislature had passed a constitutional amendment that carved out an ingenious loophole for white voters. 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. White Louisiana legislators argued that their 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.

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.

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. Perhaps half of them were able to vote. For the first time since just after the Civil War, no black man was elected to either the state house or the state senate in the 1900 election. Not a single black man was elected to a local office in the Black Second.

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.

procedures. But in 2013, the United States Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, gutted the law and eliminated the preclearance requirement. Within hours of the Shelby decision, a Republican leader of the voter ID effort told reporters: “Now we can go with the full bill” for voter ID—because the “legal headache” of preclearance had been removed. The state’s conservatives were now free to invoke the spirit of 1898 via a twenty-first-century voter suppression law nearly as effective as the suffrage amendment and grandfather clause 115 years earlier. 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.

Rather than passing a revised voter ID law, they proposed a constitutional amendment to require citizens to show an ID to vote. The state’s voters approved it by a margin of 56 to 44 percent. In December 2018, the Republican-dominated state legislature voted the amendment into law.

In 2011, Republicans crammed black voters into two contorted, serpentine congressional districts with the aid of sophisticated computer models. At the same time, they created several safe Republican districts dominated by conservative white voters. The changes produced remarkable results. In 2012, Democratic congressional candidates won 51 percent of the vote in North Carolina. Yet Republicans won nine of thirteen congressional districts, erasing the previous 7-to-6 Democratic advantage.

The state’s school textbooks, presided over by white supremacists, ensured that the enduring myths of 1898 were passed down to each new generation of white pupils. A 1933 textbook placed the blame for the killings on elected black officials: “There were many Negro officeholders in the eastern part of the state, some of whom were poorly fitted for their tasks. This naturally aroused ill feeling between the races.” The textbook described Charles Aycock, whose speeches incited white supremacists at rallies in 1898 and 1900, as “one of the best friends that colored people had.” One passage suggested that black citizens were deprived of the vote for their own good: “Though Aycock was in favor of an amendment to take the vote away from illiterate Negroes, he had no ill feeling toward their race.” A 1940 public school textbook blamed black citizens for the misfortunes that befell them: “The mass of negroes became poor citizens. To keep their vote, the Carpetbaggers and Scalawags allowed them to do very much as they pleased. The worst crimes were not punished. The white people of the South were no longer safe.” The 1940 textbook went on to describe how the Ku Klux Klan and, later, the Red Shirts, addressed the problem: To put an end to this terrible condition white people all over the South joined together in a sort of club which they named the Ku Klux Klan. Members of the Ku Klux Klan, dressed as ghosts, scared lawless men into acting decently. On moonlit nights these men could b...

In 1949, another North Carolina public school textbook glossed over white supremacist violence and portrayed black men as aggressors and whites as defenders of law and order in Wilmington. It ignored the killings and coup, describing instead an orderly change of government. “A number of blacks were jailed for ‘starting a riot’ and a new white administration took over Wilmington’s government,” one summary read.