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

by David Zucchino

White politicians claimed there had been massive voter fraud. They demanded that the election results be invalidated.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America.

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.

White served North Carolina’s heavily black Second District in the eastern part of the state, known as the Black Second. He was ridiculed by a white Wilmington newspaper as “a saucy, bitter nigger with the strange name of White, as if a nigger was ever white.”

“We were never very careful about winnowing out the stories or running them down …,” Daniels wrote in a memoir years later. “In fact, the people on every side were at such a key of fighting and hate that the Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality.” As a result, he noted, “The propaganda was having good effect and winning Populists.”

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.