Wilmington, NC – coup d’état
By
John C Abercrombie
This post focuses on a little known fact of American History known as a coup d’état. For information and pronunciation, click here. A coup d’état is the illegal and often violent overthrow of an existing government by a small group. In this case the city government of the city of Wilmington, North Carolina was overthrown by a violent massacre of as many as 60 citizens of the city by a mob of people opposed to the fact that the government had members of the Black race in responsible positions.
The event took place in 1898 when a mob of White vigilantes. Vigilantes are a mob who seek to enforce their will on a situation disregarding laws in place. They are often violent and kill indiscriminately without trial or seeking the truth. The mob was misinformed about the ability of duly elected local government to govern because there were Blacks and Whites forming a biracial government.
Wilmington, North Carolina, is a port city that is the country seat of New Hanover County in the coastal southeastern portion of North Carolina. In 1898, it was a great place for Blacks as it offered great opportunity and was over 50% Black. The White Democratic party which ruled most of the South had been defeated by the Fusion movement in the latest election. The Fusion movement was composed of White farmers and Black Republicans. Together they had defeated the White supremacy of the Democrats.
Wilmington had a thriving Black community and was considered THE most progressive city in the South. There were bustling businesses and represented what the new South could have become after the Civil War.
In Wilmington there were 126,000 Black men registered to vote in 1896. There was a booming middle class including 65 doctors, lawyers and educators, many independent entrepreneurs including barber shops and restaurants. There were public health workers and member of the police and fire departments. Black Republicans had positions of power and were serving as city council members, magistrates and other elected positions.
The first act was stoking far of a Black uprising in the city and fear that they would end the Southern was of life, endangering White women and the fear that Black men not White men would govern. These vigilantes pledged to “choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses” as an alternative to allowing Wilmington’s Black citizens to succeed.
Cape Fear is in the coastal plain and tidewater region of North Carolina around the area of Wilmington, North Carolina. The name comes from the Cape Fear River which flows through the region and empties into the Atlantic Ocean.
The coup resulted in more than 100 Black government officials being forced from their duly elected positions and an estimated number, ranging from 60 to 250 Black citizens murdered, with countless leaving without their property for fear of their lives.
As in most instances of violence in the South, no one has ever been prosecuted for the more than crimes that has seen over 100,000 registered Black voters flee from the City. It would be over 75 years before another Black served in local government.
Following the coup powerful Democrats such as
- Josephus Daniels, publisher of the largest newspaper in North Carolina, the News and Observer
- Charles Aycock, future governor
- Alfred Moore Waddell, former Congressman and Confederate soldier
They plotted to lure White voters from the Fusion Party and against Black citizens. This point was made quite clear in the Democracy’s official 1898 handbook which stated, “This is a White man’s country, and White men must control and govern it.”
The use of fake news was used in partisan newspapers.
- One published an article the “Negro Menace.” Inflaming the fears that the state would be overrun by a Black political party despite the well known fact that the Fusion movement was mostly White. There was also an abundance of cartoons showing Black men preying on White women.
- Another published a speech from future United States Senator Rebecca Felton who said she supported lynching a Black man every day if it meant protecting White women.
- Waddell provoked tension with a speech in which he warned “Let them understand once and for all that we will have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live. We are resolved to change them, if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses.” He continued, “Negro domination shall henceforth be only a shameful memory to us and an everlasting warning to those who shall ever again seek to revive it.”
During this period White police rode into Black homes, shipping Black men and threatening them with death for even attempting to vote. On Election Day armed mobs of White men gathered outside polling places, threatening any Black who tried to cast a ballot. With the outward displays of violence, White Democrats won every election on the ballot in which they had a candidate.
Following the call to lynch a Black man a day by Rebecca Felton, Alex Manly publisher of the Black newspaper responded with an editorial that included … White men were hypocrites for protecting White women while seeking to “destroy the morality of ours.” Noting that Whites had long preyed sexually on Black women, both during slavery and since the Civil War as White men often held economic and political power over Black women in the segregated society.
Great controversy was generated when he openly referred to miscegenation in South Carolina society, noting flaws in the White double standard of assuming that all relationships of Black men and White women were sexually coercive. Stating that consensual relationships took place between White women and Black men, but when these relationships attracted public attention, White people called it rape. He continued to refer to another social fact that many Whites wanted to ignore “Black men were in fact of mixed race, with White paternal ancestry. This alluded to studies by noted Black journalist Ida B Wells he argued that the stereotype of the “Big Black Brute” punished in Lynchings was incorrect, and that many Black men that were not only mixed race with European ancestry but were “sufficiently attractive for White girls to culture and refinement to fall in love with them, as is well known to all.”
While factual, it inflamed White supremist and was widely reprinted.
Once in power, the Democrats started reversing the economic wealth of Blacks and instituting the principals of White supremacy.
The newspapers published “The White Declaration of Independence”
“We will no longer be ruled and will NEVER again be ruled by men of African origin.”
The Declaration stripped Black citizens of the right to vote and demanded that city jobs held by Blacks be given to White citizens. They also demanded that Alex Manly, publisher of the Black newspaper leave town immediately or be lynched.
The Black voters decreased from 125,000 to a low of 6,100 by 1902. There was not a Black citizen in public office in Wilmington until 1972.
In a country that prides itself on freedom of the press, armed men burned the building to the ground and destroyed the equipment. That same mob continued and forced the duly elected Republican mayor and city aldermen to resign. Waddell was installed as Wilmington’s mayor.
The mob of 2,000 Whites terrorized the city. The racist police force, state militia armed with guns and military grade Colt machine guns killed at least 60 Black residents. Pleas for assistance to the state government and the White House were ignored.
“The black middle and merchant class has never been reinstated to this day,” says David Zucchino, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the book Wilmington’s Lie. “The coup left a permanent scar on the city. Wilmington became a place where no Black people would go unless, to borrow a phrase used in the newspaper, they ‘knew their place.’”
Immediately following the coup and for more than 100 years after, North Carolina’s newspapers, media and state-run institutions obscured or distorted its truth, describing the one-sided coup as a race war instigated, in part, by Black aggression. Many of the coup’s leaders, including Waddell, Daniels and Aycock were heralded as brave heroes.
No one was ever arrested or prosecuted for any of the Wilmington coup’s crimes.
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When white supremacists overthrew a government The hidden history of an American coup.
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History
There are many people, places and events that we are not exposed to in school. Don’t let that lull you into believing that it does not exist. Enlighten yourself with the Amazon link below
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Democracy Betrayed:
The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy At the close of the nineteenth century, the Democratic Party in North Carolina engineered a white supremacy revolution. Frustrated by decades of African American self-assertion and threatened by an interracial coalition advocating democratic reforms, white conservatives used violence, demagoguery, and fraud to seize political power and disenfranchise black citizens. The most notorious episode of the campaign was the Wilmington “race riot” of 1898, which claimed the lives of many black residents and rolled back decades of progress for African Americans in the state. Published on the centennial of the Wilmington race riot, Democracy Betrayed draws together the best new scholarship on the events of 1898 and their aftermath. Contributors to this important book hope to draw public attention to the tragedy, to honor its victims, and to bring a clear and timely historical voice to the debate over its legacy. The contributors are David S. Cecelski, William H. Chafe, Laura F. Edwards, Raymond Gavins, Glenda E. Gilmore, John Haley, Michael Honey, Stephen Kantrowitz, H. Leon Prather Sr., Timothy B. Tyson, LeeAnn Whites, and Richard Yarborough.
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How the Only Successful Coup D’état in US History Was Carried Out
After Black voters helped elevate Black politicians to power in US politics, tensions over race started to flare up. Black men were called various disrespectful terms, and messages were put out in the media that stoked fear and guilt. In 1898, white citizens seized control of the government in North Carolina, and initiated the only successful American coup, by overthrowing the elected government in Wilmington, NC.
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A Day of Blood:
The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Originally published in 2009, the revised edition includes a foreword by Dr. Valerie Ann Johnson, Chair of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission and Dean of the School of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities at Shaw University. In this thoroughly researched, definitive study, LeRae Umfleet examines the actions that precipitated the coup; the details of what happened in Wilmington on November 10, 1898; and the long-term impact of that day in both North Carolina and across the nation.
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Wilmington’s Lie:
The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community with a burgeoning African American middle class. In 1898, North Carolina’s white supremacist Democrats were plotting to take back the state legislature in November “by the ballot or bullet or both.” In Wilmington’s Lie, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, David Zucchino tells the story of intimidation and violence, stuffed ballot boxes, and thousands of armed men who killed at least 60 black men in the streets. The rioters forced city officials to resign at gunpoint and replaced them with mob leaders. This brutal insurrection is a rare instance of a violent overthrow of an elected government in the U.S. It halted gains made by blacks and restored racism as official government policy. A book signing follows the program.
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Deeply Rooted in North Carolina:
Two Runaway Slave Brothers Forever Separated After Joining the Union Army Foreword by Dr. Frank Smith, Founding Director, African American Civil War Museum. This solved mystery will be of interest to Civil War ‘buffs’ looking for a brand new story as well as to descendants of Civil War veterans. For many African Americans, being able to call ancestral names brings a kind of closure to us, who during slavery, were counted as 3/5 of a person. Two young runaway slaves from Edenton, N.C., enlisted in the Union Army under the surname ‘Patience.’ The elder Thomas joined the 5th MA Colored Cavalry while the younger Crowder joined the 103rd PA Infantry. After the war, Thomas returned to North Carolina while Crowder went with his regiment to Pennsylvania, never to meet again. Not until 2000 when the author, Crowder’s descendant, discovered Thomas’ name inscribed on the Wall of Honor in Washington, D.C., was it known that two Patients had served during the Civil War. Are they brothers? This question was answered in 2018 through 23andMe DNA reports. Not only that, an amazing ‘WOW!’ moment is in store for interested sleuths. May readers of other ethnicities be so inspired, they will want to call the names of their unknown ancestors, too.
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Wilmington 1898:
The Hidden History of An American Coup D’état On November 10, 1898, the only coup d’état ever to take place on American soil began with the torching of a black owned newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina, and ended with white supremacists overthrowing the local government. The coup was the culmination of a white supremacy and propaganda campaign waged all across the state, designed to strip black men of the right to vote, remove them from public office, and stoke fear. Throughout the events of 1898 and after, at least 60 (and possibly hundreds) of black men were murdered, and more than 2,100 African Americans were banished or fled the city, turning a black-majority town known as a symbol of black hope and progress, into a stronghold of white supremacy. In this session, three award-winning historians, authors and experts on this period – LeRae Umfleet, David Cecelski, and Dr. Freddie Parker – discuss the events leading up to and taking place during the Wilmington coup, as well as discuss the lasting legacy of this little known history. After a brief presentation from each panelist, they answer and discuss questions posed by attending educators.
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The Militant South, 1800-1861
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David Zucchino | Wilmington’s Lie:
The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy Recorded on February 4, 2020 In conversation with Mark Bowden, most recently author of The Last Stone: A Masterpiece of Criminal Interrogation David Zucchino is a contributing writer for The New York Times. He has covered wars and civil conflicts in more than three dozen countries. Zucchino was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from apartheid South Africa and is a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for his reporting from Iraq, Lebanon, Africa, and inner-city Philadelphia. He is the author of Thunder Run and Myth of the Welfare Queen. In his new book, Zucchino tells the story of the 19th-century North Carolina port city that, while once a burgeoning example of a mixed-race community, exploded into racial violence that erased the progress made by formerly enslaved people and their children.
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It is difficult to imagine that an event of this significance and size is not a part of our taught history. The vile treatment of a large group of our citizenry is painted with a brush of invisibility when it comes to calling out the actions of people that don’t act in concert with the image that we attempt to paint by ignoring important events that are a significant part of our history. These issues must be faced before we can learn the lesson that we so proudly proclaim when we say that if we ignore the event, we will repeat it. It is time to prevent a recurrence of this type of event.