Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino
Wilmington’s 1898 racial violence was not accidental. It began a successful statewide Democratic campaign to regain control of state government, disenfranchise African Americans, and create a system of legal segregation which persisted into the second half of the 20th century. (From the inscription on the 1898 Memorial)
Ironically, I finished David Zucchino’s unsettling novel, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, as the protests in Michigan escalated. The pictures of heavily armed, predominantly white men storming the state capitol is reminiscent of the white mob storming the streets of Wimington in 1898 to overthrow the local government and force, with violence if necessary, all elected officials to resign so the white supremacists could take over after their stolen election. It only took us 110 years to begin to acknowledge this act of domestic terrorism, and now here we are with mobs trying to enforce their will through intimidation again. The parallels are uncanny.
Zucchino presents the Wilmington events without bias, allowing the reader to grasp the enormity of the injustices perpetrated against the colored community in the Reconstructionist South. After the Civil War, freedmen began carving new paths for themselves in Wilmington as craftsmen and entrepreneurs. Between 1776-1835, they gained suffrage and voted in an unheard of amount of black officials from aldermen to police officers. Black men and their families kept migrating to Wilmington, arguably a center piece for mixed-race opportunity, searching for the freedoms promised with the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War.
Wilmington’s Lie acknowledges the legacy of influential black men such as Abraham Galloway, the first black man elected as a delegate in, and Alex Manly owner and editor of The Record, a newspaper run by the Manly family and touted to be, “...a clean newspaper with good reading material,” (49). Both were outspoken, and unafraid to challenge the rising white supremacist fabrications of the negro as the “rapist beast,” or the uneducated and inept elected official.
Manly particularly stoked the fires with his editorial response to the Raleigh Gazette’s column claiming, “...the entrenched white supremacist principle that no sexual union between a black man a white woman could possibly be consensual…” (51). The black-run paper concluded that the only remedy for this act of “rape” was the death penalty. Manly clapped back that the editors were cow-towing to whites. They did not acknowledge the white men who raped black women. Manly called for equal treatment for blacks and whites.
This was not the end of Manly’s vocal opposition. Rebecca Felton delivered a speech to a group of white men that outlined the need to protect the poor white women on farms left to the hands of the predatory black man. “If it needs lynching to protect women’s dearest possessions from the ravening human beasts- then I say lynch,” (84). Manly’s editorial response lit the match, so to speak, in Wilmington, as well as across North Carolina. As a child of a former white governor and one of his slaves, Manly understood, uniquely, the plight of black women raped by white men, and he stated it in his editorial. “... you cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you seek to destroy the morality of ours. Don’t think ever that your women will remain pure while you are debauching ours. You sow the seed- the harvest will come in due time” (88). Zucchino’s deep research is evident throughout as he presents pieces from original newspaper articles, letters, and interviews with current surviving family members.
According to Zucchino’s account, gaining control of the newspapers was key to the white supremacist crusade to overtake all facets of power in North Carolina in 1898. For the newspapers of the time, it was a campaign of disinformation and inflammatory, sensationalist stories published and distributed to the public that would convince voters of the growing black menace, and the loss of white power. It was “fake news” before that became a calling card of our current administration.
The News and Observer, written and edited by Josephus Daniels, pipelined the party line, often for free, to the white population of North Carolina. “As a native of the South, Daniels understood implicitly the sexual insecurities of white Southern males. Already emasculated by Union troops... they risked further shame if the black men were elevated to something approaching equality. Daniels worked to portray black men as sexually insatiable and, at the same time, weak willed and easily duped” (79).
Book Two of Wilmington’s Lie recounts the efforts to unseat the “negro domination” of North Carolina. Zucchino brings into focus the efforts by Alfred Waddell, the Red Shirts, the Wilmington Light Infantry, and George Roundtree to intimidate, and quell the black vote. There were armed patrols to turn back any brave black man who ventured out to vote on November 8, 1898. They also tampered with ballot boxes- throwing out votes against Democrat White Supremacist candidates and adding phony ballots. At some locations there were more votes recorded than there were people registered to vote. It didn’t matter. The dye was cast. Two days later, the real violence began.
Book Three lays bare the events of November 10, 1898 through excerpted news coverage at the time.
From the New York Journal:
The 10th was a bloody day in this one-horse town. They talk of culture and refinement. But could you have seen them on Thursday you would have thought them the bloodhounds of hell turned loose... The negroes had no firearms of any kind but every white man from 12 to seventy was handling guns...From every town around the whites poured in to exterminate the Negroes. (268)
From the Richmond Planet:
It was a slaughter, a useless slaughter, and A.M. Waddell was the leader of this murderous outrage...Does anyone doubt that if the the men killed at Wilmington had been white instead of colored that the government at Raleigh, N.C., and Washington, D.C., would have stumbled over itself in suppressing the “insurrection? (269)
National newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, “...deplored the violence but not the outcome...They welcomed the return of what was regarded as the natural order in America-whites ruling blacks” (276). Published in January of 2020, Wilmington’s Lie poses uncomfortable questions about violence done in the name of race, and what legacy we leave if our history ignores brutal events like the Wilmington coup. And even more dangerous, what happens when we revise that history to reflect the victors’ viewpoint. In Wilmington, it resulted in the coup being labeled a race riot where white militia had to protect citizens from the violent black mob. What narrative will emerge from the demonstrations being staged around the country now?
I am still trying to come to terms with all that David Zucchino taught me about this period of history, but also what he is making me question now. The injustices brought to light in Wilmington’s Lie, sadly, still resonate.
About Carrie Honaker
Carrie Honaker is a writer currently based in Panama City Beach, Florida. She studied Literature at Florida State University, but has worn many hats including restaurateur and teacher. Carrie is a voracious reader and kitchen sorcery addict who found her inner writer at the Blue Ridge Writing Project in 2010. Most days you can find her plowing through a book, writing or dabbling with a new recipe.
Carrie’s work has appeared in ALCA Lines, Virginia English Journal, and Digital Is. She also regularly writes about experiences in the classroom, moments in the kitchen, and all things travel & restaurants on her site, StrawbabiesandChocolateBeer.com. Currently, she is revising her foodoir about life growing up on a farm in Vermont interspersed with family recipes. You can find her on Twitter: @writeonhonaker, Instagram: @corkdorkva, on Goodreads & Trip Advisor.
