Newspapers / The Charlotte Post (Charlotte, … / Nov. 17, 2006, edition 1 / Page 11
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THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER -f FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2006 WILMINGTON RACE RIOT 11 BANISHMENT AND COUP Wilmington Light Infantry and Naval Reserves members escort captured blacks. Fusionist leaders were marched to the train station. COURTESY N.C. OFFICE OF ARCHIVES & HISTORY W hile the streets became a killing ground, the Com mittee of Twenty-Five launched a coup d’etat in the corridors of City Hall, forcing the mayor, the board of aldermen, and the police chief to resign at gunpoint By 4 p.m. that day, the committee had replaced elected Fusionist city officials, both black and white, with its hand-picked white appointees. The new mayor, fresh from lead ing the mobs in the streets, was CoL Alfred M. Waddell bi short the paramilitary force that wealthy conservatives had built to seize power in North Carolina now ran the city of WDmington. For days after the coup, hundreds of African-Americans who had fled the white mobs huddled in the forested thickets around WilmingtMi. Many had escaped too quickly to bother with coats or blankets, and slept on the ground in the wet No vember woods. “BoneK;hilling driz zling rain falls sadly from a leaden sky,” Charles Francis Bourke (rf Cd- lieFs Weekly wrote from the scene. “Yet in the swamps and woods, in nocent hundreds of terrified men, women and children wander about, fearful of the vengeance of whites, fearful of death, wiSiout money, food, [or] sufficient clothes.” Children whimpered in the cold, their parents reluctant to li^t fires for fear that the mobs would find them. “In the blackness of the pines,” Bourke ob served, “I heard a child crying and a hoarse voice crooning sofdy a mourn ful song, the words of which fell into my memory with the air “When de battle over we kin wear a crown in the new Je-ru-suhim.’ ” But the work was not complete in this new Jerusalem along the Lower Cape Fear. Everyone seemed to un derstand that a purge was in order. “Immediately after Waddell became mayor,” H. L^n Prather writes, “the Secret Nine furnished him with a list of prominent Republicans, both white and black, who must be ban ished from Wibnington.” The white mob gathered at the city jail to watch soldiers with fixed bayonets march Fusionist leaders to the train station. Those local citi zens slated for banishment fit three rough categories: African-American leaders who insisted on citizenship for their people or who openly op posed the white supremacy cam paign; black businessmen whose prosperity offended local whites; and white politicians who had, as the Wilmington Morning Star wrote of the soon-to-be-exiled United States Commissioner R.H. Bimting, a “po litical record of cooperating with the Negro element” Silas Wright, the white Republican mayor whom WaddeU had deposed, fit ffie same “white niggers” category as Bimting and stood among the first names on the banishment list George Z. French, another white Fusionist stalwart and a deputy sheriff, nar rowly escaped lynching. A raging mob plac^ a noose around his neck and started to string him up from a light pole on North Front Street Fr^ Stedman, a member of the Commit tee of Twenty-Five, saved the white law enforcement officer’s life, but the mob dragged French to the train sta tion and told him to “leave North Car olina and never return again upon peril of his fife.” Chief of Police John Melton, a staunch white Populist found himself accosted, The News and Observer re ported, by a mob that would have lynched him but for some soldiers who intervened. One local white Demo crat recalled that he would “never for get” how Melton looked when “one of the boys went upstairs and took a rope with a noose in it and threw it at his feet [andMeltCHi] turned just as white as a sheet” The mob dispatched him and two other white Fusionists on a train to Washington, D.C., amid cries of “white nigger.” The black men who were hustled to the train station at the point of a bayonet included Salem J. BeU and Robert B. Pickens, who operated a successful fish and oyster business. Ari Bryant who owned a butcher shop, was “looked upon by the Ne groes as a high and mighty leader,” the Wilmington Morning Star mocked, by way of explaining Bryant’s banishment. The most pros perous exile may have been Thomas C. Miller, who had been bom in slav ery and yet had become a financial force in Wilmington, dealing in land, loaning money and entering mort gages with blacks and whites alike. One member of the detachment that took Miller recalled that he was “one Negro that we could not make keep quiet and he talked and talked until Ed McKoy’s gun went ‘click click’ and when we told him to shut up, he kept a little quieter.” Like most trimnphant revolution ary governments, having silenced its principal opponents, the new ad ministration declared its devotion to public order. They fired all the black and Fusionist city employees, start ing with firefi^ters and police offi cers. They declared that school com- mittees henceforth would be composed “exclusively of white citi zens,” even in black districts. The white terror in the streets persisted, even thou^ Waddell notified whites “who seem disposed to abuse the op portunity of carrying arms which re cent events afforded” that “no further turbulence or disorderly conduct will be tolerated.” In an article he wrote for Collier’s Magazine two weeks af ter the rioL Wilmington’s new mayor explained that “there was no intim idation used in the establishment of the present city government” 'WHITE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE' Flush with victory in the stolen election, Alfred Waddell introduced the "White Declara tion of Independence” on Nov. 9. Given that Wilmington's politics and economy were controlled by whites before and after the election, the declaration's seven main points suggest the wide gap that existed between reality and rhetoric in the city that fall. Here are excerpts from the declaration: "First That the time has passed for the intelligent citi zens of the community owning 90% of the property and paying taxes in like proportion, to be ruled by negroes. "Second That we will not tolerate the action of unscrupulous white men in affiliating with the negroes so that by means of their votes they can dominate the intelli gent and thrifty element in the community, thus causing busi ness to stagnate and progress to be out of the question. "Third That the negro has demonstrated by antagonizing our interest 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.... "Fifth That we propose in the future to give to white men a large part of the employment heretofore given to negroes... "Sixth We are prepared to treat the negroes with justice and consideration in all matters which do not involve sacrifices of the interest of the intelligent and progressive portion of the com munity. But are equally prepared now and immediately to enforce what we know to be our rights. "Seventh That we have been, in our desire for harmony and peace, blinded both to our best interests and our rights. A climax was reached when the negro paper of this city published an article so vile and slanderous that it would in most communi ties have resulted in the lynching of the editor. We deprecate lynching and yet there is no punishment, provided by the courts, adequate for this offense. We therefore owe it to the peo ple of this community and of this city, as a protection against such license in the future, that the paper known as the 'Record' cease to be published and that its editor [Alexander Manly] be banished from this community."
The Charlotte Post (Charlotte, N.C.)
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