WILMINGTON RACE RIOT
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2006 4- THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER
ChaDter 11
THE MEMORY OF 1898
And yet, even as white supremacy
tightened its grip on North Carolina,
the memory of what that victory had
entailed — murders, banishments,
stuffed ballot boxes—soon became
murky. The central episode was
gradually cleansed from our state’s
history, from our textbooks and our
memories. Eventually, Charles B.
Aycock became known as the edu
cation governor.
However, the raw violence of
Wilmington was not completely for
gotten. It could, of course, be seen
every day, everywhere, in the Jim
Crow world it had made. More than
60 blacks were lynched in North
Carolina between 1900 and 1943.
Whites would often raise the specter
of 1898 when mounting demands
from African-Americans for justice
made it necessary to remind them of
what could happen. “Sometimes,”
historian Glenda Gilmore writes,
“murder does its best work in mem
ory, after the fact.”
During World War II, black
protests against racial discrimina
tion blossomed, especially among
black men in uniform. Black soldiers
stationed at Camp Davis, 30 miles
north of Wilmington, overturned
buses at Grace and Second streets in
Wilmington to protest segregation
policies that limited black seating.
Mayor Bruce Cameron pleaded with
Gov. J. Melville Broughton to “tell
them as long as you are governor the
colored people will have to behave
themselves.”
On July 11, 1943, Broughton
mounted a podium beside the Cape
Fear River that Alfred Waddell had
promised to clot with black bodies.
In language evoking the inflamma
tory tirades of 1898 against blacks
preying on white women, Brou^ton
condemned “radical agitators” who
he claimed were seeking “to advance
theories and philosophies which if
carried to their logical conclusion
would result only in a mongrel race.”
Then he cut to the chase: “Forty-
five years ago, blood flowed freely in
the streets of this city.” It was hard
to escape the conclusion that if the
J
After a violent demonstration
by black soldiers in Wilmington
during World War II, Gov. J.
Melville Broughton made a
speech invoking the 1898 riots.
NEWS & OBSERVER FILE PHOTO
or decades afterward, participation in the 1898 cam
paign became the irreplaceable political credential; at
least five of the state’s next six governors were drawn
fi*om its ranks. As late as 1920, Cameron Morrison
campaigned on his laurels as a Red Shirt Democrat
in the “party of white supremacy.”
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“radical agitators” persisted, it could
happen again.
Broughton was not siniply a pan
dering politician intent on main
taining law and order. He reflected
the view of much of North Car
olina’s elite, who still understood
the violence upon which their world
rested.
During the war, Josephus Daniels’
sons, Jonathan and Frank Daniels
Sr., often conferred about race rela
tions in North Carolina. Jonathan
worked as an assistant to President
Franklin Roosevelt on race relations.
Alarmed at “the rising insistence of
Negroes on their rights,” Jonathan
favored small concessions in order to
maintain white domination. “We
thought we had to get a little justice
[for blacks] just to keep them in
line,” he said later.
Frank Daniels, who stayed in
Raleigh to publish The News and
Observer, took a harder stance. If
African-Americans continue to “keep
on insisting for more privileges,” he
wrote, “a worse condition is going to
exist in North Carolina before very
long than the period from 1895 to
1902, because white people just
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if.
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A Rights of White People meeting at Hugh MacRae Park in Wilmington, 1971. ‘What we need in this
town are some dead agitators. They should be shot and left in the streets ...,' a white man said.
PHOTO BY ANDY HOWELL/WILMINGTON STAR-NEWS
aren’t going to stand for it.” If blacks
continued to press for “equality,”
Daniels insisted, “white people are
going to rise in arms and eliminate
them from the national picture.” In
the end, Daniels warned, continued
civil rights activism would “mean
that all of [the blacks] that can read
and write are going to be eliminated
in the Hitler style.”
Despite seveid riots and persistent
black protests across the state, the
bloodbath some predicted did not
occur. Newly committed to Amer
ica’s image as a beacon of democ
racy, the federal government, the
national Democratic Party and many
newspapers, including The News
and Observer, began to actively op
pose white terror after the war.
Lynching was no longer a viable
political option, though it contin
ued to happen occasionally. When a
black man in Jackson, N.C., mirac
ulously escaped the clutches of a
lynch mob in 1947, Gov. R. Gregg
Cherry attempted to prosecute
members of the mob, though he
failed. When the Klan committed
dozens of kidnappings, whippings
and shooting in Eastern North Car
olina in the early 1950s, 60 Klans-
men were indicted. During the
1960s, white terrorism persisted
but rarely won public applause.
And yet from the very first hints
of the modem black freedom strag-
gle, the memory of violence
haunted Wilmington. Hubert
Eaton, an African-American physi
cian who pressed for integration
in WUmin^on for many years, re
calls a 1951 school board meeting
in which he was rebuffed by the
board’s attorney, who alluded to
the violence of 1898 “as an effort to
intimidate — to warn that it could
happen again.”
hi 1971, when the upheavals over
school integration tore through
Wilmington, a white man at a
Rights of White People rally in
Hugh MacRae Park told the Wilm
ington Morning Star: “What we
need in this town are some dead
agitators. They should be shot and
left in the streets as a reminder for
three days and then bury them. I’ve
got my gun.”
When Wilmington’s streets
raged with violence in early 1971,
one black woman recalled, her
schoolteachers warned her about
what had happened at the turn of
the century. “Those old experi
enced teachers,” she told an inter
viewer, "... talked in hush-hush
tones about 1898.” But the ghosts
along the river persisted in their
whispering, and that is what
echoed in our church in 1971 when
an African-American woman told
my father, the Rev. Vernon C.
Tyson, They say that river was
full of black bodies.’ ”
It is no wonder that the furious
conflict that marked the black free
dom movement in Wilmington in
1971 brought back memories of
bodies drifting in the current of the
Cape Fear. Wilmington’s African-
Americans realized that the legacy
of the racial massacre still haunted
the city. And this is only a little less
true today. Far beyond North Car
olina and 1898, the tragic events
that transpired in Wilmington force
us to contemplate the meaning of
America’s racial past and its hold on
the living.
From our vantage point more than
a century later, we can see that the
white supremacy campaigns of the
1890s and early 1900s injected a vi
cious racial ideology into the heart
of American political culture. Our
separate and unequal lives attest to
its persistence.
If 1898 has saddled us with its
legacy, it also suggests how we mi^t
overcome it. Its central lesson is
this: Human beings make history.
The mistakes that North Carolinians
made in 1898 can be mended if we
choose.