THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER 4- FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2006
WILMINGTON RACE RIOT
SUPREMACY
CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE
ecutive committee on Nov. 20,1897.
At its end, Francis D. Winston of
Bertie County published a call for
whites to rise up and “reestablish An-
^o-Saxon rule and honest govern
ment in North Carolina.” He attacked
Republican and Populist leaders for
turning over local offices to blacks.
“Homes have been invaded, and the
sanctity of woman endangered,” the
Democratic broadside claimed. iSusi-
ness has been paralyzed and prop
erty rendered less vduable.”
This claim ignored the enormous
commercial expansion in North Car
olina in the 1890s. Despite the pain
of farmers pelted by the national
agricultural depression, textile mills
had increased fourfold; invested cap
ital had surged to 12 times its 1890
value; the number of employed wo ris
ers in North Carolina had skyrock
eted during the decade; and the rail
road interests had obtained a 99-year
lease on public railways. But the
truth was not the point. The Demo
crats clearly planned to portray
themselves as the saviors of North
Carolina from the Fusionist re^me
— and from “Negro domination.”
By any rational assessment,
African-Americans could hardly be
said to “dominate” North Carolina
politics. Helen G. Edmonds, the
scholar from N.C. Central Univer
sity, which in her day was called
North Carolina College for Negroes,
weighed the matter in her classic
1951 work, “The Negro and Fusion
Politics in North Carolina, 1894-
1901.” She wrote:
“An examination of ‘Negro domi
nation’ in North Carolina revealed
that one Negro was elected to Con
gress; ten to the state legislature; four
aldermen were elected m Wilmington,
two in New Bern, two in Greenville,
one or two in Raleigh, one county
treasurer and one county coroner in
New Hanover; one register of deeds
in Craven; one Negro jailer in Wilm
ington; and one county commissioner
in Warren and one in Craven.”
Indeed, all three political parties
were controlled by whites. Two of
them ■— the Populists and the Demo
crats — could fairly be described as
hostile to blacks, though the Pop
ulists supported a smsil degree of
black office-holding in an arrange
ment based on the arithmetic of po
litical power. Given that North Car
olina’s population was 33 percent
African-American, it would be far
more accurate to describe the state
of affairs as “white domination.”
But to white supremacists, the fact
that black votes—usually for white
candidates — could sway elections
was tantamount to domination. They
wanted blacks removed from the po
litical equation.
PROPAGANDA, PASSION ACROSS THE STATE
T o achieve victory in 1898, Democrats appealed to ir
rational passions. They used sexualized images of
black men and their supposedly uncontrollable lust
for white women. Newspaper stories and stump
speeches warned of “black beasts” and “black brutes”
who threatened the pure flower of Southern wom
anhood. They cast any achievement or assertion by African-
American men as merely an effort to get close to white women.
N&O cartoonist Norman Jennett penned caricatures of blacks.
THE NEWS AND OBSERVER
Aware that a picture could be
worth a thousand votes, Josephus
Daniels engaged the services of car
toonist Norman Jennett to pen front
page caricatures of blacks. Jennett’s
masterpiece was a depiction of a
huge vampire bat with “Negro rule”
inscribed on its wings, and white
women beneath its claws, with the
caption “The Vampire That Hovers
Over North Carolina.” Other images
included a large Negro foot with a
white man pinned under it. The cap
tion: “How Long Will This Last?”
Sensational headlines and accounts
of supposed Negro crimes were
Daniels’ stock in trade: “Negro Con
trol in Wilmington,” “A Negro In
sulted the Postmistress Because He
Did Not Get A Letter,” “Negroes
Have Social Equality” and ‘Negro On
A Train With Big Feet Behind
White” were typical.
The News and Observer was one
of many newspapers spreading anti
black propaganda. “The Anglo
Saxon/A Great White Man’s Rally,”
read a headline in the state’s leading
conservative paper, the Charlotte
Daily Observer. It offered readers a
stream of sensationalized and fabri
cated stories about black crime,
corruption and atrocities against
white women. Star reporter H.E.C.
“Red Buck” Bryant traveled North
Carolina filing triumphant dispatches
about the white supremacy cam
paign and dispara^ng accounts of
the Fusion government.
Populist leader Marion Butler,
who was elected by the Fusion leg
islature to the U.S. Senate in 1895,
anticipated the crucial role news
papers would play in the 1898 cam
paign. The year before, he wrote,
“There is but one chance and but
one hope for the railroads to cap
ture the next le^slature, and that is
for the ‘ni^eF to be made the issue”
with the Ralei^ and Charlotte pa
pers “together in the same bed shout
ing‘ni^er.’”
This propaganda fell on fertile soil
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Headlines from the Charlotte Daily Observer, October and November 1898
The racist assumptions that made it
effective were commonplace. With
out the cooperation of the news
papers, thou^, especially The News
and Observer, the white supremacy
campaign could not have succeeded.
Although he never apologized for
his central role in the campaign,
Daniels later acknowledged that his
newspaper had been harsh, unfair
and irresponsible. The News and
Observer was “cruel in its flagella
tions,” Daniels wrote 40 years later.
“We were never very careful about
winnowing out the stories or running
them down... they were played up
in big type.”
Nor was it a secret, as Election
Day approached, that violence was
part of the Democrats’ strategy.
Two weeks before the slaughter in
Wilmington, The Washington Post
ran these headlines: “A City Under
Arms — Blacks to Be Prevented
from Voting in Wilmington, N.C. —
Prepared for Race War — Prop
erty-Holding Classes Determined
Upon Ending Negro Domination.”
The white supremacy forces did
not depend solely upon newspapers,
but required a statewide campaign
of stump speakers, torchlight pa
rades and physical intimidation.
Former Gov. Thomas J. Jarvis and
future Govs. Robert B. Glenn and
Cameron Morrison struck many a
blow for the conservative cause.
“The king of oratory, however,
was Charles B. Aycock,” historian
H. Leon Prather writes, “the Demo
cratic Moses, who would lead North
Carolina out of the chaos and dark
ness of ‘Negro domination.’ ” As he
did throu^out the campaign. Ay-
cock mesmerized a standing-room-
only crowd at the Metropolitan
House in Raleigh, pounding the
podium for white supremacy and
the protection of white womanhood.
V^te men have neglected poor
qpd long-suffering white women,
he explained in his famous “guilt
and degradation” speech, which he
repeated across the state that fall.
“For them,” he said of the wives,
daughters and sweethearts of white
men, “it is everything whether
Negro supremacy is to continue.”
Wilmington, Aycock explained
later, was “the storm center of the
white supremacy movement.” Here
was the largest city in the state,
with a black majority and a black-
owned daily newspaper, and sev
eral African-American office hold
ers. Wilmington represented the
heart of the Fusionist threat. And so
it became the focus of the Democ
rats’ campaign.