Before We Can Learn From History, We Must Acknowlege It

Armed white rioters burn down the Daily Record

The Wilmington Massacre (to date) is the only successful coup d’etat to unfold on American soil--  an estimated 300 Black Americans were murdered by white supremacists.  The mass murder is a poignant reminder that white nationalism remains a deadly scourge that directly undermines democracy, decency, and liberty in the U.S.

In North Carolina in 1898, the political strategy for white supremacists of the era was to “redeem North Carolina from Negro domination,” a racist belief widely upheld by party officials and spread by the men they chose to deliver their propaganda.

One of those men was Alfred Moore Waddell, a Confederate colonel and avowed white supremacist who once served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina.

To disrupt a local government committed to biracialism, Waddell and others mobilized whites, held rallies, and led militias of “Red Shirts,” who, as the Zinn Education Project points out, were “basically ruffians on horseback” echoing the Ku Klux Klan.  As the election neared in Wilmington that November, Waddell made open threats in his speeches.

“We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of Negroes, even if we have to choke the nearby Cape Fear river with carcasses,” he said in his intimidation campaign aimed at keeping Black Americans from the polls.  During his speech, Red Shirts had taken off on horseback through the region, disrupting Black church services and instilling terror.

“The White Supremacists used an editorial by Alex Manly, the editor of Wilmington’s Black newspaper the Daily Record to stir a firestorm at the time of the elections,” the Zinn Education Project critically points out in its recounting of the day.  The editorial by Manly was a scathing criticism of a public speech from a local white woman who advocated for lynching as a means to protect white women from black men.

Waddell and his armed mob kicked off his coup by assembling with 2,000 men at the Black-run Daily Record.  In retaliation for Manly’s editorial, they busted up the establishment, vandalized Manly’s presses, and burned the whole building to the ground.  

It was, as Adrienne LaFrance and Vann Newkirk II wrote for The Atlantic in 2017, “just the beginning of an assault” which by evening, led to the murder of dozens upon dozens of Black people. The attack destroyed lives and livelihoods, upended a thriving community, forced Black Americans to flee or be banished, and only ended with a gun held to Mayor Wright’s head by Waddell.  The aging Confederate colonel installed himself as mayor and by brute force, had ejected White from his post.

Last month, two Black men killed by the white mob in 1898, Joshua Halsey and Samuel McFarland, finally received proper funerals. As noted by the NYT, the insurrection of 1898 “laid the foundation for the Jim Crow laws and voter disenfranchisement that followed in North Carolina.” For years, Black residents of Wilmington were wrongly portrayed as “gun toting instigators” and much work has been done to see the record corrected.  

The great grandson of one of the Wilmington Massacre’s victims, Joshua Halsey, perhaps summed it up best as he reflected on the need for reconciliation of an ugly past that, incidentally, still has ties to the present.  “The town needs closure,” Hesketh Brown Jr. said.  “And the truth helps bring closure if we accept the truth.”