Wilmington's Lie: If You're White, Read at Your Own Risk

Holy shit. The culmination of my Black History Month Book Club (with one member) is a wild one. Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy is a great read, but it's brutal. Downright humiliating American history. The worst behavior.

And the book explains a lot about present-day America. The reason progressives just can't fathom why poor white folks would vote for policies that harm them.

David Zucchino tells the story of Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. At the start of the book, the city is a prosperous port. Blacks and whites live in the same neighborhoods. Blacks occupied positions in business, the middle class, and politics. In many regards, black freedmen were just as affluent and successful as whites. It was truly a functioning mixed-race city.

                                                      

Then the Democratic politicians and the white newspapers joined forces to oppress and terrorize blacks, disenfranchise them from voting, and essentially run them out of town. The story takes a violent turn when the paramilitary Redshirts, emboldened by a "white Declaration of Independence" run amok. They are heavily armed-- unlike the black folks in town (because munitions dealers would only sell to whites). They burn down the office of the black newspaper, The Record. They terrorize women and children. They kill at least sixty black men. The government coup is successful, Democrats illegally remove the Republicans and Fusionists. Crazy racist coup. The Wilmington government is now all white.


And then comes the whitewashing.

The first person to take the blame was a black newspaper owner, Alexander L. many. He had the gall to print an editorial debunking a fundamental white myth: the inviolate purity of the white woman. Manly suggested that many of the black men charged with "raping" white women did not do so. Instead, he speculated that they were often consensual lovers. He urged white men to protect their women, and not blame and lynch black men for taking part in willing trysts. Sacrilege! So they burned down his building, threatened him and his family, and sent him into hiding.

White papers and politicians knew how to manipulate this editorial and enrage white folks. It's the same political tactics of race and xenophobia as today, but you've got to replace the Republican party with the Democrats. They were the abominable racists involved with voter suppression and white supremacy in 1898. This is weird at first, but you get used to the flip-flop on racial politics. The Democrats hate the other, the Democrats blame the other, the Democrats gerrymander and suppress the other. It's a tactic, and an effective one. During the Reconstruction, the Republicans used the black vote, the Democrats destroyed it. The opposite of today's politics.

After the violence, Coup leader Col Alfred Waddell proclaimed a “White Declaration of Independence” and installed himself as mayor. He proudly instituted law and order and called the massacre a "race riot" started by blacks. Meanwhile, black families were mourning the dead, hiding out in swamps, taking trains North, and still being terrorized by white supremacists. They could not walk through the city without being stopped at Redshirt checkpoints, where they were searched, harassed, and often killed.

In the 1940s, Southern textbooks still portrayed the local (white) version of events. The Carpetbaggers and Scalawags were at fault for the violence, for inciting racial tension. The city was saved from chaos and disorder by a "sort of club which they named the Ku Klux Klan." The KKK performed the charitable task of "scaring lawless men into acting decently." They dressed as "ghosts" and "frightened Negroes into leading better lives." Yikes. That's what they were teaching the kids.

by the 1950s, the truth about the event was slowly uncovered. It still causes unrest and ill-will today. 2100 blacks fled the city, and many blacks and whites were banished for political reasons. It's the stuff of banana republics. The "success" in Wilmington emboldened white supremacists throughout the South to enact Jim Crow Laws and various means of black voter suppression.

The white supremacist newspaper editor, Josephus Daniels, moved on to Louisiana and campaigned for white supremacy there. He created a voter-suppression law that, in New Orleans, “helped reduce the number of black voters from 14,117 to 1,493.” Attempts to undo these wrongs were met by indifference by Republican President William McKinley (who was involved with other ordeals, including the Spanish-American War).

This book details a downright embarrassing period of American History. It's an important reminder that the end of the Civil War did not in any way mean civil rights for freedmen. The Reconstruction was a war unto itself; the history of the Reconstruction is historiography worth investigating-- though if you're a white dude (like me) you might find yourself reflecting on just how many obstacles were thrown in the way of blacks in America and wonder about the consequences. How long will they last? Will race be an issue in America for the rest of our days as a nation?

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