Unreplied wilmington nc2/20/2024 ![]() Allen Kirk, an outspoken minister William Henderson, a leading lawyer and Thomas Miller, the wealthiest black in the city. Wright and Melton were among the “Big 6,” the name given by the white supremacists to a group that was targeted as “traitors to the white race.” Among the African Americans who were marched to the railroad station and forcibly ejected under humiliating circumstances were the Rev. The pogrom was followed by the organized banishment of leading black citizens, as well as several white officials, including Mayor Silas Wright and police chief John Melton. The actual death toll was likely significantly higher. Whole families were forced to flee for their lives into neighboring swamps. For the rest of the day, frenzied racist mobs, the infamous “Red Shirts,” attacked black workers, shooting at least 60 dead. Alexander Manly, the African American editor of this influential daily newspaper, had already fled the city to avoid a possible lynching. It began with the torching of the Daily Record building. ![]() The coup took place on November 10, 1898. On the heels of this statewide election victory, they moved immediately-only two days later-to overthrow the multi-racial government in Wilmington. They used a combination of ballot stuffing, terror directed against black voters, and the use of race-baiting to mobilize whites. The Democrats, brazenly employing white supremacist demagogy, set out to take back control of the legislature in 1898. In this period, Wilmington was described as “the freest town for a Negro in the country.” In Wilmington, white Fusionists were elected mayor and to a number of other key positions. In 1894, a coalition of Populists and Republicans on a so-called “Fusionist” slate won control of the state legislature. In the period leading up to 1898, there was a continuing Republican Party presence, both statewide and in the major cities. Ferguson ruling of the US Supreme Court, as well as through political and extralegal efforts by Southern Democrats to whip up racism.Īs author David Zucchino explains, North Carolina was one of the last states to become an integral part of the white supremacist counterrevolution that followed the end of Reconstruction. Even after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, it was another two decades before Jim Crow became entrenched, through legal decisions such as the 1896 Plessy v. The white supremacist coup that took place in Wilmington, then the largest city in North Carolina, overthrew a multiracial government and took the lives of scores of African Americans.Īlthough it is widely assumed that rigid segregation and lynch mob terror followed immediately after the end of the Civil War, that is not the case. Wilmington ’ s Lie provides a detailed account of an infamous chapter in the consolidation of Jim Crow segregation and terror in the states of the former Confederacy following the US Civil War.
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