Never Been a Time (7 page)

In the fall of 1898, the worst aspects of a terrible decade—tragically effective racist propaganda that often focused on alleged black rapes of white women; the disenfranchisement, disempowerment, impoverishment, and murder of blacks; the triumph of white supremacist politicians; and a sharp increase in racial segregation—coalesced in Wilmington, North Carolina's largest city, to produce the first major American race riot in some twenty years.

Wilmington, a thriving port city of some 20,000 people, about 11,300 of them black, sat on the Cape Fear River near its outlet to the Atlantic Ocean. The city and the state of North Carolina as a whole had in the years before the riot escaped many of the worst aspects of ever-increasing repression of blacks that characterized the 1890s in the South. The agrarian-based Populist Party, whose brief flame had been snuffed out by racist Democratic politicians by the mid-to-late 1890s in most of the South, had joined with black Republicans in North Carolina to mount successful campaigns for Fusion candidates, some of them black, in statewide and local races in 1894 and 1896. The white leader of the Fusion movement was Daniel Russell, who as a judge had ruled that business owners did not have a right to bar African Americans from their shops. It was a decision that would turn out to be roughly three quarters of a century ahead of its time. In 1896, Russell was elected to a four-year term as governor. By 1898, four blacks sat on Wilmington's ten-man board of aldermen, and the mayor, Silas Wright, was a Republican and a member of the Fusion movement.
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African Americans held other city offices and made up more than one third of the city's police force. There was a substantial and educated black middle class. The situation was too much to bear for North Carolina's white supremacists, particularly men whose wealth rested upon the large, docile contingent of poor people, both black and white, who were willing to work for near-starvation pay or under the terms of financially imprisoning share-cropping and tenant-farm contracts.

Although neither the Republican mayor of Wilmington nor the Fusionist
governor of North Carolina was up for reelection in 1898, some of the most prominent white citizens of the city and the state, fearful of the radical economic notions associated with populism, chose the months leading up to the statewide biennial elections of that year to launch a vicious antiblack and anti-Fusionist propaganda campaign aimed at swaying the emotions of poor whites who had previously voted for Fusionist candidates. Leading North Carolina newspapers gave regular front-page banner headlines to trumped-up charges of corruption and ineptitude against Russell, Wright, and other Fusionist officeholders, black and white, and to wildly exaggerated tales of rampant rape of white women by blacks. Among the men orchestrating the campaign was nationally prominent Democrat Josephus Daniels, publisher of the
Raleigh News and Observer
, who openly proclaimed that his goal was “permanent good government by the party of the White Man.”
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Thrust into the campaign was a much-publicized speech by the wife of a Georgia congressman who alleged that the greatest danger facing any rural white women was “the black rapist” and saying that such rapes must be stopped if it meant “lynching a thousand negroes a week.” In reply, Alexander Manly, publisher of the
Wilmington Daily Record
—one of the few black-owned daily newspapers in America—wrote that, although it was true that black men were having sex with white women, the liaisons could hardly be called rape. “Our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than [are] the white men with the colored women.” Manly's incendiary editorial was reprinted in white newspapers across the state under the headline ATTACK UPON WHITE CHRISTIAN WOMANHOOD. Manly's words added fuel to an already incendiary antiblack campaign. Alfred Waddell, a former Confederate soldier with a gift for passionate stump speeches, seized the day and uttered words of anti-Fusionist defiance that echoed from Wilmington across the state. “We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of Negroes, even if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses.” Large crowds of poor whites turned out to cheer Waddell and curse the black race.
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In Wilmington and other North Carolina cities and towns, Red Shirts—Democratic paramilitaries—on horseback rode the country roads and the city streets in mounted Klan-like platoons, disrupting Fusionist political rallies and even bursting into church services, wielding clubs and whips, warning
blacks that worse would come on election day if they dared to show up at the polls. And on November 8, in the streets of Wilmington and other North Carolina cities, black voters had to make their way past threatening phalanxes of Red Shirts. Through a combination of intimidation of blacks and arousal of racial fury in poor whites, the Democrats won strong victories across North Carolina.

But in Wilmington, the center of the racist campaign, the white supremacists were not finished, not while the Fusionist mayor and the four black aldermen had two more years in office. Two days after the election, Waddell and an armed mob of two thousand men stormed the wooden building where the
Daily Record
was published—Manly had already fled the city—and burned it down. Then, led by Red Shirts on horseback, the mob laid waste to black neighborhoods, destroyed black businesses, and beat and slaughtered blacks. An estimated fifty or sixty blacks were murdered. Waddell installed himself as mayor and on his orders at least twenty-one prominent blacks and some of their white supporters were forced at bayonet point onto trains leaving town. In the immediate aftermath of the riot, about two thousand blacks fled town, and white supremacy reigned in Wilmington. The following year, the newly elected Democratic state legislature took the vote away from blacks and instituted a regime of Jim Crow laws that remained in force for decades as North Carolina joined what came to be called the Solid South, the segregated fiefdom of racist white Democrats.

As the years went by, the Wilmington race riot, when it was discussed at all by whites, was portrayed as an understandable reaction against the black lawlessness that allegedly had plagued the state since the days of Reconstruction. But the essential truth of the Wilmington riot as an assault on black success remained alive in the oral tradition of North Carolina's African Americans. In 2000, after repeated questions were raised by civil rights leaders and black politicians, the North Carolina General Assembly established the thirteen-member Wilmington Race Riot Commission to try and find out what had really happened on the streets of the small city more than a century before. Six years later, the commission issued a 464-page report that explains in detail that the events of November 1898 were not a spontaneous riot but a “coup d'état,” an “armed overthrow of the legitimately elected municipal government” that was organized in a conspiracy by “men prominent in the Democratic Party, former Confederate officers, former officeholders and
newspaper editors locally and statewide rallied by Josephus Daniels of the
Raleigh News and Observer
.” The riot and the white supremacist reign that followed, the commission reported, resulted in devastating damage to the black community, with a significant loss in skilled occupations and an increase in “lower status jobs,” along with major losses to the black businesses that remained, a sharp increase in residential segregation, and a drastic cut in funding to black schools and teachers. Among the recommendations to “repair the moral, economic, civil and political damage wrought by the violence” was to “support judicial redress to compensate heirs of victims.”

The report noted, “An African American collective narrative developed to recall the riot and placed limitations on black/white public relationships. White stories of the riot claimed that the violence was necessary to restore order. The white narrative was perpetuated by historians.”
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By 1900, more than 880,000 blacks lived in the North. The black population of the North had risen by more than 180,000 men, women, and children in ten years, more than twice the increase of the previous decade. Every year, many thousands of black men and women had abandoned the South to escape lynching, horrendous poverty, wretchedly unequal public education, and the virtual disappearance of their political and civil rights. But almost eight million American blacks still lived in the South. What is surprising today is not that so many African Americans fled to the North in the 1890s, but that so few did.
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In October of 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt set a surprising racial precedent by inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner, infuriating the Democratic South and dashing its hopes for both men, the hero of San Juan Hill (and American imperialism), who had been in office for barely a month following the assassination of William McKinley, and the “good negro” who had counseled blacks to back away from social equality. The black-owned
Washington Bee
whooped with glee. “The Southern Democrats hoped and expected to blarney the President so as to continue unrestrained in their wicked reign of terror and proscription against the coloured race. They are shocked, boiled, smitten, and exasperated … They are fuming with dire imprecations against him, and all because he took a meal of victuals with a coloured gentleman who had been entertained by the nobility of England and the best people of America.”
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The meeting had symbolic value that helped both men politically with their own constituencies, black and white, but it didn't mean much in terms of better lives for blacks, North or South, and it didn't stop Southern Democrats from passing even more rigid Jim Crow laws. In the long run, the Progressive movement of the first two decades of the twentieth century did little to help African Americans, even when Republicans, the traditional party of blacks, sat in the White House. Still, the very early 1900s were a time when faint glimmers of hope flickered, often quite briefly, in the terrible darkness for American blacks. The price of cotton and some other farm products began to stagger upward in 1900, bringing modest economic improvement to the rural South, and within two years lynching of blacks had dropped from
105 a year to 85. Never again in the decade—nor since—did they approach 100. Black migration slowed a bit in the first ten years of the twentieth century, although more than one million blacks lived in the North by the end of the decade.
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At the turn of the century, a century that began with the United States still a predominantly rural nation and ended with most Americans living in cities or suburbs, seventy-two cities nationwide had black populations of five thousand or more. The largest concentration of blacks—eighty-six thousand—was in Washington, D.C. Over the years, particularly under Republican administrations, the federal government had made an effort to hire blacks. And Washington, a river's width from white-supremacist Virginia, maintained excellent if segregated schools for blacks. The capital was developing a solid African American middle class and a growing—and notably snobbish—black elite. Washington symbolized the protection that blacks hoped to find from the federal government. A black man driven by racial violence from the South in the early 1900s was asked by a reporter why he had chosen to go to Washington. He replied that he “wanted to be as near to the flag” as he could get.

Still, even in Washington, increasing numbers of poor urban blacks were crowded into disease-ridden ghettos that reeked of garbage and sewage—dangerous, ill-lit slums with flimsy, flammable housing, and high death rates among both infants and adults. Previously, small black neighborhoods had been scattered across cities. The new ghettos, growing in population but not always in geographical size, bred despair, anger, and crime—most of it inflicted on other blacks. They also bred disease; more than one fourth of black infants born in the North in the early years of the twentieth century died before they reached the age of one, which was twice the death rate of white infants.
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Blacks continued to be rejected by almost all trade unions and many blacks with a trade were forced to “stagger downward,” as W. E. B. Du Bois vividly put it, into lower-paying unskilled jobs simply because of their race. After a wide-ranging survey in 1902, Du Bois concluded that the nation's 1.2 million union members included less than forty thousand nonwhites. This was not necessarily a problem for Booker T. Washington, who said that blacks “were not naturally inclined towards unions,” being in the main “friendly” country folk who tended to “work for persons not wages,” seeking out “a good white man” as a boss, and remaining loyal to him. Also, Washington said, there was “a very wide-spread prejudice and distrust of labor unions
among Negroes generally.” Why? Because, Washington said, spinning a circle of logic, white unions refused to admit blacks.
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Northward migration of blacks to small cities and towns in the southern Midwest led to numerous racial attacks in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1901, after a young white woman was murdered by an attempted rapist in Pierce City, Missouri, a mob of one thousand stormed the city jail, lynched a black prisoner who apparently had nothing to do with the killing, and rampaged through an African American neighborhood, killing two more black men and driving hundreds of African Americans out of town. And in 1903, in Belleville, Illinois, just east of East St. Louis, a black schoolteacher who had shot and wounded the white superintendent of schools after learning that he had failed an examination for a teaching certificate was dragged from jail by a mob of five thousand, hanged, and set on fire. Race riots were triggered by the killing of black policemen in 1903 in Evansville, Indiana, and in 1904 in Springfield, Ohio. In both cases, racial tensions had been building up for years as blacks moved to these relatively small but rapidly growing industrial cities and competed with whites for jobs. Black homes and businesses were destroyed, and blacks were attacked and killed in both cities. In Springfield, a black neighborhood was rebuilt and, in 1906, again destroyed by an angry mob of whites.
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