My journey of exploration for a United-States-I-never-knew took another turn once I read Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. It received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and is a fascinating read.
Now 1898 may seem awfully long ago so one could ask: why the significance? But when looked through the context of lifespans, it’s really not that long ago. For example, I figure have roughly 62 years of memories accumulated in one form or another. Although I was born in the 50s, I remember little before 1960, the year my brother was born and I went to first grade. I’ll be reliving some of those memories during my 50-year high school reunion this year.
From one perspective, much has changed since 1960. People have come and gone and I’ve experienced a rich lifetime of work, events, a new family, and experiences. Yet much has remained roughly the same. Planes, trains, and automobiles still look and function similarly. Houses are still houses and boats still boats. The world’s gotten smaller, but it wasn’t that large before.
As an aside, Alaskan king salmon are smaller too, but still have their legendary incredible taste. As long as you get the very best product, don’t overcook it, and use minimal seasoning (I use a baste of salted butter and brown sugar). That’s the secret to amazing salmon. Take it off the grill or out of the oven just before it’s done. Let it cook to perfection on the plate as people sit down to eat. And make sure you primarily taste the fish and not the seasonings.
The 62 years prior to 1960 tell a remarkably different story. Think about life before cars, telephones, cordless drills, flush toilets and expresso machines. The mere thought of fastening thousands of long deck screws by hand brings pain to my right arm. But maybe that’s why God made hammers before he made drills.
Looking back in history, 1898 was quite the year! The year began with the USS Maine sunk in Havana harbor. Soon the Spanish American war was on and then it was off by the year’s end. Not quite as short as the 100-hour Gulf War of 1991, but still pretty short as wars go.
Annexation was in the water that year. New York City annexed the land around it to create five boroughs. The United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands. John D. Rockefeller’s merged a bunch of oil companies to form Standard Oil Company which then controlled 84% of the United States’ oil. And the Democratic party led by white supremacists led a coup d’état against a democratically elected government in America.
I wonder how many Americans have ever heard about this armed uprising leading to a successful overthrow of a legitimate government in the “land of the free”? It took me 67 years before I did. But then again, it took me 66 years before I learned about the Tulsa massacre. Maybe I’m just a slow learner.
Wilmington in 1898 was one of those rare anomalies of the Jim Crow south. A few years earlier, the Populist Party had joined forces with the Republican Party to form a winning coalition which included blacks. Other communities may have been racially mixed, but Wilmington’s elected leadership was also biracial. Blacks held important government positions with authority over both the white and black parts of the community.
This was a bridge too far for many whites. Having suffered through the loss of a war and new constitutional amendments, “Negro Rule” was a nonstarter. Plus, given the populist influence, many of the new legislative priorities – lowered interest rates, new tax laws, and new railroad regulations– harmed Democratic interests.
So the Democrats hatched a plan to overthrow a legally elected government. They drafted a Wilmington Declaration of Independence calling for enlightened men who refused subjugation to an “inferior race.” They formed white supremacy clubs such as White Government Unions to help plan the insurrection and whip up anti-black sentiment. They launched an inflammatory propaganda campaign. They set up armed “vigilance committees” and “citizens patrols” for each block. Lists of white women were kept to sustain the fiction that blacks were plotting to rape white women and burn homes.
Then the Democrats did it, with gusto and brutality. The massacre began two days after an election on November 8th. They wanted a chance to win outright through a campaign of intimidation, a combo of ballot box stuffing and ballot destruction, and teams of armed men prohibiting blacks from voting. Since they could not outnumber the blacks, they must “either outcheat, outcount, or outshoot them.” With the first two of that triad accomplished, phase two began and the massacre was on.
Armed mobs backed up with state militia hunted down blacks. Blacks were usually shot in the back according to records from the local hospital. Many in the mob saw this as great sport with one white man declared “we are just shooting to see the niggers run.” Hundreds of “Red Shirts,” a white supremacist paramilitary group, coursed through the black areas of town, breaking into homes, spilling blood while looking to lynch. Blacks fled the city into the surrounding swamps and forest, leaving folks like the Red Shirts frustrated. Yes, they had shot their share of black men, but there hadn’t been a single lynching! The armed crowd forcibly removed all the black and white Republican officials and ran those they didn’t kill out of town. “White niggers” were fair game too, including the Republican governor who was in town for the election.
None of this happened spontaneously. It was the climax of a full court campaign by the press and Democratic Party to demonize blacks and amplify the myth of an impending “black uprising.”
These lies are perhaps the worst part of the story. Sure, the killing fields are hideous, an unthinkable part of our history that infuriates any patriotic person to ask “how could something like this happen in America?” Yet it was through those enabling lies that the stage was set for the extremists to enlist the ordinary white citizen of Wilmington. They needed to create an atmosphere of overwhelming fear and outrage. And they did.
No story was out of bounds. Blacks were deemed incompetent with poor character. Newspapers portrayed black men as beasts, sexually insatiable. White men’s “manhood” were challenged for not protecting white women enough: poor white girls on secluded farms needed men with courage, ready to enact justice at a moment’s notice. Trivial incidents became amplified into front page stories. Innocent events twisted to increase white folk’s fear. Rape epidemics declared although the statistics showed otherwise. False reports of blacks stockpiling weapons were printed.
No one was ever charged, something the insurrectionists relied upon before the massacre and found true following it. Might made right, hence murder, ballot box stuffing, voter intimidation, and home invasions to whip and terrorize families were all fair game as long as the victims were black.
Emboldened by their November 10th insurrection success, the white supremacists of the Democratic Party then set out to eliminate any future black vote. The poll tax and literacy test were obvious tools, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898, but such actions could disenfranchise poor white voters too.
Louisiana offered the perfect solution. Called the grandfather clause, men whose fathers or grandfathers had voted before 1967 – two decades before the 15th amendment of the constitution – were exempted from the poll tax and literacy test. This provided, in one white senator’s words, an “election perfectly fair.” Prior to its 1898 passage, 3000 blacks and 380 whites in St. Joseph, Louisiana had registered to vote. Following its passage, white voters outnumbered blacks 369 to 14. Its application in North Carolina found similar success. Registered black voters dropped from 126,000 in 1896 to 6,100 in 1902.
The spin following the massacre was unrelenting. For years, this massacre, plotted and executed by white supremacists, was portrayed as a “race riot” instigated by the black community. The coup was framed as a righteous return to law and order. The new mayor Waddell declared “I believe the negroes as much rejoiced as the white people that order has been evolved out of chaos.” Newspapers downplayed the destruction. The Morning Star first asserted “not the hair of any man’s head was hurt” and then backtracked to say that no unarmed black man had been shot.
Both were lies. The Washington Post saw the uprising not as a mob but against conditions that had grown intolerable. Northern newspapers deplored the violence but welcomed the change back to the “natural order,” where the “weaker race must bend to the stronger.” Victory celebrations commenced in several southern cities.
There were some who got it right, basing their stories on eyewitness accounts. But their voices were marginalized until recent years. The intimidation by the white supremacists with their skill in whipping up fear and outrage were just too much to overcome. Even McKinley, who had a long and storied history fighting slavery and racial division, kept silent. Bombarded on both sides but in the midst of the Spanish American war, he and his administration stayed neutral, reluctant to antagonize folks in the south.
School textbooks began to tell the same mythical stories. Blacks had only themselves to blame. After all, the Ku Klux Klan were assets to the community, bringing law and order through the intimidation of lawless men (read blacks). As the truth slowly emerged over time, the spin continued to evolve. It became just another incident of “racial violence” done in the distant past by people no longer with us.
Quite the story isn’t it? You should look it up someday because it’s a most relevant story for six important reasons.
It Reminds Us That Wholeness In America Needs Wholeness In Storytelling
The older I get and the more I read, the further I realize how little I know of our nation’s history. Now some of this shortfall is surely memory related, as I’ve forgotten much of my past learning. Other parts may due to whitewashed curricula. To wit: a Connecticut social studies textbook said slaves were treated just like “family;” a Texas geography textbook referred to slaves as “workers;” and an Alabama textbook called slave life on a plantation “one of the happiest ways of life.” Maybe that happened in the Alaska of my youth. I just don’t know.
I do know that other parts of my shortfall have been self-inflicted, a selective use of facts, interpretations and memories to fit the dominative narrative of my youth. We are storytelling people acutely committed to defending our narratives. Our need for coherence trumps our desire for truth. And the stories we tell ourselves provide insight into our values, aspirations, and what we see as meaningful.
I grew upon a conservative culture that fused a fundamentalist view of Christianity with nostalgic stories about America’s past. America was a shining city on a hill, a nation of divine beginnings with a divine calling central to God’s purpose for his world. Stories like George Washington’s Farewell Address reinforced those narratives. Stories of 400 years of abuse to African Americans, like the story Wilmington’s Lie’s tell, did not.
John F. Kennedy said “Perhaps our brightest hope for the future lies in the lessons of the past.” There are still too many silent chapters in America’s history and too much of that silence is about the black experience. An America restored to wholeness needs to correct a nostalgic understanding of our past through a revival of remembrance. We need diverse perspectives from both inside and outside of our groups. We need an inclusive society, where people arising from vastly different backgrounds are equally welcomed and accepted into our nation’s discourse and civic life. Zucchino’s book Wilmington’s Lie is one small but important step there.
Fun fact: the power of independent judgments was famously demonstrated by Sir Francis Galton in 1906 where he took guesses of the weight of an ox at a local fair from 787 different people and calculated the average, which came to 1,197 pounds. The actual weight of the ox was 1,198 pounds.
It Teaches Us About the Dark Side of Human Nature
Stories like Wilmington’s Lie instructs us about the power of affective polarization which thrives on an antagonism towards the other. Affective polarization creates a binary worldview of us versus them. It welcomes anything which confirms that antagonism, opening the door to false narratives, distortions, and embellishments. Fear and outrage are its bread and butter. It takes us down tribal rabbit holes as our identity becomes owned by our political or social group. Then as we live in those echo chambers, the law of group polarization moves us towards more extreme positions driven by reputational needs and of the limited argument pools within our group.
It Exposes the Unbounded Destructiveness of a Media Amplified Lie
Joseph Goebbels once said “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” When that lie is shaped to invoke fear, we begin to hate without thinking. And the rest is observed in history with Wilmington in 1898 being a prime example.
Daniels, the editor and publisher of North Carolina’s most influential paper, and other newspaper men of that time understood the power of the press to move people. Especially white people and there was no greater motivator than the twin menaces of black suffrage and black beast rapists. Daniels needed white men to “take the law in their own hands and by organized force make the negroes behave themselves.” So he launched a constant barrage of inflammatory lies and succeeded.
It Shows Us Our Theology Can Be Wrong
Many in that era thought they were doing the Lord’s business. Leading theologians like Thornwell taught slavery was normative from a scriptural perspective: any other opinion was extrabiblical and vain philosophy. Some pastors stayed neutral or did what they could to reduce the violence. But many pastors joined the mob or supported the insurrection. Three days after the massacre, James Kramer of Wilmington’s Brooklyn Baptist Church said: “God from the beginning of time intended that intelligent white men should lead the people…In the riot, the negro was the aggressor. I believe the whites were doing God’s services, as the results have been good”
The idolatry of the god, guns and country face of Christian Nationalism shone brightly in the story. One letter to President McKinley said “men with white skins, sons of revolutionary ancestors…lovers of the Union and the constitution…are leading the victorious column this morning and will rule North Carolina ever hereafter. No need of troops now. Praise God!”
It Reveals the Vulnerability of Liberal Democratic Principles
Waddell, the insurrectionist made Mayor after the massacre, dared federal authorities to intervene in their affairs. His words: there aren’t enough soldiers in the US Army to make whites give up the vote.” The Wilmington story is a story of intentional disregard for the constitution, the rule of law, and democratic principles. This disregard was created through a steady diet of lies with malicious intent to whip up fear and outrage. The fear and outrage tapped into a moral depravity deep in the hearts of the white citizens of the area, removing any barriers to the outbreak of evil.
This just wasn’t a story about a few bad apples taking control of the city. Yes, I’m sure there was nuance with many citizens uncomfortable about the events which took place that day. Yet the underlying support was broad enough and the force of intimidation strong enough to overcome any moral or constitutional principles in its way.
Final Thoughts Without Commentary
Wilmington’s Lie is a relevant today because of a critical need in America today to understand how: (1) wholeness in America requires wholeness in storytelling, (2) hope for the future requires a full uncovering of the past, (3) there is a dark and innate side of human nature itching for division, (4) bad theology can enable racial division, (5) liberal democratic principles are vulnerable to the lie and the mob enabled through polarization, (6) the unbounded destructiveness of a media amplified lie.