Christianity in America, 1898: One of the city’s leading churchmen, the Rev. James Kramer, who had carried a gun during the massacre, told his congregation that whites had done holy work, since they were destined by God to “lead the people and rule the country.”

Wall Street Journal book review: WILMINGTON’S LIE By David Zucchino

BOOKS
BOOKSHELF

WILMINGTON’S LIE
By David Zucchino
Atlantic Monthly, 426 pages, $28

‘Wilmington’s Lie’ Review: An American Tragedy

By 1898, North Carolina’s largest city was a thriving mixed-race community— and so a target of the state’s white supremacists.

By Fergus M. Bordewich

January 3, 2020

Sometimes history’s greatest waves leave their most vivid traces on the most local of events. In “Wilmington’s Lie,” David Zucchino offers a gripping account of one of the most disturbing, though virtually unknown, political events in American history. He opens with a terse verbal jolt: “The killers came by streetcar.” From this ominous beginning, the ruthless 1898 massacre of blacks in Wilmington, N.C., by the members of a white-supremacist conspiracy roars to its tragic conclusion. It is a grim but fascinating story, and an instructive one.

What happened in Wilmington was not the first deliberate massacre of black Americans. In the late 1860s, white race riots killed scores of blacks in Memphis, New Orleans and upcountry Louisiana. Nor was it the last. Dozens of blacks were systematically slaughtered in Tulsa, Okla., and Ocoee, Fla., in the 1920s. Thousands, too, were lynched or shot during the Jim Crow decades in individual incidents in small towns and rural areas. The Wilmington massacre stands out as the only coup against a stable, elected government in American history, a government that was objectionable for no other reason than that it was biracial.

Mr. Zucchino, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a contributing writer for the New York Times, welds probing research and a crisp writing style into a dramatic rendering of events, and he goes on to show their ramifications for African-Americans across the South. The Wilmington coup, as he suggests, was a kind of coda to Reconstruction—a final episode in the failed effort to create a biracial politics in the former Confederacy.

By the late 1870s, black and white Republicans had been ousted from power in most of the South. But as long as the federal government remained in Republican hands, as it did for almost all the rest of the 19th century, the Southern wing of the party was kept alive, mostly through federal patronage and the tenacious attempts of African-American voters (then virtually all Republican) to take part in elections. From time to time, Republicans managed to make common cause with populist reformers, as they did in North Carolina in the mid-1890s: A fusion ticket won sweeping victories across the state, putting many blacks into office in areas that, like Wilmington, were heavily populated by African-Americans.

In 1898, three of Wilmington’s 10 aldermen were black; there were black health inspectors, black postmasters and black magistrates, as well as a black street superintendent and county treasurer—most drawn from an educated middle class that included lawyers, doctors and churchmen. Just months before the massacre, the American Baptist Publication Society had called Wilmington “the freest town for a negro in the country.” Other key offices, such as those of the mayor and police chief, were held by white Republican or fusionist allies. Contrary to later racist propaganda, the city was well run. It was the very presence of blacks in positions of power that was intolerable to leading Democrats, who began railing against “Negro rule.”

Mr. Zucchino’s narrative toggles skillfully between the city’s black community and the activities of the white insurrectionists, a group that included Confederate veterans, militia officers, rabble-rousers, members of prominent local families and, based in the state’s capital, the widely influential editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, Josephus Daniels. His race baiting and fake “reporting” fueled the savagery of the white mobs. “White supremacy” has today become something of a buzzword in the debate over racial inequities: In the Wilmington of 1898, it was a proud battle cry.

In the fall of 1898, there was no doubt that violence was in the offing. Gun sales soared, and wealthy merchants handed out free weapons to white men who couldn’t afford to buy their own. When blacks attempted to buy guns for their own defense, however, the local white newspaper in Wilmington, the Messenger, declared: “Sambo is seeking to furnish an armory here.”

Democrats were looking for an excuse to act. They found it when Alex Manly, the fiery editor of Wilmington’s black newspaper, the Daily Record, published an editorial denouncing the hackneyed but incendiary charges routinely being leveled at the city’s black community—in particular, that blacks were wholesale rapists who could be brought to heel only by lynching. As Manly sarcastically wrote of these attacks: “Every Negro lynched is called a ‘big, burly, black brute,’ when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers, and were not only ‘black’ and ‘burly’ but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them as is very well known to all.”

Calls for Manly’s murder swelled, while the columns of the Messenger wildly asserted with no evidence whatsoever that Wilmington was experiencing a massive—in fact, nonexistent, as Mr. Zucchino shows—crime wave. The newspaper declared: “The Sambos do not wait to be threatened or assaulted but they take the initiative and assault to kill from the start.” The paper further charged that blacks were stockpiling arms and that nannies planned to poison the white children in their care and set their homes on fire.

As the November 1898 state elections approached, white vigilantes in Wilmington rode through black neighborhoods shooting off their guns. One white ringleader, Col. Alfred Waddell, a one-time Confederate officer, directed his followers in a speech to “do your duty” as white men: “Go to the polls tomorrow and if you find the negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill him! Shoot him down in his tracks!”

On Election Day, whites forced blacks away from polling stations at gunpoint and openly stuffed ballot boxes. In one typical instance, the “winning” Democratic candidate had 100 more votes than the total number of registered voters in the precinct. Using similar tactics, Democrats won overwhelming victories across much of the state. One newspaper trumpeted: “Our state redeemed—Negroism defunct.”

What came next was an organized riot, one that, as Mr. Zucchino conclusively shows, was planned even before the stolen election as a decisive coup de grâce to what remained of the biracial fusion movement. On streetcars, on horseback and on foot, hundreds of armed men poured into Wilmington from outlying towns, “stoked with adrenaline . . . and eager for an opportunity to shoot black men,” in Mr. Zucchino’s words. Many of them, known as “Red Shirts,” wore red calico blouses or red jackets over white butterfly collars, with cartridge belts around their waists. They shot their guns into black homes, fired on blacks standing on street corners, and burned the office of the black-owned Daily Record. Alex Manly had already fled north or he would have been lynched.

Later, white officials claimed that their actions were necessary to quell “Negro riots.” In reality, what took place was a slaughter. One white man was overheard to say to another as he fired, “We are just shooting to see the n—s run!” White housewives brought the shooters coffee and hotcakes. Meanwhile, hundreds of black women and children fled to the surrounding swamps in terror. By the time it was all over, at least 60 black men lay dead and many others wounded.

The insurrectionists issued a manifesto demanding an immediate end to Negro “rule,” the handing over of black-held jobs to white men, and no tolerance for “the actions of unscrupulous white men in affiliating with the negroes.” Every official of the city’s fusion government, white and black, elected and appointed, from the mayor on down, was forced to resign. An impromptu “election” was held, and eight white supremacists, including two men who had directed the rioters, were chosen as alderman. Col. Waddell—who had called for black voters to be shot in their tracks—was then selected as Wilmington’s mayor.

Fifty “troublesome” men, mostly black, were peremptorily put on trains out of town and warned never to return. Many others were beaten and threatened with lynching. In the weeks and months that followed, an estimated 2,100 blacks fled the city. Not one white rioter was ever charged with a crime.

“With the killings completed and their enemies banished,” Mr. Zucchino writes, “Wilmington’s whites began crafting a lasting narrative of a heroic victory over dark and malevolent forces.” Later reports in the white press typically asserted that black men were the aggressors. One of the city’s leading churchmen, the Rev. James Kramer, who had carried a gun during the massacre, told his congregation that whites had done holy work, since they were destined by God to “lead the people and rule the country.”

The impulses behind the events in Wilmington soon made themselves felt more broadly. Resurgent Democrats in the state legislature stripped the vast majority of blacks of the ability to vote by crafting discriminatory poll taxes, whites-only primaries and targeted literacy tests. Other Southern states followed suit with similar legislation in the first years of the 20th century, until the black vote even in areas where blacks were a majority had been reduced to nearly nothing.

The victors were proud of what they had accomplished. Josephus Daniels, the editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, later to be secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, praised the gunmen of 1898 for creating “a reign of terror.” Boasted Col. Waddell, Wilmington had “set the pace for the whole south on the question of white supremacy.” In the years that followed, whites shamelessly rewrote history to incorporate racist tropes. In the 1930s, one popular writer asserted that Wilmington’s whites had to act because “black rapists prowled the city . . . attacking Southern girls and women.” And as late as 1949 school textbooks portrayed the insurrectionists as heroic defenders of law and order.

Thanks to Mr. Zucchino’s unflinching account, we now have the full, appalling story. As befits a serious journalist, he avoids polemics and lets events speak for themselves. “Wilmington’s Lie” joins a growing shelf of works that unpeel the brutal realities of the post-Civil War South, including Steve Luxenberg’s “Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey From Slavery to Segregation,” Stephen Budiansky’s “The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War” and Charles Lane’s “The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction.”

The white supremacists who overthrew the elected government in Wilmington, and drove blacks and their white allies from power elsewhere in the South, liked to call themselves “redeemers”—that is, the saviors of white power. But it is books such as these, not least “Wilmington’s Lie,” that have redeemed the truth of post-Civil War history from the tenacious mythology of racism.

—Mr. Bordewich is the author of “Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America,” to be published next month.