Wilmington Insurrection of 1898
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The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina and is considered a turning point in North Carolina politics following Reconstruction. Although it was dismissively labeled a riot for decades, the accurate - and now applied - term is coup d'etat. This incident is the only instance of a municipal government being overthrown in US history. (John DeSantis, "Wilmington, N.C., Revisits a Bloody 1898 Day." The New York Times at 1, 33. June 4, 2006) The Wilmington massacre was a the illegal seizure of power from an elected government by white supremacists.
Wilmington, then the largest city in the state, has a majority black population, large number of black professionals and a strong, biracial Republican Party. A group of white supremacists, planning to reestablish the Democratic Party, led the insurgency. They killed twenty two blacks and Republicans[citation needed].
Whites initiated targeted violence on November 10, 1898, just after the general election that brought Democrats back to power in the state legislature. A mob led by Alfred Moore Waddell and others forced white Republican Mayor Silas P. Wright and other members of the city government (both black and white) to resign (they would not be up for re-election until 1899). A new city council elected Waddell to take over as mayor. [1]
Subsequent to usurping power, Democrats (see North Carolina General Assembly of 1899-1900) passed the first Jim Crow laws for North Carolina. The democrats had established martial law for African Americans in North Carolina and had thus forged a template applied far beyond the state's borders for at least fifty years. Many of the rights blacks had secured after the Civil War were cleansed from the law. It would not be until the African-American Civil Rights Movement several generations later that African Americans would regain their civil rights. In 1900, a second "white supremacy" political campaign cemented the Democrats' domination and elected Charles B. Aycock as governor.
In 2000, the North Carolina General Assembly established the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission to develop a historical record of the event and to assess the economic impact of the riot on blacks locally and across the region and state. [2] The commission was co-chaired by state legislator Thomas E. Wright, whose 2007 campaign finance scandal seemed to damage the prospects of the commission's proposed legislation. [3]
In January 2007, the North Carolina Democratic Party officially acknowledged and renounced the actions by party leaders during the Wilmington insurrection and the White Supremacy campaigns.[4]
[edit] Press/Media Involvement
The press at the time of the riots purportedly contributed to them by publicizing the elections and encouraging people from other parts of the state to travel and participate in the upcoming coup d'état. The News & Observer in Raleigh, run at the time by Josephus Daniels, remains today one of the largest papers in the state. There has also been discussion of participation by the Charlotte Observer.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Contemporary Editorial from the Cleveland Gazette (1901)
- 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission
- NC Election of 1898
- News & Observer: The Ghosts of 1898 (registration required)
- News & Observer: 'City confronts a past long buried' (registration required)
- News & Observer: 'Group denies state's race riot report' (registration required)
- Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy
- NC State Library
- A Statement of Facts Concerning the Bloody Riot in Wilmington, N. C. (Contemporary Account)
