After reading WB Reeves article about Lindsey Grahams ‘lynch mob’
I write here about the original January 6 c’oup — North Carolina’s Wilmington NC ‘race riot’ of 1898.
The term ‘race riot’, is the term that has been applied as a form of ‘both-siderism’ implying both races were equally to blame. Just like Charlottesville, just like Tulsa. Not true.
This was not ‘good people on both sides’ but an all out white mob of violence
The main lesson of the White Supremacist ‘Red Shirts’ and the Wilmington race riot of 1898,
is the mob’s violence provoked by their ringleader’s lies and rhetoric — allowed
the un-elected ringleader to have himself installed, as the new Mayor. (sound familiar?)
In 1898 Wilmington’s black citizen prosperity was built on a tolerant coalition of blacks and whites
working for some of the things that we are wanting still to this day...
Free education and economic opportunity for all.
https://media2.newsobserver.com/content/media/2010/5/3/ghostsof1898.pdf
By Timothy B. Tyson
At the end of the 19th century,Wilmington was a symbol of black
hope. Thanks to its busy port, the black majority city was North Carolina’s largest and most important municipality.
(however,)
North Carolina became a hotbed of agrarian revolt as hard-pressed farmers soured on the Democrats because of policies that cottoned to banks and
railroads. Many white dissidents eventually founded the People’s Party, also known as the Populists. Soon they imagined what had been unimaginable: an alliance with blacks, who shared their economic grievances.
As the economic depression deepened, these white Populists joined
forces with black Republicans, forming an interracial “Fusion” coalition that championed local self-government, free public education and electoral reforms that would give black men the same voting rights as whites.
In the 1894 and 1896 elections, the Fusion movement won every statewide
office, swept the legislature and elected its most prominent white leader,
Daniel Russell, to the governorship. In Wilmington, the Fusion triumph
lifted black and white Republicans and white Populists to power. Horrified white Democrats vowed to regain control of the government.
As the 1898 political season loomed, the Populists and Republicans hoped
to make more gains through Fusion. To rebound, Democrats knew they
had to develop campaign issues that transcended party lines.
(during the election season of 1898)
the Red Shirts, a paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, thundered across the state on horseback, disrupting African-American church services and Republican
meetings. In Wilmington, the Red Shirts patrolled every street in the days before the election, intimidating and attacking black citizens. Through these efforts, the Democrats won resounding victories across the state on Nov. 8, 1898.
Stealing the election would not be enough for the conservatives. For one thing, Wilmington’s local Fusionist government remained in office. Many local officials — the mayor and the board of aldermen, for example — had not been up for re-election in 1898. And Wilmington remained the center of African-American economic and political power, as well as a symbol of black pride. White Democrats
were in no mood to wait. The day after the election, Waddell unfurled a “White Declaration of Independence” that called for the disfranchisement of black voters.
The following morning, Nov. 10, Waddell and a heavily armed crowd of
about 2,000 marched to Love and Charity Hall, where the Record
(the town’s Black owned newspaper - my added note w.n.)
had been published. The mob battered down the door of the two-story frame structure, dumped kerosene on the wooden floors, and set the building ablaze.
Soon the streets filled with angry blacks and whites. Red Shirts on horse-
back poured into the black community and other white vigilantes romped
through the black sections of town to “kill every damn nigger in sight,” as
one of them put it. At the end of the day, no one knew
how many people had died — estimates ranged from nine to 300.
The only certainty in the matter of casualties is that democracy was gravely
wounded on the streets of Wilmington.
While the violence raged, white leaders launched a coup d’etat, forcing the
mayor, the board of aldermen, and the police chief to resign at gunpoint.
By 4 p.m. that day, Waddell was Wilmington’s mayor.
Still, they were not done. The white mob gathered at the city jail to watch
soldiers with fixed bayonets march Fusionist leaders to the train station, banishing at least 21 successful blacks and their white allies from the city.
Effects of 1898 linger...
When the new legislature met in 1899, its first order of business was to
disfranchise blacks. In the years that followed, the leaders of the white
supremacy campaign were largely responsible for the birth of the Jim Crow
social order and the rise of a one-party political system.
More than a century later, it is clear that the white supremacy campaign
of 1898 injected a vicious racial ideology into American political culture
that we have yet to transcend fully.
Waddell, a defeated Confederate soldier, ‘claimed’ the mayoral office after a campaign of violence.
In other words, an angry mob inspired by repeated lies and racist rhetoric, allowed an un-elected man to be installed as the new ‘leader’.
(I’m sure the grift of taking over one of the most prosperous cities in the south had it’s fringe benefits as well.)
It’s not ridiculous that T**mp is demanding to be ‘re-instated’ and that his followers do anything, even violent acts to ‘restore’ what was ‘stolen’ from him.
This playbook is an old one, but it will succeed again if we are not vigilant in pursuing justice, and law and order, against those like TFG and the mobs he provokes to violence.