Transcript of The Wilmington Massacre

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, another black spot on American history edition.

That's right. And it's not like we're on a mission to make ourselves look bad as Americans.

Right.

But these are often stories that are not only overlooked, but in some cases, like this one, kind of like buried for decades and decades. So nobody knows the truth of the matter, which in this case is that in the late 1800s in Wilmington, North Carolina, a large mob of white supremacists, a very organized group, got together and staged a coup because they were not happy that black people in their town had become franchised.

Mm-hmm. Enfranchised, maybe.

Enfranchised. Yeah, that'd be it. And, you know, we're starting to hold office and have a say, and we're winning elections and stuff like that. And they were like, "This will not stand. So we're going to stage a coup and kill a bunch of people."

Yeah. And that is definitely worth dragging up and showing off to everybody because that isn't the kind of thing that should be swept under the rug like it was.

Yeah, totally.

And what sucks also is this just bears such an uncanny resemblance to the Tulsa Massacre. And one of the things do you remember that episode too?

Oh, yeah.

Both of these, any story like this is just so stomach-turning, you know, that people do this to other people. And I think one of the other reasons why it's worth talking about is this still goes on in the world. Dominant groups still slaughter other groups for whatever reason. And it just so happened that in the 1890s in Wilmington, North Carolina, it was white supremacists slaughtering black residents who had been democratically elected or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the armed white mob went through town to stage what you said, a coup.

Yeah. There are also parts of this that, you know, we've seen play out over, like, the past six and eight years. It was scary a few times where I was like, "Oh, this march happened with, like, torches." And I was like, "That sounds just like what happened in Virginia not too long ago." So weird parallels. So we're going to tell this story today and I guess start with going back in time to the passage of the 15th Amendment when this is, you know, decades after the Civil War, when the Democratic Party, Democrats at the time, used laws and violence to suppress power in the South.

Yeah. And in another turn that is very similar to now, this was not disenfranchising black voters, killing black citizens. This was not mainstream popular, like, opinion, I guess.

Yeah.

Or desire necessarily. It was essentially the wealthy white elites in Wilmington and North Carolina who were upset about this and who were funding the Democratic Party. And this is when we're talking about the Republicans, it's the Lincoln Republicans who had supported, you know, ending slavery.

Yeah.

So it's a little confusing right now, but sadly, it's not that confusing because there's no decent party right now. But that's neither here nor there. Instead, the wealthy white elite of the area were basically supporting the Democratic Party and trying to get this all changed. It wasn't like your average person necessarily. It was like, "Yeah, I want to make sure all the black people get run out of town where they were born and raised and were my neighbors for 30 years."

Yeah, for sure. So this is the 1890s. There was something called the Populous Party, and they came out to support, like, you know, farmers, laborers, stuff like that, like, you know, against the wealthy elites at the time. And this was not just in North Carolina. This is sort of in other places in the South. The Populous got together with the Republicans of the time, which was the main party of, like, black Southern voters, and they formed a new movement called the Fusionist Movement.

Yeah, which is a pretty smart thing to do, right? So they basically got together and they said, "We're going to form a coalition and we're going to say, 'You guys run for this race. Republicans run for this race. Populous run for this race.' And we're not going to run against each other so that we won't split the anti-Democrat ticket. Instead, you know, we'll both adopt the same combined platform so that all of the people who are Populous and all the people who are Fusionist or all the people who are Republicans and who all want these things, you know, enacted, these platform planks, they're going to vote for both of us because there you go."

Yeah, for sure. What policies, you ask? Stuff like, you know, "Let's limit interest rates. Let's make it more affordable to own a home. Let's increase education funding. Let's, like, let's make sure, like, this is a specific thing they did. Let's make sure that if you're illiterate, you can still vote. So election ballots have to use, like, designated party colors and designs so you still know who you're voting for, even though you may not be able to read the name." So it was very successful. The next election that came along after this was 1896, and they had a lot of great success.

Yes. And so what happened, Chuck, that we're about to talk about was so the white coup in North Carolina was so successful that after Representative George H. White left office in 1901, there wasn't another black congressman elected from North Carolina until 1992.

I thought that was 1928.

No, that was somebody from the North.

Oh, okay. I got you.

And there wasn't one from the South elected until after 1965. But in North Carolina specifically, they had a drought of black congresspeople from 1901 to 1992.

And I guess a countrywide drought for 28 years after.

Yes.

Which is also crazy.

So this was like. We haven't done an episode just on Reconstruction. We've done some. We did one on, like, the black codes that really kind of covered, like, Jim Crow stuff.

Yeah.

But I feel like we should do one on Reconstruction itself.

Yeah.

But a lot of this is largely the South rebelling against, you know, Reconstruction policies. And again, the idea that black people are starting to vote and, well, wait a minute, that means that they're starting to gain power and political power, and all of a sudden they are going to have a say. Black people are going to have a say in their own towns.

Yeah.

And this was really going on in Wilmington. Like, thanks to the Fusionist Movement, the town of Wilmington was becoming, like, politically and economically powerful with blacks and whites living together, side by side, working together, frequenting each other's stores and things like that. But we should say this is not it wasn't like some sort of multiracial utopia. Like, it was still it still existed in the Jim Crow South. But as far as the Jim Crow South goes, it might as well have been a multiracial utopia.

Yeah. And Wilmington was the largest municipality in North Carolina at the time. It had about 20,000 people. And like you said, it was a majority black city, had black doctors and businesspeople and attorneys and businesses. There were three black-owned banks. Some black people were elected to key offices in the city, like the treasurer, the jailer, the coroner, even some cops. I think 10 of the 26 cops were black.

Yeah, significant.

But like you said, it was like it was a big deal. It still didn't align, like, statistically with how majority black Wilmington was. And, like.

Yeah.

Black cops in Wilmington couldn't arrest white people. And there were obviously, you know, there were some stuff like that going on, but a lot of progress being made in the Deep South at the time.

Right. And so again, if you're a white supremacist, especially a wealthy white supremacist who's used to having power and say in the area, you're watching your entire world erode as the Fusionist Coalition just gains more and more power and just starts taking things in the direction they think they should go, right? So as this is happening in the 1890s in Wilmington, there is a sense of real unrest and I think hatred growing.

Yeah.

Among certain populations of whites. Again, not entirely the entire population of whites or even necessarily a majority of it. I think stuff like this is so ugly.

Yeah.

That you start to think, like, well, everybody was like this. You just lump everybody into this category. And that's just not the truth. It can very often be a very small proportion of the population, but what they do is just so atrocious. It just seems like this is so many more people and that everybody thinks that way, which is a.

Yeah.

It's kind of like a terrible byproduct of it that makes it even more scary and fearsome and has an even more sweeping effect than just the event itself. Because say if you're a black person in Wilmington and you suddenly see all these white people doing this to you, you are probably going to assume from that point on that all white people feel that way, even if they didn't directly participate. And that's not necessarily true.

Well said. It's insidious. That's the word.

See, all I had to say was insidious. You always do that to me. You're so much better at pulling the right word out. And I, like.

Oh, no.

Give 500 or 600 words to that one word. I'm doing it right now.

Hey, we're I'm your jelly to your peanut butter. It works well. We work well together.

I was assumed I was jelly.

Okay. You can be jelly today. All right. So in North Carolina, the Democratic Party was, like you said, they were like, "We're having no more of this." And there was a guy named Furnifold M. Simons who launched what was called, and this is in capital letters, everybody, the White Supremacy Campaign. Because like I mentioned earlier, this wasn't just like this was a very organized thing that they got together and had meetings and said, "This is how we will stop this." It wasn't just some kind of random actions that were dashed off by a bunch of mad white people.

Yeah. It had been reframed from race to class, the problem. And yeah, it had been very successful. The Populous had. One of the other ways that this White Supremacy Campaign was successful in gaining recognition and adherence is through the media, specifically through the Raleigh News and Observer newspaper. The editor was a guy named Josephus Daniels, and he was one of the leaders of the whole campaign. But in his paper, he used his paper to also scare white working-class voters into supporting this idea.

Yeah. They would run articles that would paint all black people as criminals. You know, "Watch your back, everybody. They will steal from you. There will be sexual assault committed against your sister or your mother or your cousin." And there was another guy in town named Alex Manley. And this is in 1898. He was the editor and publisher of the black newspaper in Wilmington called The Daily Record. And he had finally had enough of them painting his people as rapists.

So what Alex Manley did right there is he basically pointed out that a taboo is routinely broken. And if you've ever seen or read To Kill a Mockingbird.

Yeah, exactly.

Ed McCinty says this is the most taboo thing in all of Southern culture. A white person, a white woman specifically, willingly sleeping with a black man, that that is the most taboo thing that can happen. And Alex Manley's like, "That happens all the time." I think he even said some of them even fall in love.

Yeah.

And that it was like a bomb dropping. And in his defense, he was responding to a white supremacist speech by a woman named Rebecca Lattimer Felton who called on white men and called white men's honor into question because she said that they needed to do more to protect white women from black rapist men by lynching them more. And so he was responding to this saying, "That's actually not the case." But nobody took it like that. They took it as him being as provocative as an editor could be at the time in the South.

Yeah. And, you know, the response was what you would think it would be. White advertisers left The Daily Record. Their landlord who, you know, where they house the newspaper offices evicted them. He himself received death threats, of course. And a lot of the Democratic papers across the state and the South started kind of either pulling quotes out of context or whatever to scare people again, using sort of his own words against him.

Yeah.

And rile up that white supremacist base.

You want to take a break and come back and talk about the election of 1898?

Yeah, let's do it.

Okay, Chuck, so it's 1898, and specifically around election time, this is when that white supremacist campaign really kind of started to put words into action. The Democratic Party Convention for 1898, the state convention, I should say, in North Carolina, essentially was like, "We're all about this white supremacy campaign. Like, we need to take back political power from the black voters, the black politicians."

Yeah.

That also supported this idea through violence and intimidation. It was carried out by kind of a clan-esque group called the Redshirts, who had originated in South Carolina, but had spread to North Carolina as well. And they were essentially called upon to enforce this white supremacist campaign and its aims and goals by intimidating. And then if intimidation didn't work, like outright violence against anybody who wanted to exercise their constitutional rights.

Yeah. And we're talking about voting here, like voter intimidation in a big, big way. This organized campaign, they would the leaders at the time, you know, were anonymous. I think some of them have come out in decades since. But there were Wilmington Democrats who got these nightly patrols organized with the Redshirts and more, where there was a captain for each city ward and a lieutenant for every block. So like super organized stuff. And they were like, you know, it was under the guise of, "Hey, like there's going to be a violent uprising of the black residents, so we need to be prepared.

Yeah. That gives you a really good idea of what the News and Observer's role was, for sure.

Yeah. We need to talk about Alfred Waddell though, huh? This guy.

Yeah. So he was he eventually became the public face and leader of this movement, this white supremacist campaign. But he was not calling the shots. There were two secret cabals, one called the Elite Nine and the other called the Group Six, who were at the highest echelons of white power in Wilmington and North Carolina and probably other states too. But they were meeting and getting together and figuring out what to do. But Alfred Moore Waddell was like the guy who seemed to be in the public leading this thing.

Yeah. Yeah. He said that they would choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses. And he said that, quote, more than once in his time.

Yeah. One thing about him, though, is it's easy to be like he was just some dumb racist. He had like a silver tongue. He had a really good way of putting things, like just flipping reality on its back end, essentially, just turning things upside down. And that whole thing about how, you know, there was going to be an uprising by blacks in Wilmington, that that needed to be looked out for. That was the reason that the white people were arming themselves. Or they also portrayed the black politicians in charge in Wilmington as basically having been duped by white carpetbaggers from the north.

Yeah.

Who were really pulling the strings and calling the shots. And you can't really you can't be mad at the black politicians. They don't know any better. Essentially like that. Like as patronizing and paternalistic an approach as you can have. But that was just deep-seated, virulent racist rhetoric as well combined with it.

Yeah, for sure. So leading up to the election and the few days before, the Redshirts are patrolling Wilmington. They're terrorizing the black community. They're randomly firing into houses with guns. They fired into a black school at one point. At least two black men were stabbed. And this is just happening like out in the street before the election. They held a white man's rally, which had a parade of armed men with torches. That's what I was talking about, sort of reminding me of Virginia not too long ago.

Yeah.

And Waddell spoke again at that rally. And that's where he talked about, once again, about choking the Cape Fear River with carcasses. And then on the actual election day, you know, it wasn't like a massacre of bloodshed on that day, but it was a big successful campaign. Like, you know, sometimes if you tried to vote, you were physically blocked. Sometimes, in a lot of cases, I think you were just too intimidated to show up at all. And the governor showed up because Governor Russell was from Wilmington.

Yeah. It really shows how emboldened they felt.

Yeah.

Like these guys were like, "We're this is if they feel like they can kill the governor."

Their white governor.

They're yeah, they're pretty sure that they have the backing from the most high.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, that they can just do whatever they want, right? So it has really now gotten really out of hand. And yet we haven't even reached the worst part yet.

Yeah.

Everything really started to get worse after election day. We're still on election day. One of the other things that happened during the 1898 election in Wilmington itself is a lot of the black precincts, they were run by white county registrars who just replaced votes.

Yeah.

If you voted Republican, they would just replace your vote with a Democratic ballot.

Yeah. There was there's some statistics here. At one black majority precinct, about 150 white men stormed the vote count. And the Democratic candidate there got more votes from that precinct than there were registered voters. And then in Wilmington itself, the Fusionists won the previous election two years earlier by 5,000 votes. And in this election, they lost by 6,000.

Yeah. And statewide also, the Fusionist movement was essentially disassembled, right?

Yeah. They squashed the vote and won.

Yeah.

Politically.

So there were a lot of just average black residents in North Carolina who were like, "Okay, we made it through election night. There was like very little violence. The white people stole the election, but we're there's still peace right now. And this sucks, but we can figure out how to regroup after this, right? We still have our lives. We've lived to fight another day."

Yeah.

But like I said, it didn't really start to get bad until after election day. And the reason why in Wilmington specifically, I should say. And the reason why is because in the 1898 election, the municipal seats weren't up for election. They were up for election the following year in 1897. And yet the white supremacist campaign in the town wanted those guys out more than anybody because they were the ones who were, you know, running the town.

Mm-hmm.

So this is where what you call the coup before really started. It was the day after election day.

Yeah, which was November 9th. The supremacist leaders put a notice in the Wilmington Messenger that the headline was, "Attention, white men," and said, "Let's get together at the local courthouse." And at that meeting, Waddell shows up. He reads the what would eventually become known as the Wilmington Declaration of Independence or the White Declaration of Independence, where they announced the plan to, quote, "End the rule by Negroes," end quote. And basically saying like the long and short of it was like, "Hey, we pay all the taxes here.

Yeah. And again, largely from the middle and upper classes of the city, right?

Yeah.

450 people. That's a lot of people endorsing a direct hate-filled.

Coup.

Coup, declaration that calls for violence. Still, this is a city of 20,000. And it's majority black residents, right?

Yeah.

So Waddell knew, like, we're going to need more than 450 people. It would be great to have the compliance of the black political leadership in the town. So he assembled he called for the 32 of the city leaders, the black city leaders, to come down, meet with him. And he read them the declaration. This is in the municipal building where these people had been democratically elected to hold office. Waddell's walking around like he owns the place, reads them this declaration and says, "Here's what we want from you.

Yeah.

At the very least, we can hopefully spare our lives and the lives of other black residents if we agree, if we comply. So they did. They wrote a compliant response to Waddell. And supposedly they had beaten that 7:30 a.m. deadline, but they couldn't get it to Waddell directly though, right?

Yeah. They were guards, armed patrols guarding his house at the time. So they weren't approaching the house. So a lawyer from the group of black leaders sent it by post. They went to the post office and it didn't reach him by the deadline. A lot of historians say like he knew that they sent it and he knew it was coming. But regardless, it did not reach him by the deadline. And maybe we should take a break there and come back and talk about the massacre.

All right. So the next day was November 10th, a couple of days after the election. And 500 white men, you can only call them a mob, assembled at the Wilmington Light Infantry Armory. And they called on the commander there, Lieutenant Colonel Walker Taylor, to lead them to the Daily Record, to that newspaper. And Waddell ended up going. He was kind of, you know, leading the charge there toward the office. They marched through town. Other people, you know, it's like something out of a movie, start joining in.

Yeah. Chuck, just put yourself in that spot that day, at that moment in this town. It was the biggest town in North Carolina at the time, but you're still only talking about 20,000 people. Imagine seeing 2,000 people, 20 or 10% of the population.

Yeah.

Armed and angry and out for blood coming down these narrow streets in downtown Wilmington, like seeing that come.

Yeah.

Even if you didn't think they were coming for you, just seeing that kind of like unhinged, like mass behavior is just I mean, that's just scary to think of.

Yeah.

Even now, 100 years plus later, like that's it's crazy that this actually happened. And it's so easy a century on to just it's just history. But if you can just put yourself there for a second, it really kind of just begins to get across what it must have been like to live through it.

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, they burned the newspaper building down. Then they moved to a black neighborhood. It was called Brooklyn near the waterfront. And the largest employer in the city at the time was a cotton processing facility. They employed a lot of black workers. And on the way, they're shooting indiscriminately into businesses, black-owned businesses and black homes, marching toward this cotton facility. And finally, the governor, he responded to Colonel Taylor's message and basically said, "Hey, listen, man.

Right. The hotchkiss gun, the Gatling gun, they made an appearance. People were not just shot. They were hanged. They were dragged. You could be in the wrong place at the wrong time and have been murdered just for being a black man standing in the wrong place, which means there was a lot of indiscriminate murder, which another term for that is thrill killing.

Yeah.

And there was also targeted acts by this mob too. There was a bunch of armed white men that surrounded the house of Daniel Wright, who's a black politician. They told him to run, and they gave him a few feet before they shot him in the back and killed him.

Yeah.

They ransacked black churches. Like it was there was no I can't even think of the word, but nothing was out of bounds, it seems like.

Yeah. You know, so Waddell gets down to, I guess, you know, while this is all going on, he calls on the mayor, the police chief, all these people they want out of their jobs, basically. They say, "Come down to the offices here. Meet the mob and resign your seats under, you know, obviously threat of physical violence." And Waddell was like, "I'm mayor now." And it's now officially a coup. The other offices were filled by these white conspiracists and supremacists.

Yeah, I found an interactive map that shows where people died. And there were just random street corners where like three or four black men were shot to death. Everyone who died was black. I think you just said a handful of white mob members have been wounded, typically from being shot, but all of them survived. And again, all of this just took place over a day. And as it was going on, a lot of the black residents fled.

Yeah.

They fled into the surrounding swamp lands, fled into the woods, a cemetery, and they just hid for days. And they finally, some of them, they started to trickle back in, but some of them were like, "I just need to get my stuff and get out of here."

Yeah.

You know, I like a lot of the residents in the city moved. I saw something like 10% of the black residents ended up leaving the city either on their own because they didn't want to live there anymore, or they were marched out of town at gunpoint in a lot of cases.

Yeah. And the ones who did stay obviously were disenfranchised at the polls. They, you know, may have been kicked out of their job or had less access to good jobs or getting like a bank loan or something like that because a lot of those businesses closed down, black-owned businesses. By 1900, the city had flipped and was majority white. And, you know, rates of literacy went down. Financially, you know, the ones who remained there were poorer than they were before.

Yeah, that was those are two other things that it bears another resemblance to the Tulsa Massacre. One.

Yeah.

Just like Tulsa, Wilmington was a source of black political and economic power. It was like a powerhouse place for black people to live at the time. And then two, no one was ever prosecuted for it.

Yeah.

So the whole thing just had such a sweeping effect, not just in the intimidation of black residents and black voters, but in the emboldenment of the white supremacists taking over the state, essentially, that one of these guys, he was one of the conspirators in Wilmington. His name was George Roundtree. He was elected a state representative, and he introduced a bill that included the quote that the chief object of the amendment is to eliminate the ignorant and irresponsible Negro vote.

Yeah. Yeah. The stat that really gets me out of this is in six years, in 1896, there were 125,000 registered black voters in the state of North Carolina. And six years later, in 1902, there were 6,000 registered black voters.

I mean, that it was just so successful. And it was such a terrible thing to be successful too. It's just it's heartbreaking. The state, of course, in Winan was like, "Hey, let's come up with some Jim Crow laws since we can pass anything like that right now." The first was they segregated train cars, and then they followed that up with bathrooms, movie theaters. Courtroom bibles had to be you had to have separate ones for black people and white people. And then, like I said, it wasn't until 1992 that a black congressperson was elected in North Carolina after George Henry White left office in 1901.

Yeah. Well, even to today, you know, at the time in 1896, Wilmington was a black majority town, like we said. And today's black population in Wilmington is under 15% black. It's still a lot of racial tensions in that area, sadly. Immediately after this thing, you know, the cover-up starts basically and the whitewashing, everything from like the newspapers officially like denying that it happened and there was no mob. They called it a unanimous uprising of the white people.

Yeah, that they basically had to. And he also portrayed the black politicians and city leaders who'd been deposed in this coup as afterward realizing like this was for the best.

Right.

He said that there was an article in the News and Observer, like a couple of weeks after the massacre, and Waddell was interviewed, and he basically gave the first extensive account of everything. So his word, his completely backward, twisted up word was taken as like, well, this is really what happened. And one of the things he said was that the black politicians who'd been running the city were now satisfied of their inefficiency and utter helpless imbecility and that they saw that really white people needed to run the show from that point on.

Yeah. She kind of the first real like honest account of this didn't come until 1951. And she wrote this book kind of, you know, it was challenged over the years. A lot of white historians at the time, of course, it was in 1951, were like, no, she's overly dramatic. But it is checked out for the most part over time as being like the first like kind of truthful accounting. And, you know, this is one of those stories that came out little by little in just recent years. I think there was an American Experience PBS documentary in 2010 called American Coup: Wilmington 1898.

Oh, yeah. There's so many that are so little known or flying under the radar are still misunderstood from this era. This is not, I don't want to say common, but it wasn't totally out of the norm. And one of the reasons also, again, it was misunderstood or mistaken was because of Waddell. One of the things he said in that article was he described how at one point the white, I guess, liberators came across a mob of armed black residents, a thousand strong, shooting at them from behind the bushes.

Didn't happen.

That in no way, shape, or form happened.

No.

And he just said that, and it became the official narrative. So yeah, that's how history is written a lot of times, guys. And you have to look into it more.

Yep. I need a shower.

Yeah, I know. This is the kind of thing that can give white supremacists a bad name, you know?

A moment of levity. Thank you for that.

I think then we should just go ahead and go on to listener mail.

All right. This is from Steph Anjude. Hey, guys. Has it really been 18 years? Started listening to you while I was pregnant with my son, and he's 16 years old now. We've been enjoying stuff you should know together since he was a baby. Can you imagine? He actually heard it in the womb, then as a baby, then finally when he could understand it himself. It was his first podcast, and we still listen to you both on all of our road trips and weekends. My son loves listening to you guys to fall asleep, as do I. It melts my heart when I remember all the times he has sung the Stuff You Should Know song with his little baby voice now to his grown-up voice.

Thanks, you guys, for being that for us. That is a great email. What a wonderful story. Bringing people together, Chuck. That's what we're doing.

Trying to.

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