'Wilmington ... Rise of White Supremacy'

Review by Bill Doughty

White supremacists –– men who considered themselves to be "victims" of history –– committed gross atrocities in Wilmington, NC, at the end of the 19th century. Through violence and intimidation, they prevented blacks from voting. Then, after a rigged election, red-shirted whites of the Democratic party went on a riot, killing as many as 60 black Americans, attacking members of the Fusionist part, setting fire to a black newspaper office, and banishing hundreds of blacks from their homes.

The details of the tragedy are captured in "Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy" by David Zucchino (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020). And the terrible truth is that the Navy was tied directly and indirectly to the events.

White supremacists burned a black-run newspaper office and posed for photos before a murderous rampage in Wilmington, NC, in 1898.

"The naval commander, George L. Morton, ordered his men to prepare to deploy to North Fourth and Harnett Streets to assist in 'quelling the negro riots,' as he put it." (though Zucchino presents evidence that it was the whites, not blacks, who initiated the killing rampage.)

Morton sought and received permission from the county deputy sheriff and then informed Governor Russell by telegram of the order to deploy Naval Reserves into the streets. "The Naval Reserves now had authorization –– from a white Republican –– to secure the peace with every weapon at Morton's disposal, including the Hotchkiss rapid-fire gun delivered two days earlier."

"In response to commander Morton's telegram, Russell's adjutant general wired back: 'Your action ordering out naval reserves to preserve the peace is approved by the Governor, who directs that you place yourself under orders of Lieut. Col. Walker Taylor.' Between them, the infantry and the Naval Reserves were able to deploy 140 trained and armed white men. Russell's decision was pivotal: he gave a committed white supremacist unchecked authority to unleash state troops against black citizens –– the very men whose votes had put Russell in office."

A History of Institutionalized Racism

Confederate General Braxton Bragg

The election and riot came just a generation after the end of the Civil War. "The U.S. Navy had unleashed upon Fort Fisher the heaviest naval bombardment in history at the time. The fall of the fort in January 1865 had closed all access to the port of Wilmington, the Confederacy's last functioning seaport." Fort Fisher had been lost by the South's General Braxton Bragg (later to be the namesake of Fort Bragg).

"The closing week of the Civil War brought chaos and upheaval to Wilmington. In late February 1865, great fires rose up, belching oily black smoke across the city. Supplies of rosin, turpentine, and cotton bales were set alight –– not by invading Union troops, but by fleeing Confederates. General Braxton Bragg and his army had managed to move most of their matériel out of Wilmington to use during their retreat, but Bragg ordered the remaining supplies put to the torch to keep them from the enemy."

In 1898 Wilmington's industries still relied on naval stores: tar, pitch and other related products made from North Carolina's pine trees. Many of the dirty hard jobs involved dockside labor. Wilmington supported the Spanish-American effort, and celebrated the return of troops with a parade and display of the American schooner William M. Bird and British steamer Hawkhurst. Naval officers marched in the parade.

A key instigator of the election fraud and attacks on blacks was, amazingly, a future Secretary of the Navy selected by segregationist President Woodrow Wilson: Josephus Daniels. In the late 1800s Daniels –– who was an unapologetic white supremacist –– ran an influential newspaper that published incendiary editorials, outright lies, and offensive political cartoons (including the fear-mongering cartoon at the beginning of this review).

Daniels and other racists played on the feelings of victimization former Confederates felt after free blacks achieved the right to vote and came into power. 

Josephus Daniels as Secretary of the Navy (NHHC)

White power demonstrators used Navy guns to intimidate black voters. When some blacks tried to buy guns Josephus Daniels published an article about the attempt. He also praised voter suppression and intimidation. He warned of black suffrage, incompetent leadership, black rapists, and miscegenation in 1898 propaganda.

"More than a century before sophisticated fake news attacks targeted social media websites, Daniels's manipulation of white readers through phony or misleading newspaper stories was perhaps the most daring and effective disinformation campaign of the era. It reached a climax that fall in Wilmington –– a special target for Daniels because of its majority black population. 'A reign of terror was on' in the city, he warned."

White militia and other gunmen burned down the office of the office of the town's black-owned newspaper. They fired guns into black homes and then confronted a group of blacks who came out to protest the violence. Some of the blacks were armed with old pistols and rifles. They were no match for the white supremacists.

"The whites ordered the blacks to disperse. They refused and cursed the white men again. It did not take long for the standoff to erupt in violence. Moments later, four white men unleashed a fusillade from a .44-caliber navy rifle, two 16-shot repeating rifles, and a double-barreled shotgun loaded with buckshot. Three black men toppled to the wood-slatted walkway. Two bled to death there, one on the walkway beneath the awning of Walker's grocery and the other after tumbling into the gutter nearby. They were identified as Charles Lindsay and William Mouzon. The third man crawled inside a nearby home and died on the floor. Other men ran from the corner in all directions, pursued by whites shooting wildly at their fleeing figures."

It was the start of a killing campaign that left dozens of blacks dead in streets and ditches, many shot in the back.

Red-Shirt, hatted militia intimidated black voters, closed black businesses and murdered dozens of blacks in Wilmington, N.C.

A Legacy Lasting Decades

Zucchino describes the long-lasting influence of the "murderous coup":

"The killings and coup in Wilmington inspired white supremacists across the South. No one had ever seen anything like it. Wilmington's whites had mounted a rare armed overthrow of a legally elected government. They had murdered black men with impunity. They had robbed black citizens of their right to vote and hold public office. They had forcibly removed elected officials from office, then banished them forever. They had driven hundreds of black citizens from their jobs and their homes. They had turned a black-majority city into a white citadel."

President McKinley refused to condemn the coup, and an investigation by officials went nowhere.

"Well before U.S. Attorney Bernard shut down his investigation in Raleigh, Josephus Daniels and Furnifold Simmons [a racist politician who would eventually become a U.S. senator] had concluded that the federal government had no interest in punishing election violence in North Carolina. They knew that no white man in the state would be prosecuted for killing blacks. No Red Shirt would face justice for threatening blacks or whipping them in their homes. No Democratic poll worker would be held accountable for stuffing ballot boxes. Murder, fraud, and voter intimidation had been effectively legalized, so long as the targets were black."

Zucchino outlines how white supremacists expanded their campaign of election fraud, including "two schemes to disenfranchise black voters: the poll tax and literacy test." They practiced gerrymandering and use of a grandfather clause, ostensibly to protect white "uneducated voters." The effects of depressed voting and a white power structure lasted for decades and kept Democrats in control "until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had driven Southern white conservatives into the segregationist states rights wing of the Republican Party."

Zucchino writes, "In 1972, North Carolina elected its first Republican U.S. senator in seventy-four years –– Jesse Helms, an ardent segregationist who once mailed postcards to black residents warning that they could be prosecuted for fraud if they tried to vote."

Lowering the Mississippi state flag in a transfer of authority ceremony, Cont. Op. Base Speicher, Iraq, March 10, 2010. (Spc. J. Zullig)

The coup and murders of Wilmington of 1898 occurred in the same timeframe that the Mississippi flag was installed (1894); Jim Crow segregation was instituted (1899); and hundreds of monuments, including statues, were erected to honor the Confederacy and promote white supremacy (late 1800s and early 1900s).

Confederate Navy Adm. Franklin Buchanan

Another white backlash came after the First World War in the wake of greater integration, especially within the military. As whites felt victimized in job and housing markets, despite their historical privileges, they installed more monuments, namesakes, and flags.

Buchanan Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, named for Confederate States Adm. Franklin Buchanan, was given that name in 1976, two years after CNO Adm. Elmo "Bud" Zumwalt retired. Zumwalt brought revolutionary changes to the Navy in racial and gender equality.

This summer Defense Department officials said they are open to renaming Confederate-namesake facilities, but President Trump said he "won't even consider" authorizing changes to Confederate namesakes.

Josephus Daniels, a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, served President Wilson as SECNAV from 1913 to 1921. Daniels oversaw the Navy through World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a future US president, served as Daniels's Assistant Secretary of the Navy; when Roosevelt became president he appointed Daniels as ambassador to Mexico.

In 2006, Daniels's former newspaper, "News and Observer," published a powerful mea culpa and exposé of the white supremacists' crimes. Author Zucchino spoke with Daniels's grandson as well as other family members of key figures involved in the Wilmington coup. The results of those interviews are enlightening and relevant in 2020.

Two weeks ago Daniels's great grandson, Josephus Daniels III, had the statue of his original namesake removed from display in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Zucchino's research for "Wilmington's Lie" includes the works of numerous historians and academics as well as original-source contemporaneous newspapers, letters, memoirs, reports, documents and even sermons. It's interesting to see the complicity of Christian church leaders before, during and after the attack. Several white pastors actually took up weapons against black people. Surprisingly, black pastors preached complacency, saying the whites' attack was understandable as the "wrath of God."

In 2008 the people of Wilmington installed a monument to commemorate the tragedy of 1898 and memorialize the murders of the black citizens. An attempt to create a monument in Wilmington ten years earlier during the centennial year was unsuccessful and an "incendiary topic," according to Zucchino: "One white man vowed to tear down any monument to the dead."

And Now ... Michael Jordan

Sixty five years after the the events of 1898 Michael Jordan was born (1963). When he was a toddler he and his family moved to Wilmington, where he attended elementary school and high school. In 1981, as a freshman at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Jordan helped lead the Tar Heels basketball team (named after a naval store) to national championship in 1998; one hundred years after the coup.

Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey meets Michael Jordan April 17, 2014.. (D. Myles Cullen, DOD)

The timeline between horrors of 1898 and the rise of Michael Jordan (bookended by Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Barack Obama) is similar to a timeline between Josephus Daniels (bookended by abolitionist SECNAV Gideon Welles and progressive CNOs like Adm. Zumwalt and Adm. Mike Mullen –– as well as SECNAV Ray Mabus). These timelines reveal not only the great successes of civil rights, but also the relative nearness-in-time of atrocities, prejudices and failures of justice.

An understanding of how much –– and how little –– time has passed may help us empathize with others and evaluate our progress toward justice as symbols of the Confederacy are rejected, including the St. Andrew's cross "stars-and-bars" flag, emphatically banned by Navy and Marine Corps leaders.

But there's much more progress needed: Last week the police department of Wilmington, NC, fired three veteran police officers after a lengthy investigation into their expressed threats regarding black citizens and officials. One of the police officers, Michael Kevin Piner, said he would buy an AR-15 military-style rifle to be ready for a "civil war" against black people to “wipe ‘em off the f***ing map. That’ll put ‘em back about four or five generations.” According to investigators, Piner used the the n-word and said, "we are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them" and "God I can't wait."

One wonders: Are past and recent successes and failures ironically creating more "victims" –– feelings of victimization that give justification for violence? Victimization-justification has happened time and again throughout history: Shia vs. Sunni Muslims, Christian Crusaders, Nazi Germany, former Soviet Union Russia, Communist Party of China, and North Korea vs. the free world.

With enough education, including the compelling history presented by Zucchino in "Wilmington's Lie," perhaps we can find humility; engender respect; and counter hate, spite, and any violence committed in the name of misplaced beliefs or outright lies. It starts with core values of honor, courage and commitment.