The Riots of '68 and a book review of "We Have Taken a City"

The first part of this post is a personal memoir. I tell about when I first heard about an awful event in the history of the city where I grew up. The second part of the post is a review of a book about that event which occured in 1898. I'm the guy on the right in a photo taken in the early 1970s, just a few years after the events described in the below memoirs.
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We were sitting out in the back yard, in lounge chairs, the type with woven vinyl webbing, when I first heard about it. It was a Sunday afternoon and there was a county-wide curfew, but the rioting was all downtown, a long away from our home. Mom and the woman next door were inside, fixing dinner. I assume their daughter was playing with my sister. I’d just gotten back that afternoon from a Boy Scout camping trip to Holly Shelter Swamp. We’d come back to a town strangely quiet, with National Guard jeeps patrolling. I was eleven years old and in the fifth grade, although it’d be a week before any of the schools would reopen. That afternoon, in the shadow of our suburban home, I sat with Dad and the man next door, out by the grill on which hamburgers were sizzling. The next-door neighbor was a talker. He never shut up, and he got our attention when he said with glee, “Back in ’98, the Cape Fear ran red with Nigger blood.” I could tell by the horror on my Dad’s face and his silence that he wasn’t very comfortable with the topic. I was shocked. The man told us about how the white men in the city took charge back then and taught ‘em a lesson. He continued to pontificate about how that’s what needs to happen again. 1898 seemed like a long time ago, but to those who lived in Brooklyn and along Dawson and Castle Street, seventy years wasn’t that long. The man must have finally realized that my Dad wasn’t pleased at all with the topic, for he quickly changed subjects and began to talk about Vietnam. There was no doubt about it, the guy could talk. No one else spoke. This was the only time I remember eating with him and his family, and I don’t know why we ate with them that night. It must have been the curfew which kept my parent’s friends from coming over and us from going over to someone else’s home. Everything stopped that weekend after Martin Luther King's shooting. Later, after I was adult, I learned that this man, our neighbor, was abusive, which explained why my sister sometimes had a quickly arranged sleep-over with the neighbor girl who was a good bit younger than she. My parents were providing a safe haven. Year’s later, when someone referred to a man’s sleeveless white undershirt as a wife-beater, it didn’t faze me at all. I can still see this guy, wearing such an undershirt, out in his back yard. Of course, in ’68, I was clueless. But what he’d said that evening about the river running red with blood has always stuck with me. This book is a part of my attempt to learn more…
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H. Leon Prather, Sr., “We Have Taken a City”: The Wilmington Racial Massacre and the Coup of 1898 (1984, Southport, NC: Dram Tree Books, 2006), 214 pages, black and white photos.

“Politics, the old cliché goes, “makes strange bedfellows.” This can be seen in North Carolina politics of the late 1890s, when Republicans (not conservatives as they are now known, but mostly African-American and carpetbaggers in the party of Lincoln) joined with white yeomen farmers and workers to vote out the conservative politicians (who were Democrats at this point in history) to elect “fusion” candidates. This threatened the status quo. Fearing threatened, the conservatives played the race card in order to split the fragile alliances and bring poor whites back into the fold of the Democratic Party and under the control of the conservative establishment. Within the rhetoric of the era, Wilmington, North Carolina’s largest city at the time, and a town where blacks out-numbered whites, erupted in racial violence that left the African-American community in shambles and brought about an untold number of deaths. At the same time, the conservatives who were working behind the scenes and used the events to bring about the only armed-coup in United States history, removing from office those who had been elected and replacing them with their own people.

In the late 19th Century, Wilmington, North Carolina had an African-American middle class. The community had their own newspaper, edited by Alex Manly, a mixed race man whose father had been the governor of the state right before the Civil War. Responding to a public speech by a Rebecca Felton, a Georgian who’d spoken out about the threat of rape that white women faced by black men and called for a campaign of lynching, Manly not only condemned such crimes by blacks, but extended it to white men abusing black women. He mentioned his own history, as his mother had served as a slave and mistress to a former governor of the state. Excerpts of Manly’s editorial began to circulate and reappear in newspapers across the country, the fallout from it leading to the events of November 10th. On this day, a group of white “redshirts” marched on Manly’s newspaper and burned the building down. Then, tension rose as a white man was shot, which provided an excuse for armed white men began to more into the black community where they faced minor resistance. A number of men were killed and most of the black leaders were rounded up and exiled from the city. Also exiled were a number of white leaders who’d participated in the fusion government that controlled the city’s politics.

When the events were over, those who had means within the African-American community had left town and the white conservative establishment was firmly entrenched. Prather suggests that the number of deaths, while significant, have probably been exaggerated. No offiical count was made, but there was probably not near enough deaths to have turned the mighty Cape Fear River red with blood. His work suggests that the conservatives used the lower class whites to do their bidding in the riot, providing them with the excuse to step in and remove the mayor, city council and police from power. The haunting part of this story is the number of names still present within the community. One of the ironic twist is that the grandson of John Bellamy, one of the conspirators, was the Superintendent of Schools who desegregation of the schools in the city in the 1960s.

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Prather sets the riot in historical context, comparing it with other race riots in American history. It's interesting that this riot came on the heels of "America's Splendid Little War," The Spanish American War. However, Prather doesn't see that playing a role even though he points out parallels to other wars and race riots. One area that I would have liked to have seen more study is in the role religion and faith played. Prather notes the doctrine of white supremacy was being proclaimed in the same pulpits that told Christ's story (102). But outside of mentioning four local clergy (the pastors of the Presbyterian, Baptist and Black Baptist Churches and the Catholic priest), Prather doesn't explore this thread further. However, two sources he draws upon were the Baptist and Presbyterian state newspapers, both of which supported the white revolt. The title, "We Have Taken a City" comes from the sermon by Peyton Hoge (Presbyterian) on the following Sunday, but nothing is said about the sermon and his source for the title came from a newspaper article.

The events in Wilmington have been portrayed in a couple of novels. Charles Chestnut, a black author from early in the 20th Century, wrote The Marrow of Tradition based on the Wilmington story. A more modern retelling of the story is Philip Gerard’s Cape Fear Rising. I recommend Gerard's story. He'd planned to write the book within the Creative Non-fiction genre, but because he wasn't sure of some of the events, changed it into a historical novel. Another great source of information that came out around the 100th anniversary of the event is Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy. This book is a collection of essays edited by David Cecelski and Timothy Tyson.
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For other book reviews by Sage, click here.

For Semicolon's Saturday's list of book reviews in blogs, click here.