Friday, April 17, 2009

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.

17 comments:

  1. wow, I am always amazed at how much history I do not know ( until now).
    in 68 I was 13 and in the boy scouts, best darn outfit ever!

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  2. I remember the curfew imposed on the Ohio town I grew up in the night Dr. King was killed. My Mom and I were at a shopping center and my Dad was at some meeting (we had only one car) and so we walked home. Even as a kid I could sense the danger as angry youth were driving erratically through the streets. It ws awful. I just remember the late 60's as a very dangerous time (tempered by hippie girls who looked so incredibly beautiful to me). I welcome that the FBI has a task force assigned to bringing to Justice those still alive who have committed atrocities from the early 1960's. Great post, Sage!

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  3. That is fascinating, Sage. Having spent half my life in the south, I know all too well how much of the shameful past of this country still lives on to this day. ...but thank God for the advances we have made.

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  4. Hi Sage,

    Tanya sent me - Coincidentally, there was a riot in Mexico City in 1968. It seems to have been an awful year. I lost my grandfather that year (well, I wasn't born even yet but still). Love your account of this story.

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  5. '68 was a happy year for me despite the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. It was the year my daughter was born. :o)

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  6. It is very hard for people to understand why we, a large group of citizens of other countries, do not want freedom of speech and press. And we got pretty upset when the US would say things like how lack of human rights we are. The truth is, we trade the freedom for racial harmony, happily. In Singapore, you see a Taoist shrine right next to a Muslim mosque which is opposite to an Indian temple. And behind the street stands an Armenian church. All 3 big races and many small races living right next to one another, eat in the same hawker center and play soccer together. We can't afford to have any inharmony. Despite no freedom of speech, I grew up without anyone telling me I couldn't say certain things. It wasn't dictatorship. But through real life lessons I know the limits, and I avoid the sensitivity areas. What you wrote here seemed so far away, but it really wasn't. When I was choosing where to go to college, I decided against Australia because of the racial tension there at that time. But the LA riot in '92 wasn't good either. I really thought I would go to Canada. At the end, I chose the States and regretted it big time. For it was in the States, in the land of the free, that I first tasted discrimination. And today, I still hear things that, "my mom said I can't celebrate MLK's day and can't sing Spanish songs" in this town. Asian? Nah, we still belong to the Chinese restaurants with dirty toilets.

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  7. Sage...You're reporting on your memories is well done, you review is also a well written piece but I was looking for your conclusions drawn from both...Detroit, had no stomach for a second year of rioting in '68. The Tigers went on to win the World Series that year.

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  8. David, you're two years older than me! I was just starting my scouting experience in '68

    Thanks Michael, for your comments & a reminder of those beautiful hippie girls (who are in their 60s now)

    Stephanie, the South is unique, but racial prejudice isn't just found there--I am hopeful that we have come a long ways.

    Raul, '68 was a tough year--I reviewed Mark Kurlansky's "1968: The Year that Rocked the World" back in April 2006. There was turmoil all over the world that year. Thanks for stopping by.

    Karen, speaking of one of those beautiful hippie girls ;)

    Mother Hen, Silly me, I had not realized that the cherubim's flaming sword had been extinguished and Eden repopulated... Yes, we have our problems, but so does Singapore.

    Walking Guy, I think you're right that I am missing conclusions, I think I'm still trying to work those out and hopefully will one day in a book or larger piece on the region. Detroit was just ahead of the times... By the way, I was a Cardinal fan in '68 :)

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  9. Thanks for the history lesson. That's a bit of NC past, I didn't know. I'll need to check out one of the books.

    Cheers.

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  10. I was just a year old when this happened. We lived in Balto at the time and my parents don't recall a lot happening there... not like here in York, PA. It was really bad here. Just a few years ago there were inquiries and then convictions stemming from the riots. Someone had to have written a book about that at some point. I'll have to look into it...

    My mil had to drive into York to pick up newspapers that my husband delivered during the riots... I guess she didn't realize how bad it would be but if the newspaper wasn't taking newspapers out of the city... she was a brave soul who got a brick thrown threw the back window of her station wagon.

    and can I just say how cute you were in that uniform? ;-)

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  12. sage~ uh, thanks, I think. :o)

    beautiful, yeah... hippie, nay!

    =grin=

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  13. Excellent story. Sometimes I wonder why some people are like that and then I think that perhaps I am like who I am now because I too have met someone like that man.

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  14. I was a little younger and carefree. That was a hard reality to face. Lived in OR, CA and NJ during the last half of the 60's and it wasn't until years later that I realized there were people like that.

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  15. Wow I never knew any of that about Wilmington. Of course I don't remember hearing about it until I moved down here when it became known to me as the Myrtle area culture capitol. Have to read the book pronto

    In NY there was a lot of tension--we had minor league riots and pretty major ones in 77 but we never had anything that called for curfews

    Nobody truly understands the reasons for any of that. I lived in Cambridge/Boston during school desegregation and for the first time knew what it was like to face racial hatred, curfews and the like

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  16. I am trying to read more about the KKK. I think we need to learn more about our historical past.

    I am going to cgheck out the books you mentioned here.

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  17. And here it is the winter of 2011 and the same conservative government still controls my city. The coup that was the riot of 1898 still plays a roll in everyday life in Wilmington. The event itself will be the point that started the chain of events that will make Wilmington a leading city in racial, social and economic justice in coming years.

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