The Wilmington Massacre of 1898 was a brutal attack on Wilmington, North Carolina’s black community that resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of black residents. The goal of its perpetrators, led by a Ku Klux Klan-like group known as the “Red Shirts,” was the reassertion of white supremacy. The Massacre occurred during the 1898 elections with an immediate goal of reasserting the white Democratic Party’s power to end black voting and black political power. As of 1898, Wilmington held a black majority with a population of 56% blacks, and its city government included numerous black officeholders. The white supremacists (including the “Red Shirts,” the White Government Union, and the state militias) murdered blacks who tried to vote in the election, and ultimately reasserted white supremacy politically (greatly reducing black voting from 126,000 black voters in 1896 to only 6,000 by 1902 through a suffrage amendment which disenfranchised black men who had gained the right to vote under the 15th Amendment) - ending black political power – as well as throughout every aspect of Wilmington’s civic structure by ousting black police, firemen, and community leaders, and through the passage of Jim Crow laws. As a result, many blacks were banished from or fled Wilmington, ending the town’s reputation as “the freest town for a Negro in the country” (according to an 1898 Baptist publication).
Wilmington’s newspapers played a large role in the massacre. Two white newspapers, The Wilmington Star and The Wilmington Messenger, spearheaded the white supremacy campaign, portraying black men as degraded lecherous beasts raping white women and as incompetent and incapable politicians (similar to D.W. Griffith’s portrayal later in 1915 in “Birth of a Nation”) in an effort to convince white voters who supported the Populist and Republican parties (in favor of black suffrage) to vote for the Democratic Party to end “Negro Rule” and prevent “race mixing.” Most incendiary was the publication of an editorial by a white woman alleging that numerous black men were raping white women, and calling for the lynching of black men by the thousands. In response, Alexander Manly, the editor of Wilmington’s black newspaper The Daily Record, wrote an editorial stating that in fact most of these “rapes” were relationships by “mutual consent” and that white women “often fell in love” with black men – a statement which greatly threatened Wilmington’s white supremacists. The white supremacists turned their wrath on Alexander Manly, calling for his lynching and burned The Daily Record building to the ground. They timed their attack on Manly to coincide with the 1898 election: on the day following the election, The Wilmington Messenger issued a “White Declaration of Independence” calling for “white rule.” The “Red Shirts” and state militias were ready to step into action, commencing their massacre of Wilmington’s blacks.
The Daily Record, October 20, 1898, page 1:
“Resolutions” submitted by An Organization of Colored Ladies:
These resolutions were proposed as a way to embolden black men to register to vote in the face of widespread intimidation of black male voters through firing those who registered to vote. The resolutions state that any black man who refuses to register to vote will be dealt with by this group of women “in a way that will not be pleasant” and that he will be “branded a white livered coward who will sell his liberty and the [illegible] of our whole race to the demons”; that they will discourage their daughters from interacting with any man who does not register to vote (“that we teach our daughters only to recognize those young men who have the courage and liberty to stand up for the liberty which under God he now has”; to do all that they can to maintain their civil rights in the face of intimidation (“to lend our assistance in every way to perpetuate the liberties which we now enjoy, regardless of the insults and threats thrown out at us by those who seek to crush us”); and, to raise their children to know their God-given rights, trusting that God will eventually help them to gain those rights. An Organization of Colored Ladies ends by stating that they wish these resolutions to be published in The Daily Record, as it is “the one medium that has stood up for our rights when the others have forsaken us.”
This is a powerful statement of the ways in which Wilmington’s black women sought to maintain the dignity and civil rights of the black community through their influence over black men’s reputations within the community, their opportunities for relationships and marriage to their daughters, and the principles by which they raised their children. It is also a notable recognition of the significance of The Daily Record in asserting black civil rights and functioning as a voice and political forum for the black community.