In 1898 Wilmington, NC, was an integrated community with a multiracial government. White and Back republicans were sharing power.  White supremacists put in place a plan to change this and assure white government.  White supremacist Josephes Daniel and Ferdinand simons, a Democratic Party leader, started a white supremacist campaign using propaganda to convince white voters that blacks were incompetent, corrupt, and amoral men who would rape white women.  A well armed, white militia started threatening the black community to keep them from voting.  Elections were won by fraud and intimidation.  During the Massacre, Alfred Moore Wadell, led a group of armed men who called themselves the Red Shirts and the Rough Riders to shoot any blacks who were out to vote.  Many black men were killed and wounded.  families fled and the city became mostly white.

Alexander Manly was the grandson of a North Carolina white governor and a slave.  He advocated for civil rights.  He was a journalist who wrote exposes to improve social conditions.  In an editorial, he wrote that supposed rapes were consensual encounters and that whites were being hypocritical because white men had been raping black women with impunity. Red Shirts devised a plan to linch him but he escaped in time.

The Wilmington Massacre was not documented accurately.  It was presented as a win of whites over incompetent black men. The accounts insisted that the black men had actually been the ones who had armed themselves and that the whites had responded in defense and had killed some men to suppress the riots.

Article form the Daily Record by Alexander Manly. Dated Wednesday, December 14, 1898, titled The Negro and White Man, A Colored Man's view of the Problem."  In this article, Manly writes that th violence imposed on the blck man in one part of the country is the same violence inflicted on other on another part of the country.  He writes that the perception of the black man as a hero who fought for the country had change so quickly and suddenly as "to the point of ghastly humor."  He says that the country was happy to accept the sacrifices of the black amn in the war but wanted him to be submissive and quiet during peace.