More than a century ago, a violent and frantic mob tore apart a city to overthrow the elected government.
After the state elections of 1898, white supremacists mobilized to the US port of Wilmington , North Carolina, then the largest city in the state.
They destroyed black-owned businesses, murdered black residents, and forced the elected local government, a coalition of black and white politicians, to resign en masse.
Historians have described it as the only coup in U.S. history .
Their leaders seized power the same day of the insurrection and quickly enacted laws to strip the black population of the state of civil and electoral rights. They faced no consequences.
Wilmington’s story has come into the spotlight these days after a violent mob stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, seeking to stop the certification of the result. of the November presidential elections.
More than 91 years after its insurrection, the city is still grappling with its violent past.
Reaction to change
After the end of the United States Civil War in 1865, which pitted the northern unionist states against the southern Confederacy, slavery was abolished throughout the newly reunified country.
Washington DC politicians approved a series of constitutional amendments granting freedom and rights to ex-slaves and sent the army to enforce their policies .
But many Southerners resented these changes.
In the decades that followed the civil war, there were attempts to reverse many of the efforts aimed at integrating the black population released into society.
Wilmington in 1898 was a large and prosperous port, with a growing and successful black middle class. Without question, African Americans still faced prejudice and discrimination on a daily basis; banks, for example, refused to lend to blacks or imposed punitive interest rates.
But in the 47 Years after the civil war, African Americans in former Confederate states like North Carolina were setting up businesses, buying houses, and exercising their freedom.
Wilmington was even the home of what is believed to be the only black newspaper in the country at the time, the Wilmington Daily Record.
- 4 data showing the deep Racial inequality between whites and blacks in the US
“African-Americans were having a lot of success,” , Yale University history professor Glenda Gilmore described to the BBC. “They went to universities, had rising literacy rates, and owned homes.”
This growing success was true in the entire state of North Carolina, not just socially but politically.
In the decade of 1890 , a political coalition in black and white known as Fusionists , who sought free education, debt relief and equal rights for African Americans, won all state offices in 1896, including the governorate.
In 1898, a mix of black and white fusionist politicians was chosen to lead the local government of the city of Wilmington.
But this provoked a great reaction, even from the Democratic Party.
“The party of white supremacy”
In the decade of 1890, Democrats and Republicans they were very different from what they are today.
Republicans, the party of President Abraham Lincoln, favored racial integration after the American Civil War and a strong Washington DC government to unify the states.
But Democrats were against many of the changes in America. They openly demanded racial segregation and stronger rights for individual states.
“Think of the Democratic Party of 1898 as the party of white supremacy , ”LeRae Umfleet, state archivist and author of A Day of Blood, told the BBC, a book on the Wilmington insurrection.
Democratic politicians feared that the fusionists, which included black Republicans and poor white farmers, would dominate the elections of 1897. The party leaders decided to launch an electoral campaign based explicitly on white supremacy and use everything in their power to defeat the fusionists.
“It was a concerted and coordinated effort to use the newspapers, speeches and intimidation tactics to ensure that the white supremacist platform won the November elections 1898 ″ said Umfleet.
White militias, including a group known as the Red Shirts, named for their uniforms, ride horses to attack blacks and intimidate potential voters.
When blacks in Wilmington tried to buy guns to protect their property, merchants b Lancos rejected them and then put together a list of those who were looking for weapons and ammunition.
Meanwhile, newspapers carried claims that African Americans wanted political power in order to sleeping with white women and they made up lies about an epidemic of rape .
When Alexander Manly, owner and editor of the Wilmington Daily Record, published an editorial questioning the rape allegations and suggesting that white women were sleeping with black men of their own free will, enraged the Democratic Party and made it the target of a hate campaign.
The insurrection
The day before the state elections of 1898, Democratic politician Alfred Moore Wad dell gave a speech demanding that white men “do their duty.”
“Go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find the black man who is voting, tell him leave and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him . Tomorrow we will win even if we have to do it with weapons. ”
The Democratic Party swept the victory in the state elections. Many voters were forced to leave the polls at gunpoint or even refused to try to vote out of fear of violence.
But fusionist politicians remained in power in Wilmington and municipal elections It wasn’t supposed to be until next year.
Two days after the state elections, Waddell and hundreds of white men, armed with rifles and a Gatling pistol, entered the city and set the building on fire Wilmington Daily Record .
Then they spread through the city killing black people and destroying their businesses. The mob increased with more white people as the day wore on.
As black residents fled into the woods outside the city, Waddell and his gang marched to city hall and forced the resignation of the local government at gunpoint. Waddell was declared mayor that same afternoon.
“It was a full-blown rebellion, a full-blown insurrection against the state government and the government local, ”said Professor Gilmore.
What came next
In two years, white supremacists in North Carolina imposed new segregation laws and effectively stripped blacks of the vote through a combination of literacy tests and electoral taxes.
The number of registered African American voters reportedly dropped from 125. 19 0 in 1896 to about 6. 19 0 in 1902.
“Black people in Wilmington didn’t think something like this could happen,” added Gilmore.
“There was a Republican governor in the state, his congressman was a black man. They thought things were actually looking up. But part of the lesson about it was that as things got better, whites fought harder. ”
Deborah Dicks Maxwell is president of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of People of Color ( NAACP, in Wilmington. Born and raised in the city, she did not find out about the attack until she was thirty.
“It was something that those who are here (in Wilmington) knew, but there was not much talk about it,” told the BBC.
“It is not in the school curriculum as it should be, no one wants to admit this happened “, he claimed. It was not until the decade of 1990 that the city began to discuss its past.
In 1998 the local authorities commemorated the centenary of the attack and two years later created a commission to clarify the facts.
Since then, the city has erected plaques at key points to commemorate the events and created the Monument and Memorial Park of 1898, something that Dicks Maxwell described as “small but significant” .
Parallelisms
Given by what has passed the city, it is not surprising that its residents and historians who have covered its past drew parallels between the insurrection of 1898 and the attack on the United States Capitol this month.
Dicks Maxwell and his branch of the NAACP had been prominent nd for months after the US elections what they saw as the similarities between what happened in Wilmington and how today’s politicians in America were trying to undermine the election results.
“That same day we had a press conference in which we denounced our local congressman for supporting Trump, (saying) that there would be a possible coup and that we did not want another coup to occur in this country ”, he said.
Hours later, the mob marched toward the United States Capitol.
Christopher Everett is a documentary maker who made a film about the uprising of 1901 under the title “Wilming ton on Fire ”. When Everett saw the attack on the Capitol he thought of Wilmington.
“No one was held responsible for the insurrection of 1898. Therefore, it opened the doors, especially in the South, for… to strip African Americans of civil rights “, he assured the BBC.
“That’s the first thing that came to mind after the DC insurrection: you’re opening the door for something else to happen, or even worse.”
The attack of 1898 was not covered up. Universities, schools and public buildings throughout the state were named after the instigators of the insurrection.
More Later, the men claimed to have participated in the attack to increase their stature in the Democratic Party.
As the decades, history books began to claim that the attack was actually a racial riot started by the black population and repressed by white citizens .
“Even after the massacre, many of these people who participated and orchestrated the insurrection were immortalized: statues, buildings that bear his name, all over the country, especially in North Carolina, ”said Everett.
Charles Aycock, one of the organizers of the election campaign for the white supremacy, became Governor of North Carolina in 1902. His statue now stands in the United States Capitol, which the rioters entered on January 6.
Everett is now filming a sequel to his documentary to examine how Wilmington is dealing with his past.
He said that many local leaders are working to “return to the city of Wilmingto n the spirit of 1897, when had this move fusion of black and white people working together and making Wilmington an example of what the New South might have been like after the civil war. ”
“ Wilmington was a model for the white supremacy movement with the insurrection, “he said.
” But now Wilmington could also be a model to show how we can work together and overcome the stain of white supremacy too ”, he concluded.
Now you can des receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so as not to miss our best content.
- Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe!
