The Wilmington massacre of 1898: a shocking episode of racist violence
The Equal Justice Initiative is a non-profit organization committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society. Guardian US has partnered with EJI to reprint this special feature, originally titledThe Wilmington Massacre of 1898.
In the late 1890s, Wilmington, North Carolina, a port city between the Atlantic’s barrier islands and the banks of the Cape Fear River, became an island of hope for a new America.
Residents of the city’s thriving Black community made themselves a political force, exercising the rights of citizenship guaranteed to them after the civil war by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Across the south, such activity had triggered deadly white violence against Black voters, organizers and officeholders in the decades since the war. But in Wilmington, a city of 20,000, the votes of 8,000 Black men helped a rare biracial “Fusion” alliance elect candidates of both races.
Three of the 10 aldermen were Black. The city had Black health inspectors, postmasters, magistrates and policemen, albeit under orders not to arrest anyone white. The county coroner, jailer and treasurer were Black, as was the register of deeds. Black businesspeople pooled their money in three Black-owned banks. Families a generation removed from enslavement owned their homes and read a local Black newspaper.
As modern-day Wilmingtonian Tim Pinnick, a genealogist, put it: “Things functioned the way they were meant to function as a result of Emancipation.”
Planning a coup
But if Wilmington looked to some Americans like a model for the south, powerful white leaders, including the president of Wilmington Cotton Mills Company, the editor of the Raleigh News & Observer and the chairman of the state Democratic party, could not abide it. They set out to topple what the newspaper editor labeled “Negro rule”.
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, on 10 November 1898, a shocking coup d’état was executed.
The plotters had set the stage by creating what they called the “white supremacy campaign”. They printed falsehoods about Black men preying on white women and stockpiling guns. They targeted the Fusion officeholders and the Black newspaper, summoned militias and white vigilantes known as Red Shirts, and terrorized Black voters at the polls.
“If you see the negro out voting tomorrow, tell him stop,” one of the leaders, former Confederate colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, told a gunwaving white audience on the eve of Wilmington’s 1898 election. “If he doesn’t, shoot him down. Shoot him down in his tracks.” Waddell vowed to “choke the current of the Cape Fear River” with Black bodies if he had to.
On 10 November, Red Shirts, militiamen and white mobs surged through Wilmington’s streets and massacred 60 or more Black men. “They gave their lives to vote,” said Hesketh “Nate” Brown, a retired New York City transit manager whose great-great-grandfather, Joshua Halsey, tried to flee the militiamen.
The Red Shirts torched the Black newspaper’s office, posed for pictures in front of its smoking ruins, installed Waddell as mayor, and sent hundreds of Black residents fleeing into the woods. Some ran west toward the river; others, east to the Black cemetery. Athalia Howe was 12 when her family and others took refuge in Pine Forest, a cemetery that dated back to the period before Emancipation. It was said that families sheltered next to graves of their loved ones.
Uncovering a history of racial injustice
For years no one in Howe’s family said much about those events, as her great-granddaughter, Cynthia Brown, told the Washington Post. But one day, when she was about eight years old, a distant look filled her great-grandmother’s eyes and she grabbed Brown’s wrist.
“If it ever happens again, run!” Brown remembered her shouting. “Don’t let it happen to you!”
Brown set out to discover what “it” was.
So did Pinnick, the genealogist and Black schoolteacher from Illinois who learned of the coup in recent years when he retired to Wilmington. And Nate Brown, the retired transit manager who found his great-great-grandfather’s name in an 1898 newspaper clipping about the “race war”. (The article blamed Black “aggressors”.) And Sonya Patrick-AmenRa, who counts among her ancestors four soldiers of the United States Colored Troops who helped win the civil war.
Now, Brown, Brown (they are not related), Pinnick, AmenRa and other Wilmingtonians, along with ministers, activists, authors, educators and a documentary film-maker whose ancestor aided the plotters, are helping change the historical narrative.
Over the last two decades, a school and park named after leaders who directed the murder of dozens of Black people have been renamed. Community activists have set out to learn the names of everyone who was killed and every Black Wilmingtonian who survived the 1898 massacre. They are marking the coup’s 125th anniversary, 10 November, with a week of events that include “racial-equity and trauma training”, documentary film showings and descendants’ stories.
“There is a need to focus on that horrible day to understand it,” Pinnick said. “And yet, it’s a testimony to surviving that the story should be told.”
For nearly a century the story was told falsely – in textbooks, clippings and memoirs that cast the horrific violence as a spontaneous “riot” and the plotters as heroes who restored racial order to Wilmington.
In 2006, a state-commissioned report debunked the longstanding false narratives about Wilmington’s history.
Even so, Deborah Dicks Maxwell, president of the county’s NAACP chapter, said many local residents still don’t know about it. “This is Wilmington,” she told USA Today last year. “There’s a distance to progress.”
That was evident in the unguarded words of three white Wilmington police officers in 2020, weeks after George Floyd’s killing. A routine audit of patrolcar videotapes revealed the longtime officers discussing killing “f—ing n—s”.
A civil war was coming, Officer Michael Piner said: “We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them f— ing n—s.” The officers told investigators they had been “venting” and blamed the “stress of today’s climate in law enforcement”.
Wilmington’s first Black police chief fired them in his first week on the job.
Their words were “painful, hurtful”, Chief Donny Williams, a Wilmington officer for nearly three decades, told NPR. “Being from this community, and then working alongside these people for so long, so just hurt – and not just me.”
A legacy of political violence
The full toll of the 1898 massacre and the political legacy it created is still