Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  During another debate, Galloway listened patiently to diatribes by white delegates who insisted that blacks were too ignorant and gullible to vote. Finally, he stood up to respond. He mentioned his white father. “The best blood in Brunswick County flows in my veins,” he said. “If I could , in justice to the African race, I would lance myself and let it out.” In April 1868, the delegates voted to establish a constitution that would guarantee universal male suffrage, with no property qualifications for voting or holding public office. County and executive officers were to be elected by citizens rather than appointed by politicians. The proposed constitution was sent to the voters—black and white—for approval during statewide elections on April 21, 1868.

  With former slaves now permitted to run for office, Galloway became the first black man in North Carolina to campaign in a statewide race. He was quick to respond to white taunts. After a white editor suggested that the new constitution would encourage black men to pursue white women, Galloway responded: “As I have never taken a white or colored woman from her husband, I think I can debate this matter pretty well.” Congress required the constitution to be ratified by popular vote, which would also select a new legislature. By now, nearly 80,000 black men in North Carolina had registered to vote, versus 117,000 white men. In Wilmington, the Klan was determined to keep blacks out of polling stations; there were not enough Conservative Party whites in the city to outweigh votes by the city’s blacks, especially if those votes were bolstered by those of white Republicans. In 1868, blacks slightly outnumbered whites in New Hanover County: 11,096 to 10,619. But if enough black men could be frightened away from the polls, the measure would fail, at least in the state’s biggest city. For whites and blacks alike, the election was the most decisive battle since Fort Fisher fell to Union guns three years earlier.

  In the end, it all boiled down to race—specifically, the prospect of racial equality, which for whites meant interracial marriage and, ultimately, a “mongrel race.”

  “Shall MARRIAGE BETWEEN NEGROES and WHITES —amalgamation —be allowed?” the Wilmington Journal asked white readers. “Arise then, ye men of unmixed blood, the pure blood of the country, and put down this Radical platform.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Avenger Cometh

  T HE KU KLUX KLAN’S election intimidation campaign in Wilmington began on Sunday, March 22, 1868. That morning, notices signed by the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan suddenly appeared at prominent locations in the city. The placards, described by one white supremacist newspaper as “done up beautifully in carmine writing fluid,” delivered warnings that were both ominous and baroque:

  K. K. K.

  Baker’s Tomb, Eastern Division, Windy Month, Cloudy Day, Bloody Hour.

  Ku Klux: The hour approacheth! Shake up, dry bones, and meet the Mysterious Circles of the Dry Sphere. From East to West, from North to South, they come. To measure justice for the traitor’s doom. When darkness reigns, then is the hour to strike.

  By order of the Great Grand Centaur.

  Another placard contained what appeared to be a coded reference to Colonel Moore, the Klan’s grand captain general: “The Shrouded Knight will come with pick and spade. The Grand Chaplain will come with the ritual of the dead.”

  One bright April day in 1868, Colonel Moore’s Klansmen made their first public appearance in Wilmington: They hauled a cartload of bones through the streets. Then, on the night of April 16, a skeleton appeared propped in an alleyway, wrapped in a sheet. It was just five days before the election. The Klansmen seemed to believe that these crude stunts would so terrify black men that they would not dare leave their homes to vote. The Journal published a fanciful account under the headline: KU KLUX —THE AVENGER ABROAD :

  Terrible was the phantom seen in the alley near the Postoffice Thursday night last. A skeleton, with a winding sheet drawn about his dry bones … the frightened darkies who chanced to be near the spot took to their heels. As they departed in their indecent haste, these words reached their ears as if borne upon the wind:

  THE KU KLUX ARE ABROAD ! THE AVENGER COMETH WITH THE NIGHT WHEN MAN SLEEPETH ! BEWARE ! THE HOUR IS NEAR AT HAND !

  Like the Klan, Wilmington’s black resistance operated in secrecy. Many members were former Union soldiers who were trained in firearms and secretly owned guns despite an election season order outlawing the carrying of deadly weapons. They were not intimidated by the Klan threats. Some black men flaunted their pistols in public. The Journal complained in April that “many negroes in the city … almost constantly go armed.” A rowdy group of black men amused themselves by hollering and firing off several shots one evening that month.

  In other Southern states, among them Tennessee and Arkansas, former Union colored troops and other freedmen were organized into militias chiefly to protect blacks threatened by the Klan and by other white vigilantes. These black militias were commanded by state governors but were not often mobilized, for fear of antagonizing whites. In North Carolina, the black militia was known as the North Carolina State Militia, or N.C.S.M. Whites called it the “Negro, Carpetbag, Scalawag Militia.” In deference to whites, no black militiamen were sent to Wilmington. Instead, the city’s blacks, with Galloway at the forefront, chose their own form of resistance—an informal militia of armed men, loosely organized, but well drilled and ready to mobilize in the face of the new Klan threat in the city.

  By the spring of 1868, Roger Moore’s Klansmen had accomplished little more than posting threatening notices and trying to frighten blacks with mysterious bones, skeletons, and skulls. But on the night of April 18, just three days before the election, Moore’s Klansmen decided to carry out the threats issued in their placards. They laid a plan to terrorize blacks.

  Wilmington’s informal black militia, led by Galloway, was prepared for them. The militiamen had armed themselves, some with pistols and others with heavy fence rails carried over their shoulders like rifles. Over the next three nights, from April 18 through April 20, they patrolled the streets in search of Klansmen. They confronted white men on the sidewalks, alert for weapons or signs of Klan membership or sympathies. A white lawyer and a former Confederate officer publicly complained that they had been harassed late at night by blacks exhibiting “undisguised insolence.”

  But Moore’s Klansmen failed to show themselves. On the rain-swept night of April 20, election eve, Galloway led a torchlight procession of several hundred black men “hooting and yelling and firing pistols and guns at imaginary representatives of the Ku Klux Klan,” the Wilmington Star reported. Another newspaper complained , “The negroes are very disorderly to-night, shouting, firing pistols in the streets.”

  There is no record of whether the Klansmen stood and fought or whether they ever confronted Galloway’s roving bands during those three nights in April. After weeks of threats and bluster, Moore’s men seemed to have vaporized like the Ku Klux phantoms described in the white newspapers. They were gone. The Ku Klux Klan would not appear again on the streets of Wilmington until the twentieth century.

  During three days of voting in April 1868, black men turned out en masse in Wilmington; one rode an ambulance to the polls a half hour after having a leg amputated. Statewide, the new constitution was approved by a comfortable margin: 93,086 to 74,086. The constitution guaranteed black men’s voting rights with no literacy or property restrictions. New Hanover County also voted in favor of the constitution, 3,568 to 2,235, thanks in large part to a vigorous turnout of new black voters. Abraham Galloway was elected to the state senate by a nearly identical margin. “Galloway ought to be arrested at once,” the Journal demanded.

  White politicians claimed there had been massive voter fraud. They demanded that the election results be invalidated. They vowed to renew their fight against a “mongrel race” and black suffrage. They recommitted themselves to white solidarity and to vengeance against blacks and against the blacks’ white allies. “Niggers, white and black, are badly scared at our unanimity and earnestness,” one
Wilmington newspaper warned.

  As Galloway led the armed bands by torchlight, Roger Moore could be found sitting inside the city’s Thalian Hall. The first full day of voting had passed, and Wilmington’s white leadership had begun to sense that the election was turning decisively against them. Still, they held a boisterous political rally, with speeches from the city’s white elite, delivered “manfully and with true dignity and eloquence,” one newspaper reported.

  Though Moore was a Conservative Party vice president, he did not address the gathering. He sat rigidly on the Opera House stage. He did not wear the robes or mask of the Klan. That was over for him. He had failed to suppress the black vote. But thirty years later, in 1898, Moore’s men would dress in red shirts and again patrol the streets of Wilmington, this time fully armed and more remorseless than the Ku Klux Klan.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Destiny of the Negro

  A T AGE THIRTY -THREE , Abraham Galloway was gone. He died in Wilmington on September 1, 1870, early in his second term as state senator. Newspapers speculated that the cause of death was fever and jaundice or perhaps rheumatism or a heart ailment. Six thousand people attended the funeral, among them a substantial number of whites and either “nine-tenths of the colored people” or “two-thirds of our colored population,” depending on the newspaper’s estimate. It was described as the largest funeral ever held in the city. Wilmington’s courts were closed, for much of the city’s population was either attending the funeral or hemmed in by the throngs of mourners who jammed the roadway and sidewalks along Market Street for half a mile.

  Flags flew at half-mast. Former slaves attended, along with the colored fire brigades in their dress uniforms. Everyone was there: Twelve colored Freemason pallbearers. The colored fraternal societies. The Ancient Order and the Sons of Lavender, in full splendid regalia, and various dignitaries, riding on horseback at an easy canter. There were post office clerks and moneymen from the customhouse, and officers from city and county government dressed in dark suits. A hundred carriages, some conveying ministers of the gospel, rolled solemnly through the streets toward St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, a black house of worship, where Galloway’s metallic coffin lay on display with a simple inscription: name, date of birth, date of death. The church was filled to overflowing, and those who could not squeeze inside gathered shoulder to shoulder in the blocks around St. Paul’s, paying their respects at a remove from the obsequies inside.

  Galloway was nearly penniless at his death. “He died poor, very poor indeed,” a journalist for Frederick Douglass’s Washington-based New National Era reported from Wilmington. The newspaper’s obituary called Galloway brave and bold, eminent and honorable: “He was full of charity—kind, benevolent, liberal, with a disposition to help the poor.” The New National Era obituary was published as part of a collective front-page dispatch of news and notes from Wilmington that included a report on the election of Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell to Congress. Waddell had prevailed over an incumbent Republican who had antagonized black voters because he had failed to vote for the Fifteenth Amendment granting them suffrage. The newspaper displayed Waddell’s victory more prominently than Galloway’s funeral.

  The rebellious spirit of Abraham Galloway soon emerged in another son of the Black Belt, also born with both black and white blood, who also chose to live in Wilmington as a black man, telling white men what they did not care to hear.

  Alexander Lightfoot Manly was born on a rural outpost outside Raleigh in 1866, four years before Galloway’s death. His paternal grandfather was North Carolina’s white governor, Charles Manly, who served from 1849 to 1851. His grandmother, possibly named Lydia, was one of several slave women said to have given birth to children fathered by Charles Manly. Like many slaveholders, Charles Manly kept two families—one white, one black. Among the black Manly clan, family tradition held that Charles Manly granted manumission to his mulatto children, along with grants of farmland and farming equipment.

  Alex Manly’s father was Samuel Trimetitus Grimes Manly, nicknamed Trim, a mixed-race (a US Census Bureau form listed him as “mulatto”) former slave and son of Charles Manly; by 1870 Trim was working as a farmer and railroad fireman. Alex’s mother, Corrine or Corina, also of mixed race, was listed in an 1870 census report as a “housekeeper.”

  In 1880, the federal census listed Alex, then fourteen, as living in his father’s household in Selma, North Carolina, a railroad town thirty miles southeast of Raleigh. By the standards of the time, the black Manlys built a successful working-class existence. The family sent Alex to Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, a colored school established in 1868 by the American Missionary Association to educate freedmen. Alex’s teachers were New Englanders who exposed him to current events and world affairs while also stressing proper Victorian manners and deportment.

  Alex studied printing and painting at Hampton but lasted just one school year, from the fall of 1886 to the spring of 1887. He was fined five times—from 5 cents to 35 cents per infraction—for talking after taps, burning a light after taps, and seventeen absences from roll calls. At his father’s request, Alex was permitted to leave school in the spring of 1887 because his mother was ill. He never graduated . After Alex moved back home to central North Carolina, he could not find work as a painter or printer. He struck out for Wilmington, which had a rapidly expanding black working class, and found a job as a housepainter.

  Young and idealistic—and better educated than many freedmen raised in the rural Black Belt—Manly held higher aspirations than painting houses. He considered himself a spokesman for ambitious black men and sought a platform for his progressive ideals. With his brother Frank, who had also gravitated to Wilmington in search of work, Alex decided to publish a newspaper dedicated to black empowerment and advancement. It was a provocative act in a city where the white planter class had for years worked to beat back black gains at the voting booth and where all newspapers were published by white supremacists.

  Alex and Frank bought a used Jonah Hoe press from Thomas Clawson, an editor at the Wilmington Messenger. Around 1893, the two light-skinned brothers (“nearly white,” in Clawson’s description) began publishing a weekly black newspaper, the Record, from an office above a saloon and directly across the street from a white newspaper, the Wilmington Star. The Manly brothers promised a “clean newspaper with good reading matter.” It was a family affair. Alex was editor, and Frank was general manager. Two other Manly brothers—Lewin, a foreman; and Henry, a compositor—also joined the business.

  In the early 1890s, Alex posed for a formal portrait that revealed a handsome, prosperous-looking young man dressed in a dark suit jacket and vest, a white shirt with a high starched collar, and a white cravat. His smooth, pale face was adorned with a handlebar mustache, the ends waxed and tapered. His straight brown hair was brushed back from his temples in a modest wave. Manly could easily have passed as white, the preferred option of many so-called mulattoes. “They all looked like whites,” Alex’s son, Milo Manly, said years later of his father and uncles. “My father’s family looked so much like whites, sometimes I wondered myself.” A reporter from Chicago was impressed by Alex Manly. “The young editor is prepossessing in appearance, smooth faced, bright-eyed and rapid talking, with scarcely a trace of the color of his race in his clear complexion,” he wrote.

  Alex refused to pass. He considered himself a proud black man who just happened to have white blood. He was the embodiment of the Talented Tenth, a term coined in 1896 by a northern white Baptist, Henry Lyman Morehouse. It referred to a black man of achievement and distinction—with “superior natural endowments, symmetrically trained and highly developed … an uncrowned king in his sphere.” Men of the Talented Tenth considered themselves fully-formed citizens equipped to confront white bigotry. In Manly’s case, his crusade for racial justice played out in the newspaper. Manley’s early columns in the Record demanded better public services for Wilmington’s black neighborhoods, where the roads w
ere dirt and pocked with ruts, and where raw sewage was dumped in gutters or in alleyways. In the mid-1890s, Manly printed an exposé of deplorable conditions in the colored wards of the city hospital, forcing the white board of county commission to grudgingly order modest improvements.

  In an editorial in early 1895, Manly openly challenged the white power structure by pointing out that black voters outnumbered white voters in the city. It was his first venture into the maelstrom of racial politics in Wilmington. It helped establish Manly, in the eyes of whites, as a nettlesome black man who did not acknowledge his proper place.

  “The air is full of politics, the woods are full of politicians,” he wrote. “Some clever traps are being made upon the political board. In North Carolina the Negro holds the balance of power which he can use to the advantage of the race, state, and nation if he has the manhood to stand on principles and contend for the rights of a man.”

  Manly concluded with a warning: “We will wait till the iron is hot, then grasp our sledge and strike at selfishness, corruption and every man who looks as if he wants to use the Negro vote to further personal ends.” White men grumbled at Manly’s audacious talk of rebellion, and even some blacks expressed alarm. The Raleigh Gazette, a black-run weekly, warned that the young black editor in Wilmington was exhibiting an unsettling “aggressiveness in battling for race.”

  The Record struggled to turn a profit. In a front-page message on September 28, 1895, Manly reminded his readers that “the Record is of the Negro, for the Negro and by the Negro. We will continue to look after the interests of the Negro.” The message was followed by a plea for readers to pay their subscription fees: “We have been sending the Record to a good number of persons who have never paid one cent for it.”