Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  Russell was an obese man with a double chin and sagging jowls, and Daniels delighted in exaggerating his features. One Norman Jennett cartoon of the governor, whom Daniels called “big-jowled Russell,” implied that Russell had paid for black votes. In the drawing, Russell’s suit was decorated with images of what Daniels called “a repulsive, very black, kinky-headed Negro.

  “It was horrible-looking , and Russell raved every time he saw it,” Daniels wrote in triumph.

  With each cartoon and with each provocative article, Daniels pitted blacks against whites. For Democrats, winning the election was only the first step toward removing black officeholders and political appointees. It provided momentum for the next step: denying the black man the right to vote. The day was coming, Daniels wrote in the News and Observer, when white men “will take the law in their own hands and by organized force make the negroes behave themselves.” A race war was inevitable. “A clash is surely coming between the races,” Daniels assured his readers. “And in such clashes the white race is always victorious.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I Say Lynch

  I N AUGUST 1897, newspapers in Georgia reported an outbreak of lynchings—five in a single week. Rebecca Latimer Felton, a chronic author of scathing letters to the state’s editors, was distressed—not by the lynchings of black men but by the purported rapes that precipitated them. She suggested that Georgia’s white men lacked “manhood enough” to protect their women from predatory black men. She suggested that they summon the courage to lynch any black man caught with a white woman. In a letter to the Atlanta Constitution, she wrote, “The black fiend who lays unholy and lustful hands on a white woman in the state of Georgia shall surely die!”

  Felton was a rarity in the post-Reconstruction South: a woman who spoke her mind. Her hectoring newspaper letters were widely read. She delivered blustery small-town speeches attended by farmers and their wives. She demanded that white women be permitted to vote and to enroll at the University of Georgia. She first rose to state prominence as the outspoken wife of a US congressman from Georgia, W. H. Felton, but she soon became a compelling figure in her own right. She managed her husband’s campaigns and, it was rumored, wrote many of his speeches.

  Like the white supremacists of North Carolina, Felton could not envision a consensual sexual relationship between a black man and a white woman. In her view, any black man who approached a white woman had rape on his mind. She blamed black men’s right to vote; it led them to believe they stood on an equal footing with white men—not only politically, but socially.

  One hazy summer day, Felton delivered a speech titled “The Needs of Farmers’ Wives” to several hundred white men at the Georgia State Agricultural Society inside the stately South Bend Hotel in Tybee, Georgia. She spoke of “poor white girls on the secluded farms,” unprotected from predatory black farmhands. Those women, she said, would prefer to die rather than subject themselves to sex with a Negro and the subsequent “suffering of innocence and modesty.”

  The solution, Felton said, was the lynch rope. “If it needs lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts—then I say lynch; a thousand times a week if necessary,” she shouted. The men’s shouts and cheers reverberated off the hall’s rafters. “They cheered me to the echo,” Felton said later.

  Felton’s “sensational speech,” as the Atlanta Journal called it, was warmly received by the leaders of the white supremacy campaign in North Carolina. In Wilmington, the Morning Star displayed the speech prominently in its August 18, 1898, editions, under the headline: MRS . FELTON SPEAKS . The Morning Star ’s republication of the Atlanta Journal ’s original dispatch carried a dateline of August 12. The editors did not mention that Mrs. Felton had delivered the speech a year earlier, on August 12, 1897. It had received little attention in North Carolina at that time because there was no election and no white supremacy campaign. But now, in August 1898, Felton’s declarations on race and rape were useful to Democrats. The inconvenient discrepancy in dates was never addressed by the Morning Star. The timing was not important. The message was.

  Alex Manly got the message. He read the account of Felton’s remarks in the Morning Star the morning of the eighteenth in his upstairs office at the Daily Record. All that summer, Manly had seethed under the withering assault against black men in the white press, but he had remained silent. He had kept the Record focused on black empowerment and self-improvement. He published articles for an aspiring black middle class—on fashions and society, on home furnishings and household upkeep, on the latest advances in science and technology. His editorials helped deliver paved roads and bicycle paths to some black neighborhoods, and miserable conditions in the colored wards of the city hospital were improving, thanks to an earlier Manly exposé.

  Just a year after expanding from a weekly to a daily, the Record was now the leading voice of black aspirations in North Carolina and parts of South Carolina. Even Josephus Daniels conceded that the Record “had a good local circulation.” Manly maintained cordial if cool relations with white advertisers, describing his interactions as of “the usual friendly nature.” Even during the heat of the white supremacy campaign, white merchants continued to advertise in the Record.

  Manly recognized that even a mild response to Felton’s speech was fraught with risk. His newspaper had barely survived the uproar, from blacks and whites alike, that greeted his August 1897 editorial pointing out that persistent rapes of black women by white men went unpunished. By August 1898, Manly had achieved something approaching a bourgeois existence. He had been appointed deputy registrar of deeds. He taught Sunday school. He was a member in good standing of the Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church, the first black Presbyterian church in North Carolina. Its pews were populated on Sundays by members of the city’s striving black middle class.

  Manly had also fallen in love. He was engaged to Carrie Sadgwar, a slender, refined young woman who attended the Gregory Normal School, the first legal school for blacks in Wilmington. Manly had first spotted Carrie before he began publishing the Record. He was working as a painter for Carrie’s father, Frederick Sadgwar Jr., the light-skinned grandson of a French sea captain. He was one of Wilmington’s most prominent carpenters and builders. Carrie walked past one day. She saw her father, who was supervising Manly, and waved. Manly thought she was waving at him, so he smiled and waved back. Carrie was flustered. She assumed Manly was a white man, and no proper black girl would dare smile and wave at a strange white man. She put her head down and walked away.

  Manly asked Frederick Sadgwar if he had noticed the pretty girl who had just walked by. Sadgwar nodded but didn’t mention that Carrie was his daughter. Manly said he’d like to meet her. Sadgwar told him to focus on painting rather than “gazing at every little petticoat going down the street.”

  For the next three months, Manly attended services at every black church in the city, hoping to spot Carrie. Finally, he stopped by the Friday Night Literary Evening at the Gregory Normal School. Carrie was onstage, singing a solo of “Gaily I Wander.” Manly asked a friend sitting with him to arrange an introduction. The friend refused, saying Carrie was Frederick Sadgwar’s daughter. Sadgwar, he said, would have Manly “smoked” if he approached his daughter. Manly left the school “like a little dog with his tail cut,” the friend said.

  Later, Manly arranged for a letter of introduction, signed by a minister at his Presbyterian church. The letter opened the door to the Sadgwar home, and Manly began a formal courtship of his boss’s daughter. They attended parties and picnics and took leisurely trips to segregated beaches outside Wilmington. The relationship continued after Carrie left Wilmington to attend Fisk University in Nashville. She studied music, graduated, and returned home to Wilmington.

  Frederick Sadgwar suggested that his daughter, who was spending idle hours at home, help Manly and other young black men publish the newspaper that spoke for Wilmington’s black community. Carrie took a job “slinging type,” a
s she put it, which put her into daily contact with her young suitor. Manly charmed her , and soon she and Alex were engaged.

  When Manly read the Felton speech in August 1898, he was torn. He risked losing his paper—if not his life—if he were to challenge Felton in print at a time of simmering white rage. Losing his white advertisers would be the least of his worries. Even so, Manly felt compelled to say publicly what he and every other black man in Wilmington knew intuitively: the leading whites of the city were hypocrites, especially in matters of race, sex, and violence. Manly decided that he had no choice but to defend what he called “defamed colored men.”

  On the morning of August 18, he picked up his pen. He wrote passionately. As his anger rose, his editorial took on a bitter, almost vengeful tone. Manly was not only deeply offended but also outraged. He finished quickly and had the editorial set in type.

  Late in the afternoon on the eighteenth, just hours after the Morning Star ’s article had appeared, the Record published an editorial titled “Mrs. Felton’s Speech.” A black writer from Wilmington later called Manly’s reply “the retort which shook the state from the mountains to the sea.”

  A Mrs. Felton from Georgia, made a speech before the Agricultural Society at Tybee Ga., in which she advocates lynching as an extreme measure. This woman makes a strong plea for womanhood and if the alleged crimes of rape were half so frequent as is oft times reported, her plea would be worthy of consideration …

  The papers are filled often with reports of rapes of white women, and the subsequent lynching of the alleged rapist. The editors pour forth volumes of aspersions against all Negroes because of the few who may be guilty. If the papers and speakers of the other race would condemn the commission of crime because it is crime and not try to make it appear that the Negroes were the only criminals, they would find their strongest allies in the intelligent Negroes themselves …

  We suggest that the whites guard their women more closely, as Mrs. Felton says, thus giving no opportunity for the human fiend be he white or black. You leave your goods out of doors and then complain because they are taken away. Poor white men are careless in the matter of protecting their women, especially on the farms … our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the womans infatuation or the mans boldness bring attention to them and the man is lynched for rape.

  Every Negro lynched is called a “big, burly, black brute,” when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers, and were not only “black” and “burly” but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them as is very well known to all.

  Mrs. Felton must begin at the fountain head if she wishes to purify the stream. Teach your men purity. Let virtue be something more than an excuse for them to intimidate and torture a helpless people. Tell your men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman, than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman.

  You set yourselves down as a lot of carping hypocrites in that you cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you seek to destroy the morality of ours.

  Don’t think ever that your women will remain pure while you are debauching ours. You sow the seed—the harvest will come in due time.

  The whites of Wilmington had never read anything like it. A black man had mocked the myths that had sustained whites for generations, piercing the buried insecurities of Southern white men. Manly had placed the blame for sex between black men and white women on white men—for failing to properly protect their supposedly cherished and virtuous women, reduced in Manly’s view to mere “property.” He upended the core white conviction that any sex act between a black man and a white woman could only be rape. In fact, he wrote—and this was the primal fear that gnawed at white men—some white women lusted for or even loved black men. Manly exposed white men as hypocrites for demanding sex with women of a race they considered servile, stupid, and inferior. And he taunted whites with their own weakness and carelessness, warning them that they, not blacks, would ultimately pay the price for race mixing.

  Inside the cramped Record newsroom and office, and in the small frame home they shared on a lot between Ninth and Tenth Streets, Manly and his brother Frank braced for a storm. There was nothing. For several days, Wilmington remained hot, drowsy, and calm.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A Vile Slander

  W HEN FURNIFOLD SIMMONS READ Manly’s editorial, he was incensed. But he was also pragmatic. He believed Manly had handed whites a perfectly valid pretext to lynch him and torch his newspaper. But Simmons recognized the value of timing white outrage for maximum political impact. August was too early. Simmons advised the city’s white elite—planters, politicians, lawyers, and merchants—to suppress the explosion of white rage until closer to Election Day in November.

  Simmons happened to be in Wilmington the week after Manly’s editorial was published. He was supervising efforts to denigrate blacks and Fusionists while seeking new ways to intimidate black men who insisted on registering to vote. In urging a restrained response, he argued that Manly’s words would ultimately ensure an Election Day victory. But their impact would dissipate before then if whites were permitted to unleash their fury too soon. Lieutenant Colonel Walker Taylor, a Democrat who commanded the Wilmington Light Infantry, recalled seven years later that “when that article appeared, it required the best efforts we could put forth that we could prevent the people from lynching him.” According to Taylor, Simmons “told us that the article would make an easy victory for us and urged us to try to prevent any riot until after the election.”

  After a brief interlude, the Record office was inundated with threatening letters: “Leave [Wilmington] on the pain of death,” one man wrote. Another told Manly to “apologize for that slander” or face a lynching. One unsigned letter read: “You are the sorriest scoundrel in North Carolina … if you are the sample of the nigger of Wilmington, you are all dirty rascals … I would advise you to go to Africa where you belong.”

  Several white men threatened to storm the newspaper office and lynch Manly. On the evening of August 24, knots of black men began surging toward the Record office on Princess Street. Some carried clubs or broken pieces of lumber. Several men climbed the wooden outdoor stairway that led to the newspaper’s second-floor office. Others took up posts inside the tiny newsroom. Still others surrounded the two-story wooden building, vowing to protect Manly and his press.

  Two white police officers and a police captain were dispatched to disperse the crowd. But soon the captain reported to Police Chief John Melton at city hall that the black men refused to leave.

  Melton said he would go confront the men himself. He did not regard them as citizens rallying behind a wronged leader of their race or even as defenders of a free press. He considered them troublemakers and petty criminals. When Melton arrived, he recognized some of “the darkies,” as he called them. He had released one man from jail earlier that day. Some of the others, Melton said later, were “crap shooters and reckless kind of Negro boys.” He and his officers tried, with little success, to usher them off the premises.

  The boldness of the black men placed Melton in an uncomfortable position. He was a white Populist who supported the Republican Party. A butcher by trade, he owed his appointed police position at least in part to the black votes that had helped Republicans win control of local government. Melton had been vilified by Democratic politicians and newspapers for permitting ten black men to serve on his twenty-one-man police force. To mollify whites, he had assigned black officers to black neighborhoods and instructed them never to arrest a white man. “Let the white men arrest the white men,” he told them.

  The confrontation also created difficulties for the mayor, Silas P. Wright. As a white Republican politicia
n, Wright was perhaps even more indebted to black voters than Melton was. Black votes had helped usher in the Republican-dominated board of aldermen, appointed by Republican governor Russell, that had selected Wright as mayor following a bitterly contested election in 1897. And Wright, from Massachusetts, was a carpetbagger ridiculed in the local press as a petty, overmatched outsider.

  Wright was aware that failing to control the gathering of agitated blacks would only subject him to more abuse from Democrats. He decided to go to Princess Street himself. Wright chatted casually with the black men, hoping to persuade them that neither Manly nor his newspaper was in any real danger. There were no white mobs, no torches, no lynch ropes. With the help of Chief Melton, the mayor persuaded the black men to leave.

  In Raleigh, Josephus Daniels did not heed Simmons’s advice to tamp down white emotions. He reprinted Manly’s editorial under the headline: VILE AND VILLAINOUS . Manly had “inflamed the white people of the State” and “aroused the people to white heat,” the editorial said.

  Daniels’s relentless coverage of Manly’s editorial intensified pressure on Governor Russell to condemn it. Russell was reluctant to offend the black voters who had helped put him in office. But as the son of a plantation master who had owned two hundred slaves, and as a lifelong member of Wilmington’s rice gentry, he shared the attitudes of Southern whites regarding sex and race. Manly’s editorial offended him. And while Russell courted black votes out of political expediency, he certainly did not consider blacks equal to whites. While serving as a judge, he had once remarked that “all Negroes are natural born thieves; they will steal six days in the week and go to church Sundays.”