Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  A few hours later, Peamon’s body, riddled with bullets, was discovered in the woods near Hilton Park on Wilmington’s northern outskirts. One account said he had jumped from the moving train and was shot by the Red Shirts. It is more likely that he was executed on board and his body flung from the speeding train.

  The men of the infantry detachment turned their attention to George Z. French, the deposed deputy sheriff. French did not fully appreciate just how deeply many whites resented him—as a Northerner, a former carpetbagger, and, as the Evening Dispatch put it, “a white politician of influence with the negroes.” Many white supremacists had not forgotten that French, at the height of Fusionist influence, had declared in a speech: “I would like to spin a rope to hang every Democrat in North Carolina.”

  French lived in a large room at the four-story brick Orton Hotel, the city’s finest. His Excelsior Plantation had made him a wealthy man. Late on the afternoon of November 10, a clerk at the Orton got word that the rioters were searching for French. He went to French’s quarters and persuaded him to hide in a different room.

  The infantry soldiers conducted a room-to-room search and soon found French’s hiding spot. They marched him from the hotel at bayonet point, bound for the train depot, past throngs of whites drawn to the streets by rumors of the banishment campaign. The gawkers hoped to catch a glimpse of well-known Fusionists who had just hours earlier held positions of influence. Someone shouted, “There’s French!” Several Red Shirts sprang from the crowd and chased after the militiamen and their captive, catching up to them near the depot.

  “Hang him!” someone cried. A chant rose up: “Hang him! Hang him!”

  The infantry soldiers used their rifle butts to push back the throng, but they were quickly overwhelmed. Several Red Shirts seized French and dragged him to Front Street. Someone tossed a rope over the arm of a telephone pole. A noose was fashioned and wrapped around French’s neck. A Red Shirt tugged at the rope and French gasped for air. As he choked, he managed to mumble the Masonic cry of distress. “Oh Lord, my God! Is there no help for the widow’s son?”

  A white man emerged from the crowd. It was Frank Stedman, a member of the Committee of Twenty-Five. Stedman was also a Mason. He told the men in the crowd that they would be pursued and prosecuted if they killed French. It was an effective threat; Stedman knew them all by name. The Red Shirts released their grip on the rope and French dropped to his knees, gasping for air.

  Stedman and several other Masons from the crowd surrounded French and half-walked, half-dragged him to the train depot. They were followed by a band of Red Shirts who again tried to seize French and lynch him. Stedman and the other Masons again held them off. At last they shoved French aboard a 7:15 p.m. northbound train.

  “French, you are a Mason and I am a Mason,” Stedman told the departing sheriff. “I will protect your life with my life, if necessary, but only on condition that you leave town and agree to remain away from Wilmington for the rest of your life.”

  French bowed his head in assent. He climbed aboard and dropped to his knees, cringing, on the floor between the coach seats as the train left the station.

  Armond Scott, the black lawyer who had failed to deliver the Committee of Colored Citizens’ response to Waddell’s home, had remained inside his house for most of the day on November 10. Some whites were already blaming Scott for the outbreak of violence. They reasoned that if Waddell had received the response on time that morning, he and the mob would have had no cause to burn down the Record. Their logic ignored the fact that Waddell already knew the content of the Colored Citizens’ response and proceeded to attack the Record anyway.

  That evening, a white neighbor offered to hide Scott, who took shelter in the man’s house, intending to wait out the mob. At the same time, a white lawyer who had been a boyhood friend of Scott’s went to the home of Scott’s parents nearby. He told Scott’s mother that the mob was now “out of hand” and that her son was sure to be lynched if found. The lawyer offered to escort Scott to the train station with the help of several other white men.

  Scott was informed of the offer. He was twenty-five, with no wife or children to keep him in Wilmington. His law practice, which defended blacks, was growing, but he could certainly rebuild it in another city—perhaps in the North. He agreed to allow the white men to escort him to the train depot.

  When Scott and his protectors reached the station, they saw that it was surrounded by several hundred Red Shirts. Scott regretted his decision. Given the surly mood of the mob, he knew he was likely to be lynched. But the Red Shirts didn’t notice him. They were focused on their efforts to lynch French before he was put aboard the same train that now awaited Scott. In the commotion, Scott was able to slip aboard. He and French escaped into the night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Not the Sort of Man We Want Here

  W ILMINGTON’S OTHER LEADING black lawyer, William Henderson, remained in the city, hoping to reason with the white supremacist leadership. On the morning of November 10, he had written a letter addressed to Waddell and other members of the Committee of Twenty-Five.

  I feel it is my duty to set at rest the public minds as to the action of the colored citizens that was intended to meet the white citizens last evening … We discharged the duties entrusted to us by informing the Chairman, Hon. A. M. Waddell, that we would use our individual influence to carry out the wishes of your committee. The same was mailed to Colonel Waddell.

  We appointed a committee to search for F. G. Manly and inform him of the facts and to urge him to act at once. We were informed and we believed that Editor A. L. Manly is now and has been out of the city for more than a month. Our committee could not find either of the associate editors, but hoped to find them today.

  Respectfully, W. E. Henderson

  Henderson hid inside his law office downtown most of the day, awaiting a reply that never came. Late in the afternoon, as the shooting seemed to die down, he ventured outside to gauge the degree of danger. On the street, he encountered a white wholesale merchant he knew.

  “What does all this mean?” Henderson asked him.

  The merchant seemed oddly calm, as if it were just another weekday afternoon downtown.

  “Oh, it will be all right, Henderson,” he replied. “We have a new form of government now and the new mayor will see to it that order is restored. Tonight the streets will be patrolled by armed men. You go home. It’s all right.”

  Henderson didn’t believe him. “How can I go home? I will be shot on the way.”

  The merchant seemed to consider for the first time that the poisonous racial atmosphere might be perilous for a black man. He offered Henderson a ride home in his buggy. Any gunmen they encountered were likely to assume that Henderson worked for the merchant. The buggy arrived, without incident, at Henderson’s home. As Henderson thanked the merchant, the white man told him to reassure his wife that their family would be safe.

  Henderson did not feel safe at all, but he had no intention of fleeing Wilmington. He was forty years old, with a successful law practice. He and his wife, Sally Bettie, and their four children lived in a finely appointed home with a parlor and a small veranda. Their outward circumstances differed little from those of their white neighbors. They worked, saved their money, maintained their home, and sent their children to school. William and Sally Bettie, who taught at a colored school, were determined to educate their children for professional careers as teachers or perhaps lawyers.

  The couple prospered in Wilmington. They befriended several white neighbors. They convinced themselves that if race troubles arose, their new white friends would protect them. They were devoutly religious, with an abiding belief in the essential goodness of all people, black and white.

  By eight o’clock on the evening of November 10, the Henderson children had said their prayers and fallen asleep. William, suffering from a headache brought on by the day’s stress, had stretched out across his bed, a pistol close at hand. Only Sally Bettie w
as awake.

  Just after 8:15 p.m., she heard a long, low whistle. She peered through the window blinds and saw a bright light at the guard stand that housed a black sentry the couple had hired.

  She heard the sentry ask, “Who goes there?”

  A reply drifted from the darkness: “White men.”

  Moments later, Sally Bettie heard an insistent knocking. She went to the door, and a voice from the veranda demanded that William Henderson step outside.

  “He can’t come outside,” Sally Bettie told the man. “But you can come inside.” She did not know what else to say.

  William, awakened by the commotion, emerged from the bedroom and shouted at the men through the closed door. “If you want to kill me, you must come inside my own house and kill me here!”

  He opened the door. He saw forty to fifty men on the veranda and in the yard. They carried pistols and rifles. White kerchiefs were tied around their arms.

  Several men burst inside, filling the hallway and parlor.

  “Well, gentlemen,” Henderson said evenly. “What do you want?”

  He spoke slowly, trying to gain control of an alarming situation inside his own home. He was determined to prevent the men from pushing into the bedrooms where his children slept.

  “We have come to tell you that you must leave,” one of the men replied in a low voice, as if he were inviting Henderson to a business meeting. “We do not want you to remain here longer.”

  Henderson tied to remain calm. “Will you tell me what I have done and why I must leave?”

  “You are not the sort of man we want here,” the man said.

  Henderson made a brief attempt to remind the men of his status as a member of the bar and of his unwavering civility toward whites. But he could see that they were unmoved. He decided to bargain for time. He asked for ten days to get his affairs in order. He would have to shut down his law practice and try to sell his home, all under duress.

  The man shook his head. He said Henderson had until the following evening to leave Wilmington forever. Otherwise, he and his men could not guarantee Henderson’s safety.

  The man turned and led his gunmen back out into the night.

  Thomas C. Miller, the real estate broker and pawnbroker, also chose not to flee the city. His roots were too deep. Miller had become one of Wilmington’s wealthiest men, black or white. He had once served as a deputy sheriff before building a small business empire that included a restaurant and a saloon. He was worth more than $10,000. He outbid whites at courthouse property auctions. Money owed to Miller by whites may have contributed to his inclusion on the banishment list, though his wealth and business acumen alone made him a threat to white supremacy. Some whites spread rumors that Miller had vowed to “wash his black hands in white men’s blood.”

  Captain Furlong and his infantry detachment rode to Miller’s house to arrest him that evening. Miller’s daughter was on the veranda and tried vainly to send the soldiers away. She told them her father was not home. Furlong pushed past her into the house, pausing for a perfunctory knock on the front door. The captain confronted Miller and ordered him to accompany the soldiers to the city jail. Miller refused. Furlong motioned for several soldiers to seize him. As Miller was led outside, his daughter tried to pull him away. The soldiers shoved her aside.

  Miller was loaded onto the gun wagon for the short ride to the jail. Miller’s young daughter followed it, begging the militiamen to let her father go. Aboard the wagon, Miller told them that he’d rather be dead than suffer the humiliation of being dragged from his home like a common criminal in full view of his daughter. One soldier told Miller that if he would simply jump from the wagon, he would gladly shoot him and end his suffering. Miller kept talking until one of the soldiers cocked his gun several times. He rode in silence for the rest of the journey to the jailhouse.

  The banishment of bold and successful men like Tom Miller had a profound effect on the rest of Wilmington’s black men and women. Their world had been upended. A multiracial city government had been overthrown. The city’s black middle class, built and nurtured for decades, was collapsing. Hundreds of black families were homeless. Those who remained were by now thoroughly intimidated, accepting of white authority, and thus welcomed by whites to remain in Wilmington. DESERVING NEGROES WILL BE PROTECTED , the Evening Dispatch promised.

  The Messenger elaborated: “The ‘colored’ folks … for the most part are decent, well behaved, intelligent, not given to the dark crimes, fond of official grub but self-respecting in the main. There are not many Tom Millers among them, but when revolutions set in the Toms are politely invited to pack and go and keep going.”

  After watching drenched black families flee to the forests and cemetery on November 10, Reverend J. Allen Kirk changed his mind about keeping his wife and niece in the city. He decided to get them out immediately. He knew his name was on the banishment list. The Evening Dispatch had singled him out as a racial provocateur. It called him “the negro who came from Boston here to lead the Negroes in their depredations.” Kirk was warned to “take his departure and shake the dust of the city from his feet.”

  Just as Kirk was arranging to move his wife and niece from their hiding place at a friend’s home on the city’s outskirts, a mob of whites barged into the sanctuary of the Central Baptist Church, searching for Kirk, who had vacated the dwelling the day before. He retrieved his wife and niece, and the three of them began walking on a roadway leading out of town. Kirk hailed a passing delivery wagon and convinced the driver to take them to join other black families hiding inside Pine Forest Cemetery.

  The Kirks made plans to bed down among the headstones. But Kirk’s wife feared he would be killed if Red Shirts attacked the cemetery that night. She begged him to flee for his own safety. Kirk was reluctant to leave his family, but his wife convinced him. He moved them to the edge of the cemetery, near a swamp, where they would be better able to hide. He would arrange for them to join him once he had found a haven far from Wilmington. He kissed them good-bye.

  Kirk waded through swampland in the dark for hours, headed north. He made his way to Castle Hayne, a railroad stop nine miles north of Wilmington. It was utterly quiet. Kirk camped in Castle Hayne for a day, then stumbled upon a black family living in a “country hut in the swamps,” he wrote later. Through friends, he sent word to his wife and niece in the cemetery. They waded through the swamps and joined Kirk at the hut on November 13. They decided to stay there until Kirk was able to flee the state, find a place to live, and send for them.

  Kirk left the hut on the evening of the thirteenth and walked to the train depot in Castle Hayne, where he bought a ticket for a northbound train to Weldon, North Carolina, a few miles from the Virginia border. He boarded the train, made his way to the smoking car, and sat down. Within minutes, the car was filled with boisterous Red Shirts carrying rifles. They cursed and threatened Kirk. He was thankful for the conductor and the other passengers on board.

  Kirk decided he would get off at the next stop and try to find a northbound train with no Red Shirts aboard. When the train pulled into a station, he got up to leave, but the Red Shirts followed him and blocked his way. He sat back down.

  At the next station, a black man boarded. Kirk recognized him. He was William A. Moore, an attorney from Wilmington. Kirk assumed that Moore, too, was fleeing the riot. The two men made eye contact but did not speak, fearing that any interaction might arouse the Red Shirts. One of them cursed at Moore as he sat down.

  Moore seemed terrified. When the train pulled in at Wilson, North Carolina, Moore’s destination, 120 miles north of Wilmington, he tried to get off. The Red Shirts blocked his path and forced him to sit back down. “This completely unstrung the most pitiful colored lawyer,” Kirk wrote later.

  Kirk spoke quietly to Moore, trying to calm him. Moore said he had no money to pay for the fare past Wilson. He planned to get off in Rocky Mount, 145 miles north of Wilmington, if the conductor allowed him to ride that far without payi
ng the added fare.

  Kirk decided to try to draw out the Red Shirts and ascertain just what they intended to do with the two frightened black men sharing their train. He gestured to the white men and said, loudly, “Perhaps some of these white gentlemen would give you the money to go as far as Rocky Mount.”

  The Red Shirts cursed Moore and told him they’d rather pay for his ticket to hell.

  The white men stood up and made their way to the adjacent first-class car, leaving the door ajar. Kirk assumed they were discussing whether to kill him and Moore. Moore drew the same conclusion. As the train slowed to pull into the next station, Moore bolted from the smoking car, flung open the door, and leaped from the train.

  He landed hard, bounced up, and sprinted into the woods that hugged the tracks. The Red Shirts emerged from the first-class car, screaming and cursing, and bounded from the train as it rolled into the station and came to a stop. Rifles drawn, they stomped through the flat, piney woods, searching for Moore. After a while they gave up and returned to the station, where the engineer had stopped the train to wait for them.

  Now the Red Shirts watched Kirk more closely. He decided again to try to get off at the next station. But then he noticed that the conductor was talking intently to the Red Shirts. Perhaps, Kirk hoped, the conductor would tell them that Kirk had a ticket to Weldon, several stops north, so they would not need to watch him closely until the train neared the town. After the conductor moved on, the Red Shirts continued to watch Kirk, but they did not speak to him.

  At the Rocky Mount station, Kirk quietly rose from his seat and attempted to get off the train. He was surprised when the Red Shirts did not try to stop him. He stepped from the car and hid inside the station. After the train pulled away, he used most of his remaining cash to hire a carriage to take him north to the small crossroads town of Whitakers, North Carolina, where he knew that freight trains embarked daily to Virginia. The carriage ride took all night, through a driving rain, to reach Whitakers. There, Kirk boarded a northbound freight train. He reached Petersburg , Virginia, the next day, November 14, four days after escaping Wilmington.