Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  Simmons took the stage to cheers so loud they could be heard over the thumping of a brass band and the popping fireworks overhead. People shouted white supremacist slogans. Simmons raised a fundamental question that was on the minds of the white citizens gathered before him: “What shall we do with the negro?”

  There were hisses and groans. Simmons answered his own question.

  “The Democrats intend that the Negro shall know his place,” he said. “Today, as always, the Democrat is his best friend. We will do all we can to promote his best interests but by the eternal gods he shall not rule over white men!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The Meanest Animals

  O N THE MORNING of Sunday, November 13, after two days and three nights in the forest and swamps, hundreds of black families began gathering up their belongings for the long trek home. They did not believe the guarantees of fair treatment promised by Mayor Waddell or the police delegation, but they could no longer tolerate sleeping on the damp ground at night, when temperatures dropped to near freezing. Some children and elderly people had fallen grievously ill; a black minister reported that several infants born under the pines had died of exposure. The New York Times reported that many families “were in a starving condition.” All that Sunday morning, they emerged from the tree line sodden, hungry, and exhausted. Their clothing was streaked with rust-colored mud. Children were sobbing and begging to go home.

  Some families returned home only long enough to gather their belongings and borrow enough money to purchase train tickets out of Wilmington. Others waited until tickets mailed by relatives reached them. Most did not have a destination in mind; they sought to travel as far north as their money permitted. Some bought tickets to Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia to join relatives or find lodging in black neighborhoods there.

  Those who owned homes or small businesses in Wilmington also bought train tickets. But they delayed their departure until they could wrap up their affairs and plan for new lives elsewhere. It was clear to them that Wilmington’s brief interlude as a mecca for blacks in the South had come to a decisive end.

  Dozens of black families had begun fleeing the city on November 10 to escape the white mobs. Instead of retreating to the woods and swamps, they boarded wagons, carriages, and trains headed north out of the city.

  Day by day, Wilmington’s newspapers chronicled the exodus: “about 50 negroes left here yesterday”; “… more than a dozen families … about sixty persons … left on the S.A.L. [Seaboard Air Line] train”; “… last week 150 took their departure from the city.”

  The Atlanta Constitution reported two days after the killings that thousands of blacks had abandoned Wilmington. A black church newsletter edited by John C. Dancy put the number at more than fourteen hundred in the four weeks after November 10. Over that same period, fifty-five houses rented to blacks were vacated in Brooklyn, where the first black men were shot on November 10. White real estate agents reported, with some satisfaction, that most of those homes had since been rented to whites.

  The passage of so many black families through white towns along the rail lines north of Wilmington alarmed some local whites. In New Bern, white men climbed the town’s water tower to spot black families arriving by wagon or cart from Wilmington so that they could turn them away. “They will be promptly and summarily shipped,” they warned. In Richmond, police threatened to arrest six black men aboard a train from Wilmington if they tried to get off. The men continued their journey north.

  A few blacks who had fled sought permission to return to Wilmington. F. P. Toomer, a fired black policeman, wrote to Mayor Waddell from New Bern to inquire about going home. Waddell delivered a disingenuous reply, asking Toomer what possibly could have prompted him to flee his hometown. But then Waddell answered his own question: he said he had been informed that Toomer “was very obnoxious to many persons here.” Perhaps, for his own safety, Toomer should stay away. But if he insisted on returning, Waddell promised, he would do his best to protect him. Of course, the mayor added, he had no authority to prevent Toomer or other “obnoxious persons” from “being assaulted and probably treated with violence by private persons.” Toomer stayed away.

  When the editors of the Messenger learned that some blacks were considering returning, they published a warning in the form of an anonymous letter signed with an X: “If the occurrences that day meant anything, they meant that the white men were determined to govern this city and county … and should any disturbances arise … the 10th of November will prove to be child’s play to what the consequences will be to the negroes.”

  Over the next few months, the pace of the exodus quickened. On a single day in April, sixty-two black men, women, and children fled the city for Norfolk, Baltimore, and New York. They were among more than three hundred black people who departed that month. By the end of April, an estimated twenty-eight hundred blacks had left since November 10. In an uncharacteristically neutral tone, the Messenger explained why: “Under the policy of our business men to give white labor the preference, hundreds of negroes have been thrown out of employment and they are forced to seek homes elsewhere.”

  The departure of black workers was initially welcomed by the new city government. Waddell and his aldermen were determined to carry out the resolution passed at the mass meeting of whites on November 9—“to give to white men a large part of the employment heretofore given to Negroes.”

  The board of aldermen went to work. They fired the black day janitor and black messenger at city hall. They dismissed the city’s black cattle weigher, the black superintendent of city streets, and the black lot inspector. The all-black health board was disbanded and the vacated positions were awarded to whites. The city’s ten black police officers, already suspended, were formally dismissed and replaced by white men, among them Red Shirts or other participants in the November 10 killings.

  The new board fired every firefighter serving in the two all-black fire companies in the city and county. The black men’s gear and equipment were awarded to white companies. The fourteen black firemen who had been permitted to work for otherwise all-white companies were replaced by white men. Among the white replacement firefighters was Mike Dowling, the Red Shirt brigade leader, who was appointed foreman of Hose Reel Co. No. 3 at a generous salary of $45 a month. Four months later, Dowling was suspended for “incompetency, drunkenness, and insubordination.” Rather than attend a formal inquiry to plead his case, Dowling told the board of aldermen to go to hell. The aldermen fired him.

  Various city boards and commissions were purged of Republicans and Fusionists, most of them white men. Gone were Fusionist members of the Board of Audit and Finance, the county Board of Commissioners, and the Board of Education. Frank Dempsey, a white Republican jettisoned from the Board of Education, begged for his job, writing: “I do not propose to let myself be let off … and intend not to serve in any office in which a negro is with me in said office.” He was fired anyway.

  Some service jobs were also taken from blacks. But other black workers were able to remain in those positions, primarily because whites lacked the skills or inclination to perform them. Blacks continued to work, for $2 or $3 a week, as domestic servants—as maids, cooks, waiters, stablemen, and laundrywomen—in the homes of whites or in exclusive white clubs. Since the antebellum era, black waiters and other household servants had cultivated traits prized by their white employers—a formal bearing, a cultured appearance, and proper diction. A few days after the killings of November 10, Waddell told a New Jersey reporter that Southern whites had long embraced “a certain class of black labor that we could not well get along without.”

  Working-class whites, many of whom had joined the mobs on November 10, began demanding that blacks be removed from positions as laborers, stevedores, and draymen, and from other semiskilled jobs. A White Laborer’s Union was organized “to aid and assist white men in obtaining situations and work which previously had largely been occupied by negroes.” Members wore
lapel pins stamped with the union name. They visited white-owned businesses to demand that merchants hire only whites. The union set up a makeshift night school to educate white children who worked during the day.

  White farmhands drifted into the city from the countryside, drawn by the promise of steady pay; many offered to perform “disagreeable and arduous work” previously carried out by black men. That included working in the holds of ships, a hot, filthy job traditionally reserved for blacks. In the first days after the coup, more than sixty white men were awarded unskilled or semiskilled jobs previously held by blacks, with many more promised.

  The Wilmington Chamber of Commerce announced a white-labor campaign. The city’s Democratic newspapers began printing the names of white job applicants and their qualifications. A White Labor Bureau was established for the same purpose.

  Waddell and his board of aldermen did not always cooperate with the Chamber of Commerce. They instituted a program of spending cuts in response to what Wilmington’s white leaders claimed had been profligate spending under “Negro rule.” The city proposed reducing the wages of street cleaners to 8 cents an hour, from 10 cents an hour paid under Mayor Wright. But now the cleaners were white. At a meeting on November 23, with Mike Dowling presiding, the White Labor Union declared that it was “shocked and surprised” at the proposed wage cut. Union members accused the new government of conspiring to “cramp and grind down the poor sons of toil.” Did the mayor and board need to be reminded whose efforts had put them in charge?

  The wage cuts were abandoned.

  There were other complications. The Messenger complained that the whites-only labor policy had by no means solved “the negro problem,” because many blacks still held jobs in the city. “It is proposed to organize White Men’s Unions throughout the south for the purpose of encouraging the employment of white men and … cause the negro to segregate or emigrate to other sections of the United States, which is all the more desirable,” the paper suggested.

  Not all white employers were pleased with the turn of events. Owners of lumber mills complained that whites weren’t up to the standards set by longtime black workers. Some whites were unable to properly count and pile lumber. It sometimes took two white men to perform the same job previously held by a single black man. On the waterfront, it was difficult to replace some black draymen, who owned their own wagons and mules and horses and who had learned to unload and deliver cargo quickly and efficiently. Some white employers said they missed their fired black workers, who had provided “the least troublesome labor.”

  Other whites made exceptions for deferential blacks who had worked for them for years. James S. Worth, a white banker and insurance executive, was pleased when a black worker named George returned to work on November 16 after hiding out for five days. Worth wrote that George was “back at work again and is happy as can be whistling at his work—I am quite satisfied that he as well as all the best darkies are glad the change has been made.” Worth added that he was “glad that ‘dark town ’ has been taught a lesson, as one bad nigger will harm the rest.”

  The most notorious exile from Wilmington was Alex Manly, who had not been heard from since he fled the city shortly before November 10. Manly was by now a nationally known figure. “Wilmington, N.C., is far too small for such a celebrity,” the Indianapolis Freeman reported. Newspapers published purported eyewitness sightings of the fugitive editor—in Raleigh, Norfolk, Richmond, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York City. He was hiding in a swamp. He had fled the country. He was plotting a return. Josephus Daniels first said Manly was hiding in New Bern but then conceded he could not be found: “He seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  Southern white men stood ready to capture the elusive editor. In Norfolk, a gang of whites thought they had spotted Manly when they encountered a light-skinned black man inside the local post office. One of them asked the man where he was from. When he replied “Wilmington,” the white men punched him, knocked him to the floor, and kicked him in the ribs. The bloodied black man was one George W. Brown, who had arrived in Norfolk that day from Wilmington on the same train that carried the city’s fired police chief, John Melton. Brown had gone to the post office to buy a stamp. He was rescued by white police officers, who took him to a police station—for his own safety, they said—before shoving him aboard a northbound train that night.

  News of the missing black editor raced across the Atlantic. One newspaper account reached Carrie Sadgwar, Manly’s fiancée, who was performing at Covent Garden in London with the Fisk University Jubilee Singers. She saw a photograph of the torched remains of the Record building. A headline caught her eye: BURLY NEGRO PURSUED BY BLOODHOUNDS .

  “I read in the London Chronicle that trouble was brewing, and it would only be a matter of time before they would catch the editor, as he had escaped to the swamps and the bloodhounds were on his trail,” Carrie wrote years later. She was so distraught that she was unable to perform. “I stood on the stage that night to sing my solo and my voice quavered and stopped.” A doctor was summoned. She did not sing again for a week.

  As it turned out, there had been no bloodhounds, no swamps, no manhunt. Manly had safely boarded a train just north of Wilmington after leaving the city in a carriage. He had made his way to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where his brother-in-law, Reverend I. N. Giles, was a prominent member of the town’s large and vibrant black community. Word spread among black leaders in the North that Manly had survived. Black ministers in New York City sent word to him in New Jersey, inviting him to speak at the protest rally planned for the Cooper Union. He agreed. But later he backed out. He offered no public explanation.

  The Wilmington Morning Star, in an unsigned dispatch sent by telegraph from New York, speculated that rally organizers feared Manly was too provocative. The truth was more alarming. Manly had received several hate letters warning that he would be shot dead if he attended the rally. The threats meant that Manly’s presence in Asbury Park was no longer a secret. His friends and in-laws panicked after a “rough looking white man” arrived in town by train late one night and asked where he could find Manly. They began providing bodyguards to accompany the editor everywhere he went.

  Three days after the killings in Wilmington, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun tracked Manly down and secured the fugitive’s first interview since he had fled the city. Manly was not particularly forthcoming. He answered questions perfunctorily, providing no details of his flight from Wilmington. He did, however, attribute “the trouble” in Wilmington to his August 18 editorial. He said he wrote the piece to defend “defamed colored men” who had been libeled by Rebecca Felton in Georgia. His words had been misquoted and distorted by white newspapers and politicians “to scare the white voters who were likely to support the populist candidates,” Manly told the reporter.

  “Flaming mutilations of this article were published all through the South, and I was charged with slandering the virtue of white women,” he went on. “Such a thought never entered my head.”

  Manly seemed puzzled by the delayed response to his editorial that summer. He told the man from the Sun that few whites in Wilmington had mentioned the article to him in the days after it was published in August. It was only weeks later, after white newspapers republished the editorial and politicians delivered threatening speeches, that Manly was blamed for inflaming the white men of North Carolina by defaming their women.

  The Sun reporter pressed Manly for more. Manly declined to say whether he intended to return to Wilmington. He feared his presence there would endanger others. But Manly did engage in a moment of personal refection. He told the reporter that he had lost everything—his home, his business, his printing press, his church, his friends. It was of little consolation that his properties were covered by insurance, he said, for the policy contained an exception. It did not cover the “fury of a mob.”

  Manly’s interview was reprinted by newspapers up and down the Eastern Seaboard. On November 15, Rebecc
a Felton delivered a furious response from Georgia. In her original speech more than a year earlier, she had suggested lynching any black man caught with a white woman. Now she wanted Manly lynched.

  “When the negro Manly attributed the crime to intimacy between negro men and white women of the South the slanderer should be made to fear a lyncher’s rope rather than occupy a place in New York newspapers.”

  Against the advice of his friends and in-laws, Manly granted a follow-up interview to the New York World. He spoke elliptically. Referring to Felton’s charge that black men were sexual predators, he mentioned that some male slaves left in charge of plantations during the Civil War protected white women and girls from harm. Refuting Felton’s claims that blacks were inherently inferior, Manly said any black man provided the same opportunities as white men could obtain “as high a standard of intelligence and morality as his white brother.”

  But Manly refused to address Felton’s threat to lynch him. “Any utterance of mine at this time must necessarily increase the race friction in Wilmington, and I do not care to be responsible for further violence or subject my friends and relatives to possible maltreatment or death,” he said.

  Manly was weary and disillusioned. He was homeless and in hiding. His life was in danger. His fiancée was half a world away. Many of the black leaders he had expected to rally to his defense had forsaken him. His life as a crusading editor in the post-Reconstruction South was over.

  Manly had expected venom from the likes of Rebecca Felton. But he had hoped that even obsequious black men like John C. Dancy, the federal customs collector, might offer some support. He was bitterly disappointed.

  Dancy had traveled to New York City after he and his family left Wilmington. He took up temporary residence with a black AME minister in Manhattan. Unlike Manly, Dancy was not in hiding. In fact, he denied that he had been forced out of Wilmington, pointing out that he still had a federal appointment there. Dancy seemed to consider himself distinct from the quarrelsome blacks he believed had provoked white wrath in Wilmington. He had counseled cooperation, and he remained true to his conciliatory and accommodating nature even after the killings.