“George H. White, the insolent negro … has retired from office forever,” Watts announced to cheers. “And from this hour on no negro will again disgrace the old State in the council of chambers of the nation. For these mercies, thank God.”
Before George White left Congress, he hired Alex Manly as his private secretary in Washington. The editor was distraught and desperate for work after months on the run. The new job helped stabilize his life. More than any other black man exiled from Wilmington, Manly had reason to fear for his safety. His editorial had made him a notorious public figure in the South, and his movements were constantly tracked by North Carolina newspapers. White men in Wilmington still threatened to murder Manly as revenge for his editorial.
Manly had left his brother-in-law’s home in New Jersey to accept White’s job offer in Washington, where he was reunited with his brother Frank. The two men lived together and briefly published the Daily Record in the capital beginning in March 1899, with Alex as editor and Frank as manager. The effort soon collapsed for lack of public support. Alex continued to work for White, who presided at his marriage to Carrie Sadgwar in the parlor of White’s home on Eighteenth Street in Washington.
As White’s tenure in Congress neared its end, Manly and Carrie moved to Philadelphia in search of work. The couple rented an apartment on the roof of a downtown building at Eleventh and Walnut Streets, where Manly took a part-time job as the building’s janitor. He also sought work as a housepainter, his first profession. It was difficult for a black man to find semiskilled work with white employers, even in a Northern city like Philadelphia. But when Manly applied in person at a white-owned painting company, he was mistaken for a white man and hired on the spot. He said nothing to suggest otherwise—a startling departure from his lifelong refusal to pass as white.
Later, Manly tired of the pretense. He began to identify himself as a black man, saying, “I’d rather be a Negro and hold up my head rather than to be a sneak.” He started a one-man business as a painting contractor. He and Carrie later moved to an Irish neighborhood in Philadelphia, where most people assumed that Alex was white and that Carrie was his maid. When neighbors realized that Carrie was Manly’s wife, they erected a spiked fence across from the Manly home. It was taken down a short time later, after Carrie rushed next door to resuscitate a white woman who had been choking and gasping for air.
For the rest of his life, Manly devoted himself to assisting blacks who, like him, had left the South to seek new lives in the North. He formed a boys’ club in his neighborhood, then began helping newly arriving black men find jobs in the city. He encountered a prominent Quaker, John Thompson Emlen, who was helping some of the same black men find work. Together, Manly and Emlen established the Stationary Engineers Association to teach black men industrial skills. To promote black employment, the two men also set up the Armstrong Association of Philadelphia. It was later absorbed by the National Urban League, which sent Manly and others on a nationwide campaign to raise money and help establish chapters in other Northern cities with black enclaves.
Until the day he died in 1944, Manly refused to speak to anyone—not his wife, his son, or his friends—about details of his time in Wilmington in 1898. His memories of his life in North Carolina were harsh and painful, and he wanted nothing more to do with the South. He never moved back to Wilmington, although he did return at least once, probably in disguise, to attend the funeral of his father-in-law, Frederick Sadgwar, in 1925.
In January 1899, two months after he fled Wilmington, Manly agreed to speak to a group of black men and women at a music hall in Providence, Rhode Island. The event had been organized by a black minister to discuss race relations and to explore ways to aid the “helpless colored people of the south.” Perhaps Manly felt more comfortable addressing middle-class blacks rather than the white reporters who had cornered him for interviews. He seemed calm and reflective, and he allowed several details of his final days in Wilmington to slip out. He spoke in the matter-of-fact cadence of a journalist, but his voice simmered with anger and resentment.
“Intimidation, arson and murder are crimes that the good people of Wilmington, N.C., have been guilty of,” he began. “The mayor and governor were in collusion with them … The white southern press then tried to stir up the citizens against the colored men. They drew cartoons, they published stories of crime, and they printed editorials that tried to make out that the colored men were beasts prowling the streets in search of white women.
“The democratic campaign began in September, and the whole basis for it was ‘negro domination,’” Manly went on. “Indecent literature was scattered, and red shirt clubs were formed. Senator Tillman came into North Carolina and made a speech in which he said that he heard that they had a big black negro editor who had insulted the women of the south. He asserted that if I were in his state, I would be lynched before the ink was dry on my paper … Bullets, he said, were better than ballots in the case of negroes.”
And then, for the only time in public, Manly provided an account of certain events up to and including November 10.
“On the evening of October 21st, after a speech by Colonel A. M. Waddell, a well known citizen, armed mobs patrolled the streets,” he told the audience. “No stores would sell the colored men any powder … A friend came to me to tell me to leave, for they had decided to put a bullet through me.”
He said that armed white men had been posted outside his home. His family persuaded him to flee—though he thought he would be gone only a few days. He planned to return the following week. He assumed “there would be no cause for any crimes.” Whites would realize he had done nothing to warrant a lynching.
Manly described the decisive meeting of the city’s leading white men on the night of November 9, the burning of his newspaper office the following morning, and the standoff at the Sprunt Cotton Compress.
“Gatling guns were placed to sweep the streets and a Colt’s gun was placed … so that it was impossible for a negro to leave the compress without being shot down,” he said. “Colored men and women ran in great numbers to the woods, carrying their bedding. There, mothers gave birth to children and both mothers and babies died.
“On the corner the mob met a number of colored men. The white men ordered the frightened black men to disperse and began firing upon them, killing three and wounding others. Caleb Halsey, a highly respected colored man, was driven out of his own house and into the yard and there shot down and his brains beaten out with a club before the terrified eyes of his wife and children.”
Manly mentioned his editorial and the death threats he had received. “If any editorial brought enmity upon me,” he said, “why should it have also caused the death of 25 innocent men?” He did not explain how he arrived at that number.
That was the most Manly would ever say in public about Wilmington. He wanted the matter buried. He had made that clear just six days after the killings, when the reporter for the New York World tracked him down at his brother-in-law’s home in Asbury Park. Manly spoke to the correspondent despite objections from the friends accompanying him.
“The editor is guarded wherever he goes and is reluctant to express himself regarding the riots,” the reporter wrote.
He pressed Manly nonetheless, but Manly stood firm. He seemed to carry a great burden of responsibility, as if all the blame cast upon him by whites in Wilmington had pierced his heart.
“Any utterances of mine [at] this time must necessar[il]y increase the race friction in Wilmington,” he told the reporter. “And I do not care to be responsible for further violence or subject my friends or relatives to possible maltreatment or death.”
Manly was far from home, weary, and on the run. He wanted to lose himself, to shed the cloak of the blasphemous editor Alex Manly, at least for a moment, and become a man without a history.
“I feel as though I would give worlds to lose my identity, and, like the chrysalis, expand into some other being and forget all the bitterness of the pas
t,” he said. He started to say more, but his friends pulled him away, afraid that he had said too much.
EPILOGUE
T HE KILLINGS and coup in Wilmington inspired white supremacists across the South. No one had ever seen anything like it. Wilmington’s whites had mounted a rare armed overthrow of a legally elected government. They had murdered black men with impunity. They had robbed black citizens of their right to vote and hold public office. They had forcibly removed elected officials from office, then banished them forever. They had driven hundreds of black citizens from their jobs and their homes. They had turned a black-majority city into a white citadel.
The white supremacy campaign had demonstrated to the nation that the federal government would reproach whites for attacking and killing black citizens, but it would not punish them or even condemn them. No one was ever charged, much less convicted, of a crime stemming from what whites called their “white revolution.” Wilmington’s leading white citizens had pioneered a formula that was soon duplicated across the South: deny black citizens the vote, first through terror and violence and then by legislation.
When white supremacists in Georgia conspired to suppress black voting rights in 1906, they consulted Wilmington’s coup leaders for advice. M. Hoke Smith, a white supremacist elected governor after a race-baiting campaign, said of Georgia’s blacks, “we can handle them as they did in Wilmington,” where he said the woods were “black with their hanging carcasses.”
North Carolina’s suffrage amendment and grandfather clause were marvels of political opportunism. Four other Southern states quickly passed their own grandfather clauses between 1901 and 1910. The United States Supreme Court struck down those laws in 1915, ruling that a grandfather clause in Oklahoma violated the Fifteenth Amendment. But the systematic suppression of black voting rights had by then been set in stone in Wilmington and elsewhere in the South. White supremacists soon found creative new ways to snuff out the black vote.
After 1898, North Carolina’s white supremacists suppressed the black vote through poll taxes, literacy texts, violence, intimidation, whites-only Democratic primaries, and voter-roll purges. The number of registered black voters in North Carolina quickly plummeted—from 126,000 in 1896 to 6,100 in 1902. The state’s black citizens did not vote in significant numbers for at least six decades, until the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and, ultimately, after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
For seven decades after 1898, black citizens were denied political or appointed office in Wilmington and elsewhere in North Carolina. George Henry White was the last black U.S. Representative from North Carolina for ninety-one years—until Eva Clayton was elected in 1992 in a district that contained parts of the old Black Second. In Wilmington, local offices were reserved for whites for three-quarters of a century. After black carpenter John Norwood was forced to resign as alderman in 1898, no black man served on the council until Kenneth McLaurin in 1972. Ten years later , Joseph McQueen Jr., a police detective, was elected New Hanover County’s first black sheriff.
Almost overnight, the coup transformed Wilmington from an American mecca for blacks to a bastion of white supremacy virulently hostile to its black citizens. Before the 1898 coup, Wilmington was 56 percent black. That percentage dropped precipitously in the years after 1898. The 1900 federal census listed Wilmington as 49 percent black. The rate continued to plunge—from 47 percent in 1910 to 40 percent in 1930, 35 percent in 1950, 33 percent in 1990, and just 18.3 percent by 2018.
After Daniel Russell left office in 1900, North Carolina did not elect a Republican governor for nearly three-quarters of a century—until 1972. By that time, the Republican Party’s ethos had shifted completely: the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had driven Southern white conservatives from the Democratic Party into the segregationist states-rights wing of the Republican Party. In 1972, North Carolina elected its first Republican US senator in seventy-four years—Jesse Helms, an ardent segregationist who once mailed postcards to black residents warning that they could be prosecuted for fraud if they tried to vote.
Nearly four decades passed before the evolution of white conservatives from Democrats to Republicans was reflected in North Carolina’s electorate. But by 2010, Republicans controlled both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1898. In 2012, voters elected a Republican governor. From that power base, white legislators reprised a tactic perfected by their forebears in 1898: suppressing the black vote. They began searching for ways to restrict voting among groups that traditionally voted Democratic—especially African Americans, who had abandoned the Republican Party during the civil rights era. Republicans spent months unearthing obscure statistics on black voting patterns, searching for vulnerabilities. They inundated the state elections board with data requests. How many black voters lacked a driver’s license? How many took advantage of early voting hours? How many voted during early voting on Sundays?
The legislators proposed a voter ID law that included a set of restrictions aimed at black voters. But they were thwarted by the Voting Rights Act, which targeted states like North Carolina with a history of racial discrimination in voting. The law required forty of North Carolina’s one hundred counties to seek federal preclearance for any changes to voting procedures. But in 2013 , the United States Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, gutted the law and eliminated the preclearance requirement.
Within hours of the Shelby decision, a Republican leader of the voter ID effort told reporters: “Now we can go with the full bill” for voter ID—because the “legal headache” of preclearance had been removed. The state’s conservatives were now free to invoke the spirit of 1898 via a twenty-first-century voter suppression law nearly as effective as the suffrage amendment and grandfather clause 115 years earlier.
The so-called voter ID bill was passed into law in late 2013. It reduced early voting and Sunday “souls to the polls” voting, both used disproportionately by African Americans. It eliminated same-day registration and straight-ticket voting, two other provisions especially popular among African Americans. The new law also required a state-issued ID to vote. That requirement imposed a special burden on African Americans voters, many of whom lacked a driver’s license, birth certificate, or other official documents required to obtain a state-issued ID.
In 1898, suppression of black voting rights went unchallenged. But more than a century later, the US Justice Department and civil rights groups sued to block voter ID. In July 2016, a three-judge federal appeals court struck down the law, ruling that its provisions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” The panel added: “Because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions on the franchise in modern North Carolina history.” The court pointed out that Republican politicians had crafted the law after collecting data showing that African Americans would be disproportionately burdened by its requirements. The judges emphasized “the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina.”
Twenty-first-century white conservatives reprised another tactic of Wilmington’s white supremacists: they said the voter ID law was designed to eliminate widespread voter fraud, the same accusation leveled against the state’s black voters in the 1890s. But the 2016 federal court panel, noting that voter fraud was extremely rare, said voter ID restrictions “impose cures for problems that did not exist.”
Two years later, the state’s Republicans found a way around the court ruling. Rather than passing a revised voter ID law, they proposed a constitutional amendment to require citizens to show an ID to vote. The state’s voters approved it by a margin of 56 to 44 percent. In December 2018 , the Republican-dominated state legislature voted the amendment into law.
Meanwhile, white conservatives had adopted yet another tool of Wilmington’s white supremacists: gerrymandering. In the 1890s, Wilmington’s white leaders herded blacks into black-majority wards to dilute their voting power. In 2011, Republicans crammed black voters into two con
torted, serpentine congressional districts with the aid of sophisticated computer models. At the same time, they created several safe Republican districts dominated by conservative white voters. The changes produced remarkable results. In 2012, Democratic congressional candidates won 51 percent of the vote in North Carolina. Yet Republicans won nine of thirteen congressional districts, erasing the previous 7-to-6 Democratic advantage.
In February 2016, a federal three-judge panel ruled that the two majority-black congressional districts had been racially gerrymandered in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The panel found that “race was the legislature’s paramount concern.”
In August 2016, a different three-judge panel ruled that dozens of North Carolina’s gerrymandered state house and senate districts also were racial gerrymanders that violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling said Republican legislators had created the districts “through the predominant and unjustified use of race.”
In both cases, the state legislature was ordered to redraw the districts.
Victors indeed write history. From the moment the first black men fell dead at the corner of North Fourth and Harnett Streets on November 10, 1898, Wilmington’s white leadership portrayed the day’s events as a justified, spontaneous response to a black riot. The white supremacy campaign itself was depicted as a legitimate corrective to corrupt black politicians and the “black beast rapist.” More than a century would pass before those narratives were successfully challenged—and only after a long and divisive debate in modern Wilmington over the true legacy of 1898.
In memoirs and letters, the coup leaders boasted of their roles in crushing black aspirations. Colonel Waddell wrote that the coup “set the pace for the whole south on the question of white supremacy.” He described it as “the spontaneous and unanimous act of all the white people … in behalf of civilization and decency.” In the weeks after the killings, Waddell received letters of congratulations from whites across the nation; a man from Baltimore praised him for cleansing whites of “the slough of black mud and degradation.” Even James Sprunt, who had tried to protect black workers at his cotton compress, wrote that “the results of the Revolution of 1898 have indeed been a blessing to the community.”
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