The conversation
A white supremacist coup took place in North Carolina in 1898, led by lying politicians and racist newspapers who reinforced their lies
Armed white insurgents killed black men and burned black businesses, including this newspaper office, during the 1898 Wilmington coup. Daily Record, North Carolina Archives and History While experts debate whether the siege of the American Capitol was an attempted coup, there was no debate about what happened in 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, there was a coup – and the consequences were tragic. These two events, separated by 122 years, have critical characteristics. Each is organized and planned. Each was an attempt to steal voters and deny voters. Each was animated by white racist fears. And everyone needed the help of the media to be successful. Those who study its reconstruction and its aftermath know that the US has deep experience with political and electoral violence. Reconstruction was the period of twelve years after the Civil War when the South returned to the Union and newly liberated Black Americans were incorporated into American democracy. But few understand that the coup in Wilmington, when white supremacists overthrew the city’s legally elected bipartisan government, could not have happened without the involvement of white news media. The same is true of the siege of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. It appears that the news media have often been important players in American election violence. This history is explored in a chapter one – Gustafson – wrote for a book – Forde – with Sid Bedingfield, “Journalism & Jim Crow: The Making of White Supremacy in the New South”, with Sid Bedingfield, which appears later. this year. In 1898, Charles B. Aycock wanted to become governor of North Carolina. Aycock, a member of the elite class, was a leading Democrat, who was the party of white supremacy in the South before the middle of the 20th-century political realignment that the parties of today yielded. A major obstacle lies in his path to the governor’s office. Several years earlier, black Republicans and white populists in North Carolina, tired of Democrats enriching themselves through public policies in favor of banks, railroads and industry, had joined forces. Known as Fusionists, they came to power in the executive, the legislature, and the governments of several eastern towns, but most importantly, the thriving port city of Wilmington, then the largest city in North Carolina. A political cartoon by the Raleigh News & Observer, August 13, 1898. North Carolina Collection, UNC Chapel Hill Anti-Black disinformation Wilmington, with its majority black population and successful Black middle class, was a city that offered hope to Black Southerners. Black men had higher literacy than white men, ran some of the city’s most successful businesses, such as restaurants, tailors, shoemakers, furniture makers, and jewelers, and, to the dismay of the Democrats, held public office. Democrats were determined on their loss of power and were determined to get it back in the 1898 state election. Aycock joined forces with Furnifold Simmons, a former U.S. representative who served as the party’s campaign manager, and Josephus Daniels, the editor. of Raleigh, News & Observer newspaper. Together they devised a plan. Through anti-black disinformation spread through newspapers and public speeches across the state, they would fuel white racial fears of ‘Negro domination’ and ‘black animals’ that undermined the ‘virtue’ of white women. The goal: to drive a wedge in the Fusionist coalition and lure white populists back to the Democratic kraal. [Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.] The press and political power The News & Observer, the most influential newspaper in the state, was the Democratic Party’s strongest weapon. Its editor calls it ‘the militant voice of white supremacy’. Months before the November election, the newspaper contained articles, editorials, speeches, and letters from readers telling lies about black misunderstanding, mismanagement, crime, and sexual predation against white women. White newspapers across the state, from big cities to small hamlets, republished the contents of the News & Observer. “The occurrence of rape by cruel Negroes on helpless white women has created a reign of terror in rural districts,” the newspaper said. Daniels admitted years later that this allegation was a lie. Daniels knew the power of images and hired a cartoonist to create venomous racist images for the cover. About a year after Rebecca Latimer Felton, a prominent white Georgian, delivered a speech advocating the lines of black men for their alleged assaults on white women, white newspapers across North Carolina reprinted it and days long discussed to incite racist hostility. At the same time, the Democrats organized the Red Shirts, a paramilitary arm of the party, to intimidate black citizens and prevent them from participating in politics and eventually voting. Alexander Manly, the editor of the Black newspaper The Daily Record in Wilmington, then the only Black Daily in the country, decided to fight back. To counter the lies that the Democrats and Felton told about black men as ‘animals’ and ‘brute’, Manly told the truth in a brave editorial: Some white women fell in love with black men and, if these matters discovered, the inevitable outcome. was the label “rape” and a cruel lynch. The grandson of a white governor of North Carolina and a black woman he enslaved, Manly knew white hypocrisy well. Democrats went wild and reprinted Manly’s editorial in newspapers across the state, attacking him for insulting the ‘virtue’ of white women. An anti-black political cartoon by Norman Jennett in the Raleigh News & Observer, August 30, 1898. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The coup As the election approached and Red Shirts patrolled the state, the Democrats laid their final planned. Because there were few local elections in Wilmington in 1898, and the Democrats viewed the city as the center of ‘Negro rule’ in the state, they began arranging early in the fall to overthrow Wilmington’s bipartisan government and oust all white officials. install. After stealing the state election through fraud and violence, the Democrats sent a massive group of red shirts to Wilmington. They killed countless black men in the street; burned black businesses, including Manly’s newspaper office; terrorized the Black community and forced at least 1,400 people to flee, and many never to return; and removed and banished all Fusionists from office and installed white Democrats in their place. Early in the new century, Aycock sat in the governors’ office. Black citizens were exempted from constitutional amendments, which ushered in white supremacist, one-party, kleptocratic rule, which lasted at least through the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Then and Now For the past four years, the overwhelming white right-wing news media has spread lies. that President Donald Trump and his allies cracked daily. Social media companies have helped turn these lies into a contagion of mass error that radicalizes a significant portion of the IDP base. Since President Joe Biden’s election in November, Trump and his political and media allies have relentlessly pushed the massive lie that liberals stole the presidential election. Like the press’ involvement in the murderous events in Wilmington long ago, the media of today has played an important role in deceiving and inciting supporters to violence in an attempt to steal an election. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even over.” This article was published from The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to the exchange of ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Kathy Roberts Forde, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Kristin Gustafson, University of Washington, Bothell. Read more: Capitol investment raises questions about the extent of US police’s white supremacist infiltration. The Confederate battle flag, flown by insurgents inside the American Capitol, has long been a symbol of white insurgency. The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that benefits from this article, and that has not disclosed any applicable commitments outside of their academic appointment.