Alex Manly had generally avoided controversy, but the accusation in The News and Observer that black men preyed on white women was too much. Manly, whose very existence was due to a white man preying on a black woman, responded with an editorial in which he charged white lynch mobs with murdering African American men because white women had chosen to become romantically involved with them.
“Meetings of this kind go on for some time,” he wrote, “until the woman’s infatuation or the man’s boldness brings 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 not ‘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.”
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At a rally on the night of November 7th, 1898, the eve of the election, Alfred Waddell addressed a Red Shirt rally. Waddell was a former Confederate cavalry officer who had served three terms in Congress before losing his seat in 1878 to Daniel Russell, who at the time was a Republican. He told the Red Shirts, “You are Anglo-Saxons. You are armed and prepared, and you will do your duty. If you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns.”
With Red Shirts and other armed white men roaming the streets, Democrats regained all they had lost, winning in Wilmington by 6,000 votes, where they had lost by 5,000 votes only two years earlier. Fraud was everywhere. Ballot boxes were stuffed so openly with phony votes for Democrats that in some districts the number of votes for Democratic candidates exceeded the total number of registered voters. In one precinct, for example, although only 30 Democrats were registered, 456 Democratic votes were reported out. Another precinct, with only 343 registered voters, reported out 607 votes, almost all for Democrats.
And where the white Democratic vote was inflated, Red Shirts made certain the Republican vote, especially among African Americans, was suppressed. One predominantly black precinct reported only 97 votes, although 337 Republicans had registered. The Red Shirts were so brazen that they met the train carrying Governor Russell, who was returning home to vote, and threatened to lynch him. Russell, almost 300 pounds, ran through the train and hid in a baggage car to escape.
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Although Democrats had achieved almost total victory across North Carolina, triumph had only increased their thirst for revenge, especially in Wilmington, where Alex Manly’s editorial and a thriving black community remained irresistible targets. In addition, since many local officials had not been up for reelection in 1898, Fusionists remained a power in city government.
On the morning of November 9th, one day after the election, Waddell again called a meeting of Red Shirts. He waved in front of him a “White Declaration of Independence,” which insisted that the American Constitution “did not anticipate the enfranchisement of an ignorant population of African origin.” The Founding Fathers “did not contemplate for their descendants a subjection to an inferior race.”
The following morning, Waddell, “his white hair flowing in the light breeze,” led an armed band of more than 100 armed men on a procession to Alex Manly’s newspaper office. Manly was not there, so they stormed inside, poured kerosene on all the printing equipment, and set it ablaze. Soon, the wooden building was consumed in flames and totally gutted.
The soaring flames seemed only to make the rampaging mob more furious at black residents of Wilmington, even those who lived peacefully and were not at all involved in politics.
And so, the shooting began.
Rev. Charles S. Morris, a Wilmington pastor, gave an eyewitness account in a speech to the International Association of Colored Clergymen in Boston in January 1899.
Nine Negroes massacred outright; a score wounded and hunted like partridges on the mountain; one man, brave enough to fight against such odds, who would be hailed as a hero anywhere else, was given the privilege of running the gauntlet up a broad street, where he sank ankle deep in the sand, while crowds of men lined the sidewalks and riddled him with a pint of bullets as he ran bleeding past their doors; another Negro shot twenty times in the back as he scrambled empty handed over a fence; thousands of women and children fleeing in terror from their humble homes in the darkness of the night, out under a gray and angry sky, from which falls a cold and bone chilling rain, out to the dark and tangled ooze of the swamp amid the crawling things of night, fearing to light a fire, startled at every footstep, cowering, shivering, shuddering, trembling, praying in gloom and terror: half clad and barefooted mothers, with their babies wrapped only in a shawl, whimpering with cold and hunger at their icy breasts, crouched in terror from the vengeance of those who, in the name of civilization, and with the benediction of the ministers of the Prince of Peace, inaugurated the reformation of the city of Wilmington the day after the election by driving out one set of white officeholders and filling their places with another set of white officeholders—the one being Republican and the other Democrat. All this happened, not in Turkey, nor in Russia, nor in Spain, not in the gardens of Nero, nor in the dungeons of Torquemada, but within three hundred miles of the White House.
The killing did not end until the following day. Two dozen African Americans were officially reported murdered, but scores more may have been killed and their bodies dumped into the river. One local historian, Harry Hayden, an eyewitness, insisted more than 300 had died.
While African Americans were either slaughtered or ran in terror to hide in the nearby woods, Waddell and his men invaded City Hall and informed the mayor, the aldermen, and the police chief, all Fusionists, that they must either resign on the spot or be shot down. All complied, and by late afternoon, November 10th, 1898, Wilmington had a new government, led by Mayor Alfred Waddell. Those local officials lucky enough to not be murdered, both black and white, were marched to the train station, some with nooses around their necks, and told they would be killed if they ever returned. None did.
In all, more than 2,000 African American men, women, and children fled Wilmington, most of them, like Reverend Morris, never to return.
Although the white press would later term the events in Wilmington a “race riot,” it was in fact the only violent overthrow of a local government in United States history.
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