On a visit to Wilmington earlier this year, my husband and I could have seen a production of “Steel Magnolias” at Thalian Hall, the North Carolina city’s 166-year-old cultural and political center that was built by slaves and free Blacks.
Instead, our friends and hosts took us about a mile north to the 1898 Monument and Memorial Park, a grassy sculpture plaza commemorating the scores of Black North Carolinians killed in 1898 as a result of what a 2006 state report determined was a "documented conspiracy" by white supremacists to violently overthrow a legitimate city government. Our friends also loaned me "Wilmington's Lie," a book by journalist David Zucchino that gives a cogent account of what is known as the only successful coup d'etat on U.S. soil in the history of the United States.
The memorial stands near where the first Black men were killed by the white mob.
I think the memorial should be at Thalian Hall. That is, after all, where Alfred Moore Waddell, who seized the mayor’s office in the coup, shouted to a crowd on Oct. 24, 1898: “Shall we surrender to a ragged rabble of Negroes, led by a handful of white cowards … No! A thousand times no! … We will have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live. We are resolved to change them if we have to choke the Cape Fear (river) with carcasses.”
Waddell returned to Thalian Hall on Nov. 7 to urge fellow white supremacists to “go to the polls tomorrow and 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!”
Waddell and his conspirators had already stockpiled guns -- including a rapid-firing weapon of war -- and lied about Black bestiality in incendiary articles, speeches, even sermons.
On Nov. 9, 1898, a day after stealing regional and statewide elections -- in part by using violence to suppress the Black vote -- white supremacists declared independence in a document read by Waddell, for whom a Wilmington street is still named. On Nov. 10 Waddell led the mob that torched the offices of a Black newspaper whose editor's writings had refuted the depictions of Black citizens used to fuel white rage. Soon after the conflagration, white assailants opened fire on their Black neighbors, killing the first of what the 2006 report determined were an estimated 60 Black men murdered by white rioters.
Even as the killings continued, the city's eight aldermen, three of whom were Black, were all replaced by white riot plotters and other white leaders. The meeting to depose the aldermen was held at Thalian Hall.
Alexander Manly, the Black newspaper editor, fled before he could be lynched by white thugs known as Red Shirts. In all, two dozen prominent Black men -- professionals, a minister, a businessman to whom white people likely owed money -- were escorted out of Wilmington under threat. By April, an estimated 2,800 Black residents had left Wilmington. White families took homes where Black families had built lives.
White men were given jobs Black workers had held. Some couldn't keep them. Zucchino writes that “Mike Dowling, the Red Shirt brigade leader, was appointed foreman of Hose Reel Co. No. 3 (what had been a Black fire station) at a generous salary of $45 a month. Four months later, Dowling was suspended for ‘incompetency, drunkenness and insubordination.”
Before 1898, Wilmington was 56% Black. Today, it is about 16.2% Black.
It wasn’t the first time murderous white mobs turned on Black people in Wilmington. In 1831, after prophetic preacher Nat Turner launched his bloody and ultimately failed slave revolt in Virginia, white Wilmington residents became convinced they would be targeted by their slaves. A dozen Black “suspects” were beaten and tortured into false confessions. Four who were deemed ringleaders were decapitated and their heads mounted on polls on a public roadway.
How quickly it became entrenched, the lie about the 1898 coup to which Zucchino’s title refers: That white Wilmington residents were defending themselves against the mythical depredations of their Black neighbors who had no business voting, let alone holding public office – or writing newspaper editorials.
Zucchino credits a Black scholar, Helen Edmonds, for being among the first to formally challenge the lie, in her 1951 thesis at North Carolina Central University. Zucchino’s 2020 book also is informed by the work of another Black historian, H. Leon Prather Sr., who wrote "We Have Taken a City: Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898," published in 1984. A commission appointed by the North Carolina legislature in 2000 published a 480-page report that made the "documented conspiracy" conclusion.
In his book, Zucchino recounts a conversation he had in 2018 with George Rountree III, a grandson and namesake of a Wilmington coup leader. George III told Zucchino that his grandfather, whom he greatly admired, had told him of his own father, Robert Rountree, an enslaver, returning from fighting for secession to find his plantation in ruins.
“That seemed to instill a sense of grievance in the family, nursed by George Rountree Sr. as he helped plot the 1898 coup,” Zucchino writes.
America’s lies and stubborn grievances have had real-world consequences for centuries.
The evening after we visited Wilmington’s 1898 Monument and Memorial Park, I finished the book I’d brought along on the trip, Edmund S. Morgan’s “American Slavery, American Freedom.” In it, historian Edmund S. Morgan confronts the paradox that the enslavers of Virginia -- George Washington, Thomas Jefferson – “were the most eloquent spokesmen for freedom and equality.”
Poor white farmers saw themselves as equals to large white landowners because neither were slaves, Morgan observed. And they did not want Black Americans to share in that vision of equality for all.
More than a century after the Civil War ended, Morgan wondered, "is America still colonial Virginia writ large?"
Central to the Wilmington monument (which was dedicated in 2008) is a sculpture by Ayokunle Odeleye of six 16-feet tall bronze paddles arranged in an arc. Georgia-based Odeleye has said the paddles refer to the importance of water in African spirituality. They are fitting for a coastal city on a river.
Though only a mile from central Wilmington’s Thalian Hall, the corner where the coup memorial sits seems out-of-the-way. The theater, where crowds come to wrestle with big ideas as well as to be entertained by “Steel Magnolias” versions of the South, is a more fitting place to contemplate questions such as Morgan’s. Or to simply consider the words etched in bronze on a placard at 1898 Monument and Memorial Park:
“This monument serves as a symbol of Wilmington's commitment to an inclusive society, a tribute to all who over the years have struggled to reverse the tragic consequences of the 1898 racial violence, and a memorial to those African Americans killed in that violence.”