By Jack R. Johnson 02.2021

Graphic by Doug Dobey

One reason the recent coup attempt in Washington DC was such a shock is that no one really thought it could happen here. We prefer to think of coups as the province of banana republics, happening in far off locales, riddled with corrupt leaders and nepotistic dynasties. Of course they do happen here, as we saw on January 6 with aborted coup at the U.S. Capitol. But there was another coup in our history which occurred in 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina. That one, unfortunately, was successful.

The superficial gloss is that the North Carolina coup came about because of racial tensions, but an accurate reading shows that the underlying causes were really about the loss of money and power for the white elite of the day. The white elite merely inflamed racial tensions to drive the coup forward.

In southeastern North Carolina, on the outskirts of Wilmington, poor white cotton farmers, fed up with big bank financing and railroad company corruption allied with recently freed Black Republicans to form what was called a ‘Fusion’ coalition.  They formed an interracial alliance with a platform of self-governance, free public education, and equal voting rights for Black men. Wisely, the Fusionist platform also called for restricting interest rates to six percent. With 90 percent of North Carolinians in debt, this turned out to be favorable political move, and they successfully won elections.

The shift in political power was a direct challenge to the old white plantation system rule, and the so called ‘lending’ class.

By late 1897, nine prominent Wilmington men were unhappy with what they called "Negro Rule". They were particularly aggrieved about Fusion government reforms that affected their ability to manage the city's affairs. Worse, when interest rates were lowered, it decreased banking revenue. Tax laws were adjusted, directly affecting stockholders and property owners who now had to pay a "like proportion" of taxes on the property they owned. Railroad regulations were tightened, making it more difficult for those who had railroad holdings to capitalize on them.

According to historian Newsome Lefler, newly elected Democratic State Party Chairman Furnifold Simmons was tasked with developing a strategy for the Democrats' 1898 campaign. A student of Southern political history, Simmons knew that racial resentment was easy to inflame and would cut across party lines. He took the advice of Marion Butler writing in his newspaper, The Caucasian:

“There is but one chance and but one hope for the railroads to capture the net [sic] legislature, and that is for the n***er to be made the issue.”

White ‘clubs’ for labor and politics began taking shape. These were clubs whose sole organizing principle was white supremacy. Paramilitary wings of the Democratic Party, such as the Red Shirts, took up the work of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been subdued by the federal government. There was much talk of the Negro taking advantage of the white woman, and the white supremacists used an editorial by Alex Manly, the editor of Wilmington’s black newspaper the Daily Record, to stir a firestorm at the time of the elections.

Manly had responded to a speech by a Georgia socialite who promoted lynching as a method “to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beast.” Manly condemned lynching and pointed out that relations between the races were more often than not consensual.  In other words, the notion that these relationships were crimes of rape was spurious nonsense. According to Manly, these were simply affairs of the human heart. This was more than the white supremacists could stand. They demanded that the paper be shut down.

In another example, Democratic Congressman Alfred Waddell declared:

“We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of Negroes, even if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses.”

This kind of rhetoric was typical of the white supremacist clubs across the state. There was talk of “shotgun politics” to oust elected Black Republicans. Shortly after Waddell’s speech, there was a political convention in Goldsboro dubbed the “White Supremacy Convention.” It was attended by 8,000 people. There, Major William Guthrie promised, “Resist our march of progress and civilization and we will wipe you off the face of the earth.” The convention was hailed in The Fayetteville Observer as “A White Man’s Day.”

Right before the election, the Red Shirts were told by Democratic leadership that they wanted the Democrats to win the election "at all hazards and by any means necessary ... even if they had to shoot every Negro in the city."

The ending was as predictable as the more recent calls to overthrow our Capitol.

On election eve, a Washington Post correspondent noted: “The city might have been preparing for a siege instead of an election ... Military preparations, so extensive as to suggest assault from some foreign foe. […] The whites had determined to regain their supremacy; and the wholesale armament was intended to convey to the blacks an earnest of this decision.”

White police stood by as nightriders burst into Black homes in and around Wilmington, whipping Black men and threatening to kill them if they dared register to vote. On Election Day in November 1898, vigilantes beat Black voters and stuffed ballot boxes in full view of white policemen.

A Washington Post correspondent noted, “No one for a moment supposes that this was the result of a free and untrammeled ballot; and a Democratic victory here, as in other parts of the State, was largely the result of the suppression of the Negro vote.”

Democrats won every seat, but these were state legislative seats. Blacks still maintained power in Wilmington’s city government.

The white clubs could not abide this.

According to The Zinn Education Project, some 800 white citizens led by Waddell met at the county courthouse and produced what was called, the “White Declaration of Independence” which stated: “We, the undersigned citizens… do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled by men of African origin.”

The following day — November 10 — Waddell led a mob of 2,000 armed men to the Daily Record and burned the building to the ground. In the confusion, someone fired a shot, and someone else yelled, “One white man killed,” and the armed white supremacists opened fire.

According to Time magazine, the coup leaders pressured the governor to call out the militias – the National Guard of the day – on the pretext that Blacks were rioting, but it was whites who were rioting, directed by soldiers and police. They led white vigilantes on a killing spree.

 Death estimates range wildly, from 60 to 300 Blacks, or more. As part of the coup, white supremacists banished leading Black and white political allies from Wilmington after forcibly evicting them from office and replacing them with coup leaders. Militiamen escorted them to the train station at gunpoint. In the weeks after the coup, more than 2,100 Blacks fled Wilmington, turning a Black-majority city into a white supremacist citadel.

Laura Edwards wrote in Democracy Betrayed (2000): "What happened in Wilmington became an affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South and in the nation as a whole."

After the coup, no Black citizen served in public office in Wilmington until 1972. No Black citizen from North Carolina was elected to Congress until 1992. No one was prosecuted or punished for the killings and violence. It was, according to Time magazine, the most successful and lasting coup in American history. “Two years before the coup, 126,000 Black men registered to vote in North Carolina. Four years after the coup, the number was 6,100.”

So when people say things like “A successful coup can’t happen here”, the correct response is, “It already has.”