‘White Supremacy Campaign’ of 1898 a stain that will not escape history: experts

(WILMINGTON, Nc.) — On Nov. 10, 1898, more than 2,000 white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, ransacked a Black-owned newspaper, Black-owned banks and forced the city’s local leaders, which included a mix of white and Black elected officials, to resign in what historians call the only successful coup in U.S. history.

Now historians, residents and descendants of the victims are working to ensure that one of the darkest days in Wilmington’s history doesn’t remain lost and forgotten.

While the city has been working to identify and honor the victims of the insurrection who lost everything, some of their descendants, like Inez Campbell-Eason, say more needs to be done to rectify the sins of the past.

“I was really angry. I used to cry all the time, like angry, fiery, angry tears, because this is generational wealth that was taken away from my family,” she told ABC News.

Campbell-Eason said she only found out a few years ago about the insurrection and how her great, great grandfather Isham Quick was evicted from town banks that he successfully managed.

Campbell-Eason was visiting a museum that had hired a black curator, who pulled out old records about her ancestor. Campbell-Eason said she learned Quick, a freed slave, joined the board of directors for Wilmington’s first Black-owned bank, the Perpetual Savings and the People’s Perpetual Savings and Loan, in 1887.

He ended up owning three banks in Wilmington and records show he had at least $2 million in holdings. His two white business partners took over the banks after he was forced out during the coup, she said.

Historians said that such economic success among Black Wilmington residents was not uncommon during the end of the 19th century. Many of those entrepreneurs worked with white business owners, according to historians.

The city’s elected office was also made up of former slaves and white men.

“It was basically the Black Mecca of the South,” Campbell-Eason said.

That integrated coalition, however, did not sit well with white supremacists around the state who were already making efforts to limit Black businesses and promote the passage of Jim Crow laws, according to historians.

LeRae Umfleet, a state historian, told ABC News that white supremacists took aim at the Wilmington city election of 1898 to further their agenda and that campaign led to the coup.

Tensions rose in August of that year when white Wilmington newspapers ran a racist speech from the year before by Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia.

“Essentially that article said all Black men have one thing that they want to do in life and that’s to rape white women. And so we need to do everything we can to protect white womanhood. And if that means lynching a Black man today, then she says lynch,” Umfleet said.

Alex Manly, the editor of one of the city’s Black-owned newspapers, responded to the speech with an editorial.

“He essentially said that white women choose to be with Black men,” Umfleet said. “And that was an insult to the white leadership that a white woman would choose to be with a Black man. So he becomes a target.”

A week after white supremacist candidates won the election, Alfred Moore Wadell, a former Confederate soldier, led a group of men with torches and burned Manly’s newspaper office, historians said.

The mob grew and they raided city hall, where they violently threw out the racially diverse city leaders who still had another year in office and forced them to resign from their positions.

Wadell then became the mayor.

“We call it the only successful coup in the United States history because there have been other attempts and those attempted coups did not last longer than a day or a week,” Umfleet said. “This time it stuck and was reaffirmed at the next election and every other election subsequent…until the advent of the Civil Rights Movement.”

An estimated 300 Black residents were murdered during the incident, historians said. Those who fled the violent mob, who historians say used a Gatling gun on Black residents and businesses during the coup, took shelter inside churches and a segregated cemetery until it was safe to go outside.

The story was left out of history books and local lore for over a century.

“African-Americans did not want to talk about that. You know, they were kind of told not to talk about it. And so it kind of went underground,” genealogist Tim Pinnick told ABC News.

But in recent years, the city has worked to rectify this problem. It has set up makeshift tombstones of the people killed in the event. A school that was named after one of the white supremacist perpetrators of the coup was renamed to Mason Borough Elementary.

Pinnick has been using DNA databases to find the descendants of the victims who were across the country and spread the word about what happened.

“We’re going to keep finding people because that’s what our mission is now,” he said.

But some Black residents say more needs to be done to undo the century of damage done to the community.

Campbell-Eason said she would like to see the properties that her ancestor owned returned to her and her family or other financial reparations.

She dismissed arguments that taxpayers of the day should not pay for past crimes.

“Yesterday’s crimes helped this country to amass the wealth that it has today,” she argued.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.