Wilmington, North Carolina was a thriving progressive town in the early 1890s where whites, blacks and Indians worked and lived together. Wilmington was North Carolina’s successful hub of business and commerce led by an interracial coalition. The community built a new political party, the fusion party, that was more progressive than either the Democratic party, which was controlled by conservative white supremacists in North Carolina, or the Republican party, which was once the party of Lincoln. This rise of interracial progressive populism was a grave threat to the slave-wage labor economic model of the wealthy white land owners who had very effectively used racism to divide working class whites from blacks and Indians. If average white folks accepted black leadership and saw that their local economy thrived, elite white landowners and businessmen would lose much of their power. The feudalistic plantation system, that had ruled the south since the foundation of the republic, when the land was stolen from the Indians, was gravely threatened.
The white supremacist elites could not allow a thriving interracial society to develop, but they had a problem. The African American population in the coastal plain was larger than the white population. The cotton plantations in the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain depended on enslaved labor. There were more enslaved black laborers than white bosses and workers in eastern North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The Fourteenth Amendment had given African Americans the right to vote and vote they did. To restore white supremacy and their power, the elites would have to find a way to slash the black vote.
In the mid 1890’s the elites revived the white militias that were used by the Confederate States to terrorize enslaved people into submission. They dredged up the racist white dregs of North Carolina society to make gangs of white thugs called the Redshirts. The Redshirts, who lacked equestrian skills, were lower class than the KKK. The Redshirts began to lynch and terrorize African Americans to keep them from voting and to put them in their place. The Redshirts were egged on by none other than Josephus Daniels owner of the Raleigh News and Observer. Over 100 years later the News and Observer publishedan unvarnished report that confessed their historic involvement in the white supremacist coup in Wilmington that set the stage for decades of lynchings and violence against African Americans.
The Ghosts of 1898 WILMINGTON’S RACE RIOT AND THE RISE OF WHITE SUPREMACY BY TIMOTHY B. TYSON On Nov. 10, 1898, heavily armed columns of white men marched into the black neighbor-hoods of Wilmington. In the name of white supremacy, this well-ordered mob burned the offices of the local black newspaper, murdered perhaps dozens of black residents — the precise number isn’t known — and banished many successful black citizens and their so-called “white nigger” allies. A new social order was born in the blood and the flames, rooted in what The News and Observer’s publisher, Josephus Daniels, heralded as “permanent good government by the party of the White Man.” The Wilmington race riot of 1898 stands as one of the most important chapters in North Carolina’s history. It is also an event of national historical significance. Occurring only two years after the Supreme Court had sanctioned “separate but equal” segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, the riot marked the embrace of virulent Jim Crow racism, not merely in Wilmington, but across the United States.Since LBJ passed the Civil Rights act the economy of the south has improved and progressive urban areas have thrived. Party roles flipped when Nixon ran as a Republican under the white supremacist southern strategy, but strong federal enforcement of civil rights laws kept the south from backsliding into Jim Crow and black voter disenfranchisement. But in 2012, when Republicans took over all branches of North Carolina state government, they rapidly passed the most severe laws to reduce the black vote since the Civil Rights Act was passed. The progressive coalition of black and white North Carolinians that gave president Obama North Carolina’s electoral votes was a grave threat to the power of North Carolina’s white supremacist large land and business owners.
However, Federal courts have now invalidated the voter suppression laws because they clearly targeted black voters. If Hillary Clinton is elected she will nominate Justices who will support the voting rights of African Americans and the rights of all minorities, including LGBTQ. Laws like the odious HB2 will never be allowed to stand under a Clinton court.
This is what Donald Trump was talking about when he brought up “Second Amendment solutions” in Wilmington. The Wilmington white supremacist insurrection was a landmark in American history where progressive leaders were lynched or driven out of southeastern North Carolina and the African American community was subsequently subjected to decades of terror. Laws were put into place so that only whites could vote. And Trump is tipping his hat to every white supremacist who wants to bring back those “good old days” when the white man was king.
And the rural areas inland of Wilmington North Carolina may still have lynchings.
A black high school student in eastern North Carolina , Lennon Lacy, was found hanging dead on this swing in 2014. He had an older white girl friend. The battered and bruised body was shod with too small sneakers that weren’t his, but local police called it a suicide. This part of North Carolina, inland from Wilmington, has been a white supremacist hotbed since the Wilmington massacre of 1898.Several days ago while driving through rural Harnett County, NC I saw a hand painted sign:
HILLARY FOR PRISONMake no mistake, Donald Trump is making loud dog whistles to white supremacists to resort to violence and to delegitimatize Hillary Clinton when she is elected president in November. This coy invitation to violence endangers progressives like me who live in eastern North Carolina.
I do not believe for one minute that Donald Trump’s suggestion of gun violence as a solution to the election of Hillary Clinton was a slip of the tongue. I think he knew exactly why he said it in Wilmington North Carolina where white supremacy rose again in 1898. I am appalled that no one in the media has picked up on the significance of Wilmington North Carolina being the birth place of Jim Crow and the reign of terror across the south by white supremacists.