[0:03]Quote, this is from the editorial. 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,
[0:16]and were not only 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.
[0:25]Let virtue be something more than an excuse for them to intimidate and torture a helpless people. Tell your men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman.
[0:39]You set yourselves down as a lot of carping hypocrites in that you cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you you seek to destroy the morality of ours.
[0:48]Now, as you can imagine, this did not go over very well with the white supremacist leadership and in fact, the article was reprinted not only in North Carolina, but across the south,
[0:58]and there was a bidding war for a while because everybody wanted to get their hands on it. So actually Manley made a little bit of money because he kept reprinting it.
[1:07]But after it appeared, uh the vigilantes, the white vigilante militia of the supremacy movement were called Red shirts.
[1:15]They wanted to lynch Manley that day and to show you how calculated and premeditated this coup was, the leaders of the coup said, no, not now.
[1:25]This will have much greater political impact, uh several months later in November. This was in August, they said we're going to wait till the November elections, and then then we can really use this.
[1:33]And I promise you guys, you can not only lynch Manley, but you can burn down the newspaper.
[1:38]And they did. They didn't lynch Manley, he escaped, he got warnings, he escaped two days before the uh election, and in fact, it was interesting, a white neighbor of his, uh knew that he was going to be lynched,
[1:50]warned him, gave him $25 in gold and gave him the password that you needed to get through the white sentinels. The whites uh had militarized Wilmington.
[1:58]Uh and they set up checkpoints all around the city and they organized it on a block by block basis, but with the password, he got through and escaped to Philadelphia, as a matter of fact.
[2:08]He lived 40 years in Philadelphia after that.
[2:11]All right. one of the things that is chilling that in a in a very odd way kind of refreshing is the complete lack of euphemism.
[2:22]I mean these there are no apologies for the pure racism, pure white supremacy.
[2:27]I know you were you've talked about Waddell's Yes. speech, you want to give us Yeah,
[2:32]let me tell you, he was uh Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell was one of the leaders in Wilmington of the coup and the massacre.
[2:38]Uh he was a former Confederate Colonel, uh he had been a uh Congressman, a US Congressman, he had run a newspaper and he was this fabulous orator.
[2:47]And during the summer, spring and fall of uh 1898, he traveled through the Cape Fear countryside, giving these race-baiting speeches, inciting white men to attack blacks, to uh prevent them from voting.
[3:00]Uh the night before the election, he gave an absolutely chilling speech and and Mark's right, the N word appeared in print constantly.
[3:09]It was in all the newspapers, it was used commonly. Uh I was just shy. That was one of the things that shocked me about the research of the book that how open and nakedly racist these people were and how proudly racist they were.
[3:20]So, uh again, this is the uh the speech to about uh a thousand Red shirts and other vigilantes uh uh downtown Wilmington the night before the election.
[3:30]Uh again, this is Alfred Moore Waddell. What page, Mark?
[3:33]161. Thank you. I know I would lose it. I memorized it. Yeah, okay.
[3:40]Uh again, this is from his speech to a bunch of whooping red shirts. Quote, Men, the crisis is upon us.
[3:47]You must do your duty. This city, county, and state shall be rid of Negro domination once and forever.
[3:54]You have the courage, you're brave. You are the sons of noble ancestry, you are Anglo-Saxons.
[4:02]You are armed and prepared and you will do your duty. Go to the polls tomorrow and if you find the Negro outvoting, tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks.
[4:15]So one of the things, Dave, that really struck me as I read your book was that it's such an astonishing episode from American history.
[4:25]Right. And I was never taught this, I, I've never I didn't know anything about this.
[4:31]So, and you grew up in in North Carolina.
[4:35]Um, why didn't we know about this? Uh, basically, the the white supremacist, on the one hand, they boasted about it, they were proud of it, they they they wrote about it in memoirs and in letters to each other and newspaper articles, but at the same time,
[4:47]they created the lie that's in the title and the lie was two things. One, that blacks were planning a riot for for the election and they told everyone that, they printed it in the papers.
[4:59]Uh and they said they were going to rise up and take over the town and a lot of whites believed their own propaganda, a lot of whites sent their families out of Wilmington, uh for the election because they were afraid of this black riot.
[5:11]Uh the other myth was that they propagated in the newspapers was that uh blacks were not intelligent.
[5:17]They were certainly not intelligent enough uh to vote and and and certainly not intelligent enough uh to to run and hold public office and to make important decisions.
[5:29]Uh they said they were venal, uh corrupt and the reason they had to rise up and take over was because this this corrupt administration and what they called Negro rule.
[5:40]And when I went to high school and college in North Carolina, not once did any teacher or professor mention this event, it wasn't in the history books.
[5:50]Uh when I was a freshman at UNC in Chapel Hill, uh the dorm I was assigned to was Morrison Dorm.
[5:56]And I didn't know who Morrison was, somebody said he was a governor, I didn't care who he was. Years later, I find out he's a character in my book.
[6:04]He was one of the uh speakers on the on the white uh supremacy campaign during that summer, who rode through the countryside, giving these giving these race-baiting speeches, telling inciting whites to go out and attack blacks.
[6:17]And in fact, he was one of three speakers who became governor of North Carolina, uh in large parts due to the fame that they won during this white supremacy campaign.
[6:27]When I was at school, I went to football games at a place a stadium called Keenan Stadium, you may have seen it on TV.
[6:33]I had no idea who Keenan was, and again, I didn't care. Years later, I'm researching this book, again, he's a character in the book.
[6:41]He was William Buck Rand Keenan, he was uh the head of one of the gun squads that rode through the town, killing black men.
[6:50]So, I bring this up only to make the point that this really isn't ancient history, it's why right now, it's the legacy is today, there are almost 30 buildings on the campus of the University of North Carolina, named for white supremacists, and many of them were white supremacists involved in this campaign.
[7:07]Um, so I didn't know it, but this book has been following me around for most of my adult life because I didn't know about that this until about 20 years ago.
[7:14]So tell us how you've you've found out about it and when and why did you decide to write a book about it?
[7:18]I found out about it in 1998 because the uh University of North Carolina at Wilmington held some centennial centennial events.
[7:27]And they tried very hard to bring blacks and whites together after 100 years and try to come up some sort of reconciliation.
[7:35]But they also wanted to burrow down and tell the real story.
[7:39]They wanted to end the lie and the myth that had been going for a century, and they brought blacks and whites together and particularly the descendants on both sides and they held meetings,
[7:51]Uh and it worked fairly well. They brought people together, they got a memorial put up, uh in memory of the of the victims and they rewrote the state his historical marker, which had called it a race riot.
[8:04]When in fact, it was a racial coup and a massacre, they changed that.
[8:09]Uh but there was one issue that sort of split the town again and that was reparations.
[8:14]Uh because it came up and the blacks, I mean, the white many members of the white community just adamantly refused to have any part of it and it's still splitting the community.
[8:24]I gave a talk there a couple of weeks ago and um, it was sponsored by the NAACP and I was anticipating there would be some whites there who would jump up and say, why are you dredging up this ancient history?
[8:35]Just let it be, but no, it did not happen. Uh but reparations was the main topic or one of the main topics of of discussion during that during that book talk.
[8:44]So did you cover this for some reason? what what brought this to your attention and made you purposely decide to write about it?
[8:50]Yes, sorry. Uh again, in in in 1998, I read newspaper stories about the the centennial and I could not believe it like how did I not know about this and how could this happen in the United States of America?
[9:03]So I just said, I've got to write a book about it. There had been one academic book written about about it in 1984, but it didn't get a whole lot of attention.
[9:12]So I really just wanted to basically correct the historical record and and bring this story to the country and when I go to other parts of the country, no one has ever heard of this, very, very few people.
[9:23]So that's why I decided to do it and I just had to wait, I mean, I have a real job writing for newspapers and I just never had time and I finally got the time and decided to sit down and do it and took about three years and obviously, as you know,
[9:36]uh it's all on paper, there was nobody to interview and I'm used to interviewing people live or witnessing events myself.
[9:43]And this was a different experience for me. Everything in here is comes from a piece of paper from a document. uh which is why it took so long.
[9:48]And I should say, you know, David is an extremely good writer and it's a very compelling and dramatic story.
[9:59]Uh he writes a narrative about these events that doesn't read like a work of academic history, it reads like the work of a Pulitzer Prize winning storytelling journalist.
[10:10]And you know, I think that you know, the question that you said there were some angry whites who showed up at the NAACP event, why are you dragging up this ancient history?
[10:18]Why is it important, do you think, for us to read about this history which has been basically hidden from us?
[10:26]Because it's not over. Um, I I had really a sinking feeling, as I was researching this book, Charlottesville happened in 2017, I believe.
[10:36]And it just occurred to me those uh uh very fine people, the uh who were marching around with the torches and chanting Jews will not replace us would have been right at home.
[10:48]In Wilmington in 1898 and since 2016 and you've all seen it, this white resentment, white rage,
[10:57]white hate and racism has been dredged up and I think it's been sitting there all along. The election in 2016 brought it to the surface.
[11:06]And I think it's terrifying because I see some of these same themes running today as in 1898.
[11:13]Uh the scapegoating of people of color or certain ethnic groups, uh the demonizing of of people of color, uh setting them up as targets.
[11:24]I mean, I'll give you one example, uh in 1898, uh the editor, Alex Manley, in addition to getting many, many death threats, was constantly told to go back to Africa.
[11:35]And just this summer, we had three United States Congresswomen of color told to go back to their home countries.
[11:44]Uh another example is in uh 1898, uh whites were told explicitly over and over in this newspaper campaign that uh blacks were coming to rape their women and take their jobs.
[11:57]Uh in 2015, a certain presidential candidate came down, uh the escalator to announce his run for president and said, uh Mexican criminals and rapists, he used the term rapists, are flowing across the border to take your jobs.
[12:12]So, this is this is all been simmering under the surface and I don't think we've we've gone a whole lot of very far, uh from 1898 in some ways.
[12:21]We haven't done much as a country to reckon with this past, and in Germany, you know, there are monuments to the Holocaust and children in Germany are taken to tour the concentration camps.
[12:34]The Germany, as a country, has confronted the Nazi uh regime and what happened.
[12:41]And in South Africa, which you covered, the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, and there are museums in South Africa to uh um uh make sure that the young people in South Africa understand the apartheid period.
[12:54]We don't really do that in America. No, we don't talk openly about race. Um, they talked more openly about race back in 1898 than we do today.
[13:04]They were very explicit about it and and they said why uh we don't think black people belong and it's a little more subtle today.
[13:10]And I think it's sitting there bubbling, but um, I don't think it's addressed.
[13:13]Now, I will give Wilmington credit, they uh did try to bring blacks and whites together and they did put up uh this memorial to the victims with uh uh a a big uh uh sign there that gives the true story.
[13:27]So I give them credit for that, but um, there is a lot more to be done in addressing openly what's going on.
[13:36]Uh one one point we were talking about earlier, uh you know, today you're constantly seeing these videos of uh young black men, unarmed black men being shot dead by police officers.
[13:45]And I understand so clearly why young black men might be afraid of uh white men in uniform because in 1898, in addition to having the Red shirts,
[13:57]the white supremacists had their own two state militias, the Wilmington Light Infantry and the Naval Reserves. These were state militias, they were the National Guard of the day,
[14:06]but they were led by white supremacists and made up of white supremacists and they served in the Spanish-American War, but the leaders of the white supremacy campaign made sure they were back in Wilmington in time for the day of the coup, which was planned ahead of time.
[14:22]But at the same time, oh, also, these men were in federal service, they hadn't been mustered out. So they were United States soldiers murdering black citizens uh in the streets of Wilmington.
[14:35]At the same time, there were segregated black units from Wilmington that were called up for service in the Spanish-American War, but the leaders of the white supremacy campaign made sure that they stayed on a training base in Georgia, hundreds of miles away, on the day of the coup.
[14:50]So the black community was defenseless. You had all these young black men trained as soldiers, trained in weapons, uh and they were hundreds of miles away and the the black were not allowed to buy guns while whites were stockpiling guns all summer.
[15:00]They refused to sell guns to to blacks. So the only weapons they had were some old shotguns and pistols, uh uh many of the uh the blacks in Wilmington were descendants of of the colored soldiers, uh from the Civil War.
[15:19]The colored units, uh had weapons, but they're completely outgunned and defenseless.
[19:30]I am I'm a UNC graduate as well. I lived in Aering House Dorm, so I'm very familiar with Morrison and James and the other, um, uh memorials to Confederates to the Confederacy on that campus.
[20:48]Um, but people still to my knowledge don't really talk about it and um, but I felt it growing up, it was never spoken, but there was a reason I became a civil rights lawyer.
[20:59]Right. It's because it was all around us, but there were no words or acknowledgements of the existence of it.
[21:23]So thank you very much for the book. It gives the opportunity for the conversations that that we need to have.
[21:29]Thank you for sharing your story.
[35:20]I was part of a group that went to Alabama to to visit the Civil Rights Movement.
[35:28]And there is a magazine, there is a, uh, there is a museum in Montgomery. That's a terrific, terrific museum, fascinating and extremely, extremely well done.
[35:44]And they are still also having trouble with the voting situation, identifying themselves and having the right to vote.
[35:54]But I would invite everyone to go to that museum because it it's absolutely spectacular and says it all.
