Dawn Blagrove traveled to Wilmington, NC this week to join a Town Hall for Black citizens to voice their concerns in the current political moment and turn hope into action. The forum was hosted by the NAACP of New Hanover County, the National Black Leadership Caucus, Friends of Williston, and the Wilmington Journal. Participants were inspired by the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope.” 

Wilmington is the site of the infamous Wilmington Massacre of 1898. After the Civil War, federal Reconstruction legislation attempted to protect voting rights for Black Americans in North Carolina and throughout the South. For a while, this was successful. In Wilmington, for example, Black citizens and rural whites joined to elect a Fusionist government for the city. Fusionists were also active at the statewide level in North Carolina and they enacted popular reforms that benefited Black citizens and poor white people alike.

Wilmington had a thriving Black middle class and a Black-owned daily newspaper. The visible success of Black citizens was intolerable to racist white people. Josephus Daniels, the white publisher of the News & Observer, and Furnifold Simmons, a powerful white political leader, joined together in a racist conspiracy. Calling for a “white supremacy campaign,” they planned to steal the 1898 elections by appealing to the racism of poor white voters and by using terrorist violence and intimidation. 

In the runup to the November 1898 election, The News & Observer and others published racist propaganda, including disgusting political cartoons. The white supremacists also dispatched a terroristic paramilitary force called the Red Shirts to burst into the homes of Black citizens and white supporters, threatening them with violence if they tried to vote. During the 1898 election, the Red Shirts stood armed at the polls ready to kill Black voters. The intimidation worked. The statewide Fusion government was defeated. 

But Wilmington’s municipal elections were not due until March 1899, so their Fusion government stood. White supremacists in Wilmington refused to wait. They organized merchants to stop selling ammunition to Black customers. Meanwhile, many Black militiamen were deployed in Georgia at the time so Black citizens were unprotected. The white supremacists started false rumors of an imminent race riot by Black citizens. The Wilmington Messenger published a “White Declaration of Independence” vowing that whites would never again be ruled by “men of African origin” and demanding the resignation of the mayor and chief of police. 

On November 10, 1898, over 2,000 white men attacked the offices of the Black newspaper and turned their weapons on Black citizens throughout the city. At least 2,100 Black Wilmingtonians abandoned the city and as many as 60 Black citizens were killed. This Massacre sealed the ruling power of racist white people in North Carolina for generations, and the spirit of white supremacy remains alive in our State.