The Intimate Legacies of a White-Supremacist Coup

Cynthia Brown first heard about the terror of 1898 as a child in the mid-nineteen-sixties. Her parents had taken her to visit her great-grandmother Athalia Howe Whitfield (Grandma Thalia), a native of Wilmington, North Carolina, who by then was living in Pennsylvania. Brown remembered going into the bedroom where Grandma Thalia lay dying. She began speaking to Brown in an agitated, almost hallucinatory tone. “Never let it happen again,” Grandma Thalia said. Brown wasn’t sure what her great-grandmother meant. As her parents hustled her out of the room, Grandma Thalia caught her wrist and squeezed it: “You have to know,” she whispered. “If it ever happens—run.”

When Brown was older, she learned that Grandma Thalia was a teen-ager when it happened, living with her parents and sisters in the Wilmington neighborhood of Brooklyn, just a few wide, quiet blocks from the house where Brown spent part of her childhood. As Brown later wrote, memories of the violence that day tended to be “quietly kept and held by family historians.” Her father had imparted bits of knowledge over the years, describing how white men had rampaged through town, killing Black people and seizing the city government. But, in general, the subject elicited private reticence and public omertà. As a high-schooler, Brown had gone to the county library in search of more information. At the time, material regarding 1898 was literally kept under lock and key. White librarians meted out access sparingly, denying anyone they thought might “make a stink.” When Brown asked to see the cache of papers, the librarian grilled her about her motives. “What do you need it for?” she asked. Brown left empty-handed.

Another long-term consequence of the coup, a lack of professional opportunity for Black people in Wilmington, sent Brown packing after high school. A stylish dresser, with a honeysuckle voice and a smattering of freckles, she spent almost fifteen years in Chicago in high-flying jobs with the University of Illinois system and Illinois Bell. But she longed for “that cozy feeling” she got in Wilmington, where she could trace her line back seven generations, where her family worshipped in churches that their forebears, who founded a local construction dynasty, had raised with a protractor and parallel rule; where her grandmother had created a garden and taught her that a can of beer poured into strategically placed saucers would stop the slugs from destroying the azaleas. The front porch of Brown’s childhood home had been framed by a pair of live oaks, a reminder of the importance of perseverance and deep roots.

Brown decided to move back. She had just accepted a job as the city of Wilmington’s first-ever director of human resources, in 1993, when she was invited, by an old teacher, to a luncheon at the home of a woman she’d never met. Brown had been expecting soup and sandwiches, but the ladies had made a fuss. They had set up card tables and dressed them with linens as heavy and smooth as cream. Each table had a floral centerpiece. Each seat had a calligraphed place card. A sideboard heaved with pitchers of sweet tea, platters of tuna salad, and poundcake dripping with peach preserves. In the sunroom, a boy played concertos on the violin, signalling that this was not an ordinary weekday lunch.

Most of the other guests were women of Brown’s parents’ generation. Like her mother, many of them had been public-school teachers. “I know your family,” one guest told Brown. She figured that the woman was referring to the tight-knit world of Black educators. Then, Mrs. Harris, her old teacher, turned to her. “We want you to get to know us, and to know more about who you are,” she said, fixing Brown with a bright smile and a dauntless look. A part of Brown bristled at being thrust back into the classroom, involuntarily enrolled in this school of self-discovery. She was a grown woman with three children, who’d made efforts of her own at understanding where she came from. But a deep-seated sense of decorum made acquiescence a given. “My brain said, ‘What’s going on here?’ ” she recalled. “My soul answered, ‘Sit back, relax, and be a good student.’ ”

After the meal, the ladies went through to the sunroom for coffee. Near the end of the gathering, the hostess stood up and identified herself as a distant cousin. “I have a gift for you,” she said, handing Brown a spiral-bound booklet. It was a family history written by another relative, a cousin of Brown’s paternal grandmother and the longtime head librarian of the Wilmington Colored Library. The author, Nada McDonald Cotton, had punctuated the neatly typed memoir with pencilled-in carets. One read:

We were saved from being slaughtered and our home was left intact. Many, many Negroes were killed, marched out of town, and their life-savings taken from them. This outrage, which resulted in rule by white supremacy, is called the Wilmington riot. It was really the Wilmington massacre.

The female elders were giving Brown the facts she needed to make sense of an event that had reverberated in her family for almost a hundred years, shaping generations in ways that history books failed to account for and even actively denied, if they mentioned 1898 at all. As educators, the women may have hoped that Brown, one of only a few Black people in a position of power within the local government, would be able to influence the way the event was remembered in the larger community. Or they may just have wanted to entrust their knowledge to someone who they knew would recognize its importance, who felt the pull of keeping counter-history alive.

I was born in Wilmington and lived there until I was eighteen, but I didn’t know much about 1898 until 2src16, when I watched a documentary called “Wilmington on Fire,” directed by Christopher Everett. The film showed how white Democrats murdered Black men in the streets, banished Black leaders and their white Republican allies, and overthrew the city’s democratically elected biracial government, establishing a precedent of impunity for racial terrorism and solidifying Jim Crow. It also demonstrated that the incident had been overlooked and even actively suppressed. (“Before Rosewood. Before Tulsa. A massacre kept secret for over one hundred years,” the film’s tagline read).

In recent years, thanks to the work of scholars, artists, and local activists, public awareness of the violence of 1898 has increased. During one trip back to Wilmington in 2src16, I went with Everett to visit a memorial that had been underwritten by the descendants of both white perpetrators and Black survivors, including Brown’s father, James. It features six paddle-shaped bronze pillars in a semicircle and an inscription explaining plainly that “Wilmington’s 1898 racial violence was not accidental” but, rather, part of a campaign to “create a system of legal segregation which persisted into the second half of the twentieth century.” The memorial was erected in 2srcsrc8 on the outer limit of Wilmington, where the street turns into a highway and whisks you out of town. A few fancy lampposts that the city installed only emphasized the loneliness of the site. During our visit, we were the sole pedestrians around, but a trace of human presence caught my eye: a piece of plywood nailed high on a telephone pole. We could just make out a message, against the hot blue sky, stencilled on the board in red and black letters: “1898 WAR CRIME.”

The two signs spoke in eloquent juxtaposition: one a handsome, official monument tidily summarizing the events of 1898 and what they meant; the other, a homemade, guerrilla effort that challenged the neat closure of that narrative. Together, they suggested that the event is still being adjudicated, with high stakes for people living today. It’s not hard to see how 1898—a period of white backlash against Black success, the violent harassment of elected officials, the undermining of democratic norms, the weaponization of misinformation—relates to our current political moment. There is no more explicit example of the vulnerability of American democracy, and of the magnitude of the task of repairing it once it is breached.

After the Civil War, what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “mystic years” of Reconstruction, a time of political possibility and economic opportunity for Black people, lasted longer in Wilmington than almost anywhere in the nation. By 1898, Black people and white people were living side by side in all five wards, making Wilmington arguably the most integrated city in the South. Black people made up nearly sixty per cent of the city’s population, and a thriving Black middle class—of dyers, pharmacists, architects, lawyers, doctors, wheelwrights, oystermen, ten of the city’s eleven restaurateurs—gave the city a nationwide reputation as a “Mecca for Negroes.” This was due to a unique political experiment called Fusion, which, in the eighteen-nineties, brought white Populists and Black Republicans in North Carolina together under the banner of common class interest. In 1898, the Fusionists controlled Wilmington’s municipal government. Three of the city’s ten aldermen were Black, as was the justice of the peace, the coroner, and a member of the influential board of audit and finance. According to one historian, Wilmington represented “the heart of Black political power in the state.”

But Black success provided ammunition to the Fusion coalition’s opponent, the North Carolina Democratic Party—the home of states’ rights and social conservatism. In their view, the state was reverting to the social and racial anarchy that had characterized the bad old years of Reconstruction, when Black people walked and sat and voted as they wished, and Black politicians strode the halls of power. Desperate to lure white Fusion voters back to the Party, Democratic leaders chose to center their 1898 election campaign on “the all-absorbing and paramount question of WHITE SUPREMACY.” Party leaders barnstormed the state’s hundred counties, bankrolled by business barons, whose taxes they promised to cut. Newspapers fulminated against “Negro domination” and printed sensational articles: “Negro on Train with Big Feet Behind White,” “Stole Cheese: Negro Man Boldly Purloins a Cheese.” For the illiterate, there were racist cartoons. A typical production depicted a winged, taloned Black man as the “vampire that hovers over North Carolina,” snatching up white women and kids.

As the elections approached, Democrats were especially intent on “redeeming” Wilmington from Fusion control. In August, 1898, local newspapers printed a grotesque speech in which a prominent white woman characterized Black men as habitual rapists, urging her male peers to “lynch, a thousand times a week, if necessary.” Alexander Manly, the editor of the Wilmington Daily Record, the state’s only Black-owned newspaper, published an unblinking rebuttal, in which he argued that white women’s sexual encounters with Black men were often consensual. He furthermore confronted the ultra-taboo subject of white men’s sexual violence against Black women during slavery and since.

The Democrats pounced, calling the piece “a horrid slander” that white men were duty bound to avenge. Members of white government clubs hassled their white neighbors into political lockstep and advertised physical and financial retribution for any Black person who dared to vote. The patriarchs of élite white families banded together, organizing secret paramilitaries that could be activated on a moment’s notice. One aristocrat took the stage at City Hall and thundered, “Shall we surrender [our heritage] to a ragged rabble of Negroes?” He continued, “No! A thousand times no!” White men had a “right to rule” and they would exercise it, he vowed, “if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses.”

The white-supremacy campaign worked: Democrats swept the elections on November 8th, taking the state legislature by outlandish margins. The Fusion-dominated city government, however, wasn’t up for reëlection until the following year, and success at the polls had made the Democrats only greedier for power. Unwilling to wait, or to take their chances with the democratic process, they initiated the takeover that they’d been covertly plotting for months. On November 9th, nearly five hundred white men signed a document that came to be known as “The White Declaration of Independence.” It proclaimed, “We, the undersigned citizens of the city of Wilmington and the county of New Hanover do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled, and we will never again be ruled by men of African origin.”

The office of the Daily Record occupied a two-story wood-framed building on South Seventh Street. A mob of white men mustered at the headquarters of the Wilmington Light Infantry (W.L.I.), a socially élite volunteer military organization, then arranged itself into military columns and marched to the newspaper’s offices, any class distinctions within the group effaced by a shared sense of racial superiority. “The lawyer and his clients were side by side,” one eyewitness wrote. “Men of large business interests kept step with the clerks.”

When the white supremacists got to the Record, they doused the office with kerosene and watched it burn. They would have lynched the paper’s editor, but he had already fled town. A photograph taken that day shows dozens of white men—they’re in suits and derbies, long rifles slung over their shoulders—posing with flushed satisfaction in front of the building’s charred frame.

As word of the violence at the Record spread, Black workers around the city put down their tools and ran home, many of them to the Brooklyn neighborhood. The white mob flocked there, too, joined by Red Shirts—white-supremacist paramilitaries connected to the Democratic Party—and a W.L.I. unit, which careened around town in a horse-drawn wagon. In the lead-up to the election, white business owners had ordered a state-of-the-art machine gun that could fire more than four hundred rounds a minute. The W.L.I. men mounted it on the back of their wagon and rampaged through the neighborhood, killing at least a dozen Black men. At the same time, Democratic leaders, backed by a rabble, stormed City Hall and seized control of the local government. They forced sitting officials to resign and installed their own men in office, completing what is thought to be the only successful coup d’état on American soil. That Sunday, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, the same church in which I was baptized and confirmed, ascended the pulpit and boasted, “We have taken a city.”

Cynthia Brown’s great-grandmother, Athalia, was likely in the middle of the morning’s chores when the terror came to her doorstep, confusing at first and then so clear that its memory marked her for life. William, her father, had started work at the break of day, down at the docks, where he was employed at the Sprunt Cotton Compress as “boss stevedore.” Athalia, the second of William’s three daughters, had risen early that morning. Bustling around the house, she took a moment to watch a neighbor heading out to work. A few hours later, looking out the window of her house, she saw the same man running back toward his yard. Before he made it there, a white man on horseback stopped him and then shot him in the street as Athalia watched. Athalia called to her mother, who quickly understood what was happening. Mary gathered her daughters and headed out the back door, toward St. Stephen’s Church.

The women figured they would be safe in a house of worship. But when they got there, more white men on horseback aimed a machine gun at the front entrance, threatening to “blow a hole” through it if the reverend didn’t let them in. Athalia and her mother watched as the pastor was hauled off at gunpoint, and they knew that their survival was in their own hands. They ran back in the direction of their house and past it, continuing until they had reached the damp, rustling expanse of Pine Forest Cemetery, where they had buried generations of kin. It sat on the edge of town, it was densely wooded, and it was a place where few white people had ever set foot. Hundreds of Black refugees of the violence found one another there, sharing information and aid.

Athalia’s family returned home a few days after the massacre. She lived there for most of her life, raising two children and spending her working hours cooking for white people. But one of the most immediate and visible consequences of 1898 was the diminution of the city’s Black population. Many men were run out of town and told they’d be killed if they ever set foot in Wilmington again. Other Black families tried to hold on under the new regime but ultimately found Wilmington untenable and moved north, joining a local exodus that prefigured the Great Migration. They and their families scattered across the country, a diaspora of diverted potential and unresolved grief. Their exile effectively eliminated political opposition in the city, sending a lasting message to anyone who might seek to challenge the white regime. White supremacists thereafter dominated political life in Wilmington and much of North Carolina, which would not elect another Black person to Congress until 1992.

Back home in Wilmington, Cynthia Brown built community the way her forebears had built houses—tirelessly and elegantly in the course of years. She tended to graves at Pine Forest Cemetery and organized luncheons to draw attention to heart disease, which had claimed the lives of her mother and other family members. The cause dearest to her, however, was historical education: the work that her great-grandmother Athalia had urged her to continue, of giving back by telling truth. She started joining committees and giving interviews, putting information that had so long been suppressed and hoarded into the public domain. In 1996, she told the story of what had happened to her at the library in the city newspaper. Two years later, on the coup’s centenary, she published an essay gently taking “local gatekeepers of information” to task and imploring them to correct this “legacy of deceit.” She urged her fellow-citizens to “gird ourselves with an awareness of the causes, and not just the effects.” Brown believed that the truth would set us free, as the Bible promises. But someone had to set the truth free first.

In 2src1src, Brown was serving on the board of the Historic Wilmington Foundation, an old-line preservation organization. As a rare Black board member, she tried to promote a more capacious view of local history and to remind her peers of the rich patrimony of Black communities which they often overlooked. To fund its projects, the organization held an annual black-tie fund-raiser. When the venue for that year was announced, Brown gasped. The gala was to be held at Live Oaks, a coquina-encrusted mansion on Masonboro Sound, where Grandma Thalia had worked as the head cook, an accomplishment that had endured as a source of family pride. Named for the magnificent trees that presided over its grounds, trailing Spanish moss in perfect evocation of Southern cliché, the house belonged to descendants of the lumber-company owner Walter Linton Parsley, who had been deeply involved in planning the 1898 takeover.

Brown bought a ticket to the gala and laid out her fanciest dress. But, when the day arrived, she was consumed by ambivalence. Her husband had come down with a fever, and she didn’t really want to go to Live Oaks alone. She didn’t really want to go to Live Oaks at all, except maybe to reclaim Grandma Thalia’s territory, as an honored guest. She called her father and told him that she was going to sit the party out, that the thought of going gave her an uneasy feeling in her soul. But he insisted that she attend and call him back the next morning to hash over every detail. Ever the dutiful daughter, Brown enlisted her adult son P.J. to accompany her. Fortunately, his father’s tuxedo fit him perfectly.

As they drove to the party, Brown talked to P.J. about Grandma Thalia, the Parsleys, and 1898. The car ride was to her as the luncheon years before had been to her elders—a moment to impress on the next generation the consequences of this history, to bestow it upon P.J. intentionally, as a gift, albeit a heavy one, rather than just leaving it moldering in the attic, hoping that somebody, someday, would open it. They pulled up the long oak-lined drive. A valet parked the car, and they stepped out into the crisp air. P.J. took his mother’s arm and led her up a pathway and through the columned portico into the party.

Brown remembered that Sarah Parsley, the octogenarian matriarch of the family, greeted partygoers from a wheelchair, assisted by a Black nurse. Brown and P.J. said hello and thanked Parsley for her hospitality. A few minutes later, the nurse approached Brown.

“She thinks she knows you,” the nurse said of her employer.

“Well, she might,” Brown replied. “My great-grandmother was down here as a young woman.”

Brown didn’t know what to make of the fleeting encounter. Had Sarah Parsley known Thalia and recalled her features or even just her aura so distinctly that she was able to identify Thalia’s great-granddaughter, more than half a century later, at first sight? Was the comment just a freak coincidence? Or could it have emanated, as fact fuzzed into folklore, from some subconscious place between memory and happenstance? Could a place remember? Live Oaks seemed to know that Brown’s family and the Parsleys were linked by violence, work, mutual dependence, and the partial yet lasting intimacy that decades of these shared experiences produced.

Brown and P.J. slipped away from the tent that had been set up on the estate’s grounds for the gala. It was so cold outside that it was just them and their smokelike breath, under a heavy moon encircled by a halo. For Brown, the evening, though tinged with melancholy, amounted to a small triumph of transmission. “My parents always taught me that you must know your history to understand where you’re going (or possibly where you don’t want to go back to),” she later wrote. Visiting Live Oaks with her son, seeing the place where their forebear had once cooked biscuits and cheese straws and angel-food cakes for an architect of 1898, she felt “a divine assurance that the legacy of documenting, pre-serving, and telling our family’s history would not be lost to the winds of time.” She died in 2src23 and is buried with her ancestors in Pine Forest Cemetery. ♦