" Freemen of North Carolina, Arouse!!" shake of the bands, drop the chains, and rise up in the dignity of men. The time has arrived when we can strike one blow to secure those rights of Freemen that have been so long withheld from us."
In New Bern, there's a black woman, Mary Ann Sharkey, with a boardinghouse and plenty of space for Galloway to met, clandestinely, with other Black men in order to raise, writes Zucchino, three army units, consisting of 180,000 Black men to fight in the Union army. Galloway and the newly enlisted become "the First North Carolina Colored Volunteers also known as the African Brigade." It's Galloway, writes Zucchino, who, upon meeting with President Lincoln in 1865, thanking him the for the Emancipation Proclamation, but also handed over a petition requesting the president use his powers to give Blacks in America the right to vote.
This is Abraham Galloway! He moves to Wilmington, North Carolina, eventually clearing the way, as Zucchino points out, "for a fertile strain of black defiance in Wilmington and much of southeastern North Carolina." It's Galloway who places an ad in a Wilmington newspaper, urging Blacks to resist the undemocratic ideology of white supremacy.
Where Zucchino is silent, I'll speak. Abraham Galloway is unabashedly on the side of right. His actions speak to an acknowledgment that white supremacy is inhumane and its supporters are members of a death cult.
In 1868, when Wilmington's white population takes note of him, they recognize, Zucchino writes, that Galloway was "neither docile nor obedient." He carried a pistol and defied "racial customs." He refused to step "aside to let white men pass on the street," and he didn't "allow whites to make purchases ahead of him in shops."
Galloway, it would seem, gave himself permission to be! He gave himself the right to be human, and, in so doing, he seemed to appear to white people like a "white" person.
Consequently, Moore, undaunted by Galloway, sees in this insolent Black man a threat. He could contaminate other Blacks who, collectively, would rival whites for power. Because egalitarian values would be out of the question. Either white supremacy prevails or something else. Something foreign takes over.
Moore vows that his men would be up to the challenge to fight the foreign entity threatening Wilmington's very way of existing in the world. He demands that new recruits to the KKK swear to uphold "[v]iolence and terror."
"You solemnly swear, in the presence of Almighty God, that you will never reveal the name of the person who initiated you: and you will never reveal what is about to come to your knowledge" you will oppose all radicals and negroes in all of their political designs; and that should any radical or negro impose on, abuse or injure any member of this brotherhood, you will assist in punishing him in any manner the camp may direct."
Galloway became the most feared and hated Black in Wilmington, but, he too, was undaunted by the believers in white supremacy. He promised that Blacks will vote in Wilmington!
When the new constitution is passed, Zucchino writes, it greatly expanded the rights of Black residents in North Carolina particularly after two years of working around Black Code laws, which "restored blacks to near-slave status. Yet, even after the new state constitution of 1868 nullified North Carolina's Black Code laws, whites in Wilmington continued as if the Black Codes were still in effect.
Even the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 does little to curtailing the white violence against Black residents in Wilmington. Nonetheless, as Galloway predicted, Blacks voted in the midterm elections. Black men "turned out en masse in Wilmington," writes Zucchino while Moore's Klansmen accomplished "little more than posting threatening notices and trying to frighten blacks with mysterious bones, skeletons, and skulls." Nearly 73,000 new registered Black voters helped bring the US and Wilmington closer to a democratic society: Once the constitutional convention won voter approval, writes Zucchino, 120 delegates headed to Raleigh. Of those delegates, 107 were Republican. Thirteen were Black men.
Abraham Galloway was one of them. A state senator now.
At the convention in Raleigh, Galloway advocates for a reign of not of terror but of democratic values. Begin with universal suffrage!
Back in Wilmington, the white newspapers called for an end to Galloway! The "'yellowish-brown horse'" is a nuisance! And that convention? Let's just call it "'THE n-word CONVENTION.'" As for the new state constitution itself, it was nothing more than "'THE GORILLA CONSTITUTION.'"
Nonetheless, democracy had advocates.
But this is Wilmington, we are talking about. And the white supremacists aren't sleeping.
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