The Wilmington insurrectionists consisted of poor whites wanting "whites-only" employment practices, white businessmen seeking to eliminate black competitors and conservative elites seeking political control. White clergymen and white newspaper editors across the state of North Carolina gave support to the insurrectionists before, during and after their uprising.
None of those Wilmington insurrectionists faced any federal or state charges for their bloody uprising - including that ex-Confederate insurrection leader who became the city's mayor. America's then President and North Carolina's then Governor refused to reverse the illegal take-over of Wilmington's municipal government. The Riot Commission report faulted "government at all levels" for failing to reverse that political overthrow.
That 1898 racist uprising in Wilmington, N.C. is a part of the 'Southern Heritage' that President Trump extols in his support for preserving those "beautiful" monuments erected to honor officials of the slave holding Confederacy.
The failure of 19th Century federal officials to initiate legal action regarding the murder of black Wilmington residents by those insurrectionists has haunting similarities to postures of the present Trump Administration.
Trump's Justice Department, for example, has backed off even minimal oversight of police brutality including fatal shootings by police in questionable circumstances. Further, Trump's Justice Department has adopted the legal posture that the predominant victims of racial discrimination today are whites not blacks. The "White Declaration of Independence" issued by the Wilmington insurrectionists contended that whites were under the subjugation of blacks.
President Trump rails incessantly about fake news. The Wilmington insurrectionists saw a form of fake news in an editorial published in a black owned Wilmington newspaper that attacked the contention that it was proper to lynch black men.
During the months before that insurrection, white newspapers in North Carolina constantly reprinted a speech by a white woman in Georgia the year before that declared lynching an acceptable act to protect white women from black rapists. Newspaper publication of the factually flawed speech was part of a nasty political campaign by white conservatives to solidify white supremacist control in North Carolina through removal of white liberals and blacks from elected office.
Black Wilmington newspaper owner Alexander Manly became an object of racist ire because he stated facts than many wanted forgotten: White woman voluntarily had sex with black men yet frequently cried rape when caught in these consensual interracial liaisons.
"Every Negro lynched is called a Big, Burly Black Brute," Manly stated in an August 18, 1898 editorial published in his Daily Record newspaper. Manly noted that those alleged black brutes were sufficiently attractive for white woman to have "intercourse with them."
Manly really poked white supremacy in the eye when he reminded that, "it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman than for the white man to be intimate with a colored woman." Manly called many whites hypocrites for the fact that "you cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you seek to destroy the morality of ours."
That "White Declaration of Independence" termed the editorial of Manly "vile and slanderous."
To protect Wilmington from "such license in the future" the Declaration demanded that Manly's paper "cease to be published and its editor banished from this community." Manly was one of the prominent blacks forced by the insurrectionists to flee Wilmington.
The first assault of the Wilmington insurrectionists on November 10, 1898 was to sack and burn Manly's newspaper.
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