The 1898 riot and coup d'etat in Wilmington that killed an unknown number of black residents actually was a planned insurrection that white supremacists spent months organizing.

The violence was part of a statewide effort -- with a pivotal role played by The News & Observer and other newspapers -- to put white supremacist Democrats in office and stem the political advances of black citizens, according to a draft report released Thursday by the state-appointed 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission.

The incident is the only known violent overthrow of a government in U.S. history. Afterward, white supremacists in state office passed the laws that would disfranchise a race of people for generations -- until the civil rights movement and Voting Rights Act of the 1960s.

"Essentially, it crippled a segment of our population that hasn't recovered in 107 years," said Harper Peterson, former mayor of Wilmington and a member of the commission. "It's a major event that went unnoticed."

Now, with history fully told, members of the riot commission will turn toward action, perhaps asserting that there must be some atonement.

"We want to engage people to come up with creative ways to respond to 106 years of degradation," Peterson said.

To make amends, some commission members have suggested financing historical exhibitions about the riot and its consequences, portraying the Wilmington riot in school history texts, and developing economic interests in affected areas.

In addition, "some apology by the state for its inaction" is also called for, said Irving Joyner, vice chairman of the commission and a law professor at N.C. Central University.

The commission has been ordered to make recommendations to the legislature by May 2006. Whatever calls for action the commission advocates will probably be hotly debated.

"I don't want to let the cat out of the bag in terms of proposals," Peterson said. "But they're going to be very specific."

The General Assembly established the commission in 2000 in response to a push from two Wilmington legislators. The report is now open for public comment, and Joyner said he wants to hear suggestions about how the community should respond.

In its 450-page report, the Wilmington Race Riot Commission describes the riot and accompanying coup d'etat as a watershed moment in North Carolina history.

"Because Wilmington rioters were able to murder blacks in daylight and overthrow Republican government without penalty or federal intervention, everyone in the state, regardless of race, knew that the white supremacy campaign was victorious on all fronts," the report says.

In 1898, African-American men in North Carolina had been able to vote for some three decades as part of Reconstruction after the Civil War, said Jeffrey Crow, deputy secretary of the N.C. Office of Archives and History, which researched the report.

Blacks voted in blocs for the Republican party -- the party of Abraham Lincoln -- and the GOP had formed a coalition state government in Raleigh with the Populist party.

In Wilmington, the state's largest city at the time, blacks outnumbered whites and were a force in the Republican city leadership.

Democratic leaders, including Josephus Daniels, editor of The News & Observer, were outraged. They developed a campaign to install white supremacist leaders in the General Assembly and U.S. Congress during the 1898 elections.

"It's really kind of scary how organized it was," said LeRae Umfleet, a historian with the state Office of Archives and History who authored the report. "Every finger of the Democratic party just reached into every aspect of economic, social and political life at the time."

Racist cartoons

In The N&O, for example, Daniels published stories about community crime and graft among elected officials in Wilmington. He hired a cartoonist to pen racist images of "Negro Rule," showing white men as victims and white women desperate for help.

One cartoon, for example, showed a white woman surrounded by black men at the post office. It was drawn in response to the hiring of African-Americans at the postal service and argued that white women now were afraid to call for their mail.

Other papers, including The Charlotte Observer, the Wilmington Star and the Wilmington News, also spread racially divisive propaganda.

For months in 1898, white men calling themselves the "Red Shirts" had been riding through the state's southeastern counties, wielding rifles and terrorizing residents.

In Wilmington, Democrats fueled an insurrection. They stuffed ballot boxes and threatened black men, but there was no widespread violence on Election Day.

Then on Nov. 10, violence broke out when a mob of nearly a thousand white men marched to a black-owned newspaper and set it afire. The editor, Alex Manly, had written an editorial months before suggesting that white women may enjoy the company of black men.

Across the street, children at a black school saw the flames and went running scared. Mothers, hearing the commotion, scrambled for their children. Residents ran to the nearby warehouse district to warn the African-American men working there.

African-Americans fled the city as the newspaper building burned, with families hiding in swamps and cemeteries for days with no more than the clothing on their backs, Umfleet said.

The white mob overthrew the democratically elected city council, whose members weren't supposed to be up for election for months. All black city workers were fired. Leading black figures were forced out of town.

Many of the histories in the past century, including an autobiography by Daniels, offered rationalizations for the riot, saying white leaders felt pushed into violence by Manly's editorial, Umfleet said. The new report challenges those accounts.

Within a year of the insurrection, the new, Democratic-controlled General Assembly had passed the first Jim Crow law cutting off voting rights to blacks.

"It took the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act to get those rights restored," Jeffrey Crow said. And today, he added, every time the Voting Rights Act comes up for renewal in Congress, it's argued.

"More than a hundred years later, we're still trying to resolve the issues," Crow said. "It's extremely important that people understand history."

Related links:

* 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Report

* 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission

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