Anne Russell vividly recalls the last days of her aunt, Amoret Wootten. Blind and in her 90s, the elderly woman loved having Russell visit her at her nursing home to give her scalp a good scratching.

And while she did, her aunt would talk about one of her favorite subjects: "the nigras," and how whites routed them in 1898.

We taught 'em a lesson, she recalls her aunt saying. We have to keep them in their place.

Russell, an author, playwright and self-described "bleeding-heart liberal," has spent a lifetime trying to make up for that kind of racist thinking among her ancestors.

She has written books about Wilmington and packed them with information about notable African-American residents. When the city commemorated the centennial of the riots in 1998, she wrote a play based on letters a woman from one of the city's leading black families wrote to her sons.

Her work has taught that people like her aunt, who was an adolescent during the 1898 riots, have left their descendants with a huge debt to repay. In her own way, she is trying.

"Every white person who benefited from racism should feel a moral duty on their part to compensate, just where you can," she said, "without it having to be an institutional thing."

Public dissent

Russell, 69, is a controversial figure in Wilmington. She is respected for her history books, but her sharp tongue sometimes gets her in dust-ups others might sidestep.

One acquaintance described her as "eccentric and explosive." When a white descendant of one of the 1898 leaders gave a speech at a church, Russell stood up in the audience and started contradicting him. She thought he was trying to excuse his grandfather's racist beliefs.

She doesn't believe she's too aggressive. Others, she suggested, are too passive about fighting injustice.

"I'm explosive with righteous indignation," she said. "I believe it's immoral not to be when you've tried everything else and nothing's made an impression."

Her ancestors rank among old-line Wilmington aristocracy. In 1898, her great-grandparents lived in a four-story house in the center of the city.

Her great-grandfather, the Rev. Edward Wootten, wasn't a leader in the white supremacy movement, but served as a block captain when those leaders told whites to organize and arm themselves.

Two nights before Wilmington exploded in violence, her great-grandmother wrote a letter in which she told her son -- Russell's grandfather -- about tensions in the town.

She wrote of how male relatives were sitting in the dining room with guns, and of how she had set out hatchets in case blacks tried to enter. Like many other whites, her great-grandmother thought blacks had usurped white authority in the city.

"I dread it," she wrote of the possible violence, "though I feel we need it and it must come before things are settled."

Russell has a copy of the letter. She said reading it today just makes her realize how thoroughly indoctrinated, and wrong, her ancestors were about racial issues.

"What happened in 1898 wasn't the result of meanness or the desire to keep a whole race of people down. It was from ignorance. And that is why I am a teacher and a writer today."

Her great-grandparents' house was torn down in the 1950s. Today, Russell lives in an upscale subdivision near the Intracoastal Waterway. It sits on a sliver of her family's ancestral land that had been sold for development.

She scraped money together to buy her home there. If she had more money or more land, she said, she'd gladly give it to a needy African-American family.

"Unfortunately, the money ran out," she said. "We all became preachers and teachers."

Her Aunt Amoret, she said, left an estate that included about $1 million worth of property. None went to Russell, who believes she was left out because of her racial views.

Before her aunt died, the older woman realized how wrong her feelings were. In her final days she offered Russell a startling admission: She might have been wrong about black people, but she'd been told blacks' brains were smaller, and she thought she was too old to change her thinking.

Russell believes the revelation came because the women who cared for her aunt in the nursing home were black.

"It taught me that, yes, people can learn," Russell said. "They can move on to a higher level of understanding.

"At the end, that was her epiphany. That was grace."