A fitting response to Wilmington 1898

DURHAM -- The state's Wilmington Race Riot Commission argues that North Carolina should repay African-Americans for the violent, unlawful seizure of power that occurred in the 1898 white supremacy campaigns. Recommendations include minority business incentives and help for minority homebuyers. Wilmington's Mayor Spence Broadhurst, however, rejects reparations, noting that "nobody that's here today was responsible for whatever happened in 1898."

Before we start handing out checks -- or denying our responsibilities -- we need to ponder the real costs of our history and our reconciliation. The lessons of history must transcend lists of grievances and instead transform public policies.

First, "whatever happened in 1898" is less murky than Mayor Broadhurst's phrasing suggests. The collapse of Reconstruction left North Carolina with two distinct political parties: the Republicans and the Conservatives, who later dubbed themselves Democrats. The Conservatives ruled from 1876 to 1894. But many hard-pressed farmers left the Conservatives in the 1890s because of "pro-corporation" policies that cottoned to banks and railroads. These rebels founded the People's (or "Populist") Party in 1892. They soon joined forces with Republicans in a "fusion" coalition that championed local self-government, free public education, modest regulation of monopoly capitalism and "one man, one vote."

Native whites led all three parties. But nearly all black North Carolinians supported the Republicans and therefore joined the fusion coalition.

This alliance between Republicans and Populists found common ground across the color line, especially around economic issues. Here in the land of the long leaf pine, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners joined hands, decades before Dr. King unfurled his dream. Imperfect as it was, this interracial fusion coalition embodied a much brighter future for our state -- and could not be beaten at the polls.

The Conservatives, led by future governor Charles B. Aycock and News & Observer publisher Josephus Daniels, turned to fraud and bigotry to seize power in 1898 -- not merely to stop African-Americans, but to stop democracy.

"White supremacy" was their rallying cry, racial conflict their weapon of choice, but elite rule was their goal. And that was why some in Wilmington turned to violence, slaughtering some of their opponents and terrorizing the rest. "We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of negroes, even if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses," Col. Alfred Moore Waddell, the future mayor of Wilmington, declared. Hugh MacRae, the MIT-trained industrialist who led the Wilmington mob, boasted that they had killed "about ninety" blacks. We really cannot know. Thousands fled the state. The "Wilmington Race Riot" was merely the capstone of the white supremacy revolution, and white "race traitors" were victims, too.

Victorious Conservatives first took the vote from blacks, leaving the thousands of whites who had voted alongside blacks nowhere to go politically. And then they nailed into place a one-party system that represented commercial interests above all else, a new social order that The News & Observer hailed as "permanent good government by the party of the white man."

Generations of one-party control and whites-only domination of Southern politics caused democracy to wither, as voter turnout declined steadily throughout the 20h century. Public life suffered. The strong public schools that the fusionists imagined never quite blossomed. Corporation control of politics increased at the expense of ordinary citizens. Schoolchildren learned to view the white crusade's leaders as heroes; their names still adorn public buildings all over the state.