On a chilly autumn morning 108 years ago this month, heavily armed columns of white men marched military-fashion into the black neighborhoods of Wilmington, then the state's largest city and the center of African-American political and economic success. "Under thorough discipline and under command of officers," one witness wrote, "capitalists and laborers marched together. The lawyer and his client were side by side. Men of large business interests kept step with the clerks."

In the name of white supremacy, this well-ordered mob burned the offices of the local black newspaper, murdered perhaps dozens of black residents -- the precise number isn't known -- and banished many successful black citizens and their so-called "white nigger" allies. A new social order was born in the blood and the flames, rooted in what The News and Observer's publisher, Josephus Daniels, heralded as "permanent good government by the party of the White Man."

The Wilmington race riot of 1898 was a crucial turning point in the history of North Carolina. It was also an event of national historical significance. Occurring just two years after the Supreme Court had sanctioned "separate but equal" segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, the riot signaled the embrace of an even more virulent racism, not merely in Wilmington, but across the United States.

This deepening racial chasm launched an extraordinarily violent and repressive era in this country. It was a time when some state legislatures -- in the North and South -- were controlled by members of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a period when groups of respectable white Southerners gathered to burn black men in public, brought their children to watch, and mailed their loved ones souvenir postcards of the smoldering corpses. It was a time when African-Americans lost the right to vote to a white South determined to control their lives and labor by any means necessary. North Carolina stripped the vote from black men in 1900. By 1910, every state in the South had taken the vote from its black citizens, using North Carolina as one of their models.

Wilmington 1898 marked a flowering of the Age of Jim Crow. White authorities constructed the symbols and signs of everyday life to show people their place. "White" and "Colored" signs were erected at railroad stations, over drinking fountains and at the doors of theaters and restaurants. Hubert Eaton, a black leader in Wilmington, recalled his shock and dismay in the 1950s to see two Bibles in every courtroom, clearly marked by race.

The Wilmington massacre inspired bloody racist crusades across the United States. When whites in Georgia, led by would-be governor Hoke Smith, sought to take the ballot from black citizens in 1906, they consulted men who came to power by leading North Carolina's white supremacy campaign. They included Gov. Robert Glenn, U.S. Sens. Lee S. Overman and Furnifold Simmons and former Gov. Charles B. Aycock. Overman urged white Georgians to be prepared to use bloody violence and promised that disfranchisement would bring the "satisfaction which only comes of permanent peace after deadly warfare."

Smith campaigned across Georgia, braying about the protection of "white womanhood" and demanding that the state take the ballot from blacks. If whites could not disfranchise blacks legally in Georgia, Smith vowed, "we can handle them as they did in Wilmington," where the woods were left "black with their hanging carcasses." Right after Smith's 1906 election, white mobs raged in the streets of Atlanta and killed dozens of blacks. Soon, exactly as in North Carolina, the state of Georgia took the vote from its African-American citizens.

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