ELON - The ruling body of the N.C. Democratic Party took a stand on searing issues of the past and present Saturday, adopting a resolution apologizing for the party's role in the 1898 Wilmington race riot and another calling for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

The first nonbinding measure repudiated the role of party leaders in the Nov. 10, 1898, riot that resulted in a virtual coup d'etat of a legally elected city government.

Dozens of black citizens were killed in the fray, which terrorized and banished black businessmen, community leaders, journalists and their white allies.

The second measure, about the Iraq war, proved more controversial, drawing impassioned responses from several committee members. Their words reflected a split in Democratic ranks across the country between young, grassroots, anti-war liberals of the party's so-called Howard Dean wing and older Democrats who don't want to dishonor the sacrifices of U.S. troops.

"I do not see anything in this resolution that says we do not support the troops," said committee member Don Davis, mayor of Snow Hill in Greene County, who noted he was a former Air Force captain who handled mortuary duties for 300 dead members of the military while he was stationed at Andrews Air Force base near Washington.

But the Rev. Floyd Johnson Jr. of Fayetteville, a Vietnam War-era Army veteran who did not see combat, recalled losing comrades in that war and remembered the hostile reception that homecoming veterans encountered.

"When we came back from Vietnam, we were spit upon and called baby-killers," said Johnson, who is second vice chairman of the Cumberland County Democratic Party. "Do we want our servicemen and women to feel like they've been forgotten about -- betrayed -- because the North Carolina Democratic Party passed this resolution?"

The Iraq war resolution notes that the fall election gave control of both the U.S. House and Senate to Democrats and calls for support of any measure that starts the withdrawal of troops by the summer of this year. It also calls on Congress to bar money for any permanent American bases in Iraq.

After the debate, the war resolution passed in a voice vote countered by a significant minority of 'nos' from opponents.

The Wilmington riot resolution, by contrast, drew no debate and was passed unanimously.

The racially motivated violence of 1898 was the most notorious act of a white supremacy campaign that resulted in laws that denied the vote to blacks and poor whites across the state. It led to Jim Crow legislation that instituted segregation, and segregation remained in place until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

State party Chairman Jerry Meek, who was unanimously re-elected by the committee Saturday, said the apology was an attempt to address the role of Democratic leaders and leading newspapers of the state -- including The News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer -- in the riot and the party's subsequent statewide reign as proponents of white supremacy. That role was detailed in a 464-page report released in May by the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission.

"Coming on the heels of the commission report, it's unmistakable our predecessors in the party played a significant role in disenfranchising African-Americans, and I think there's a need to reflect upon that role and show that we're a different party than we were in 1898," said Meek, who initiated the resolution.

The resolution drew a lukewarm response from a leading member of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission and one of the state's top civil rights leaders. Though both men praised the party's apology as a good first step, they said the party should pressure legislators to adopt the commission's 15 recommendations for redressing a historic wrong.

Those recommendations include establishing a Restructuring & Development Authority endowed by governments, media and businesses -- particularly those that benefited from the riot and subsequent takeover of state government by white supremacists. The commission also recommended creating a system for hearing claims for reparations by heirs of victims.

It's a start

"Certainly, an apology is the minimum thing that is required," said Irving Joyner, a commission vice chairman and a law professor at N.C. Central University in Durham. "I would hope they would go further and look at all the recommendations in our report and seek to get all or some of them enacted by the legislature.

"That would show they are really serious about the apology and righting the wrongs of that overthrow."

An apology from the party isn't enough, said the Rev. William J. Barber, head of the North Carolina branch of the NAACP.

"What we must have is not only an apology, but public policy that redresses these wrongs," Barber said. "You can't just apologize for these wrongs. We need policy."

But Meek said action on the commission's recommendations is the legislature's responsibility, particularly on the complex and divisive issue of reparations.

"The sense was we should leave that in the hands of our elected officials and let the General Assembly take the matter up," Meek said. "What were able to do as a party is establish programs that promote minority participation in the [political] process."