Reparations sought in 1898 riots

Statewide series of marches to end in Raleigh as NAACP conference begins

Marchers took to the street this week, calling for the state to make reparations for the 1898 Wilmington riots.

About a dozen people marched to the courthouse in Durham on Sunday. It was one of 13 such marches held across the state leading up to the 65th annual conference of the state NAACP, which starts Thursday.

The marchers are asking state legislators to make payments to the descendants of those harmed in an insurrection that led to the deaths of at least 14 black people and perhaps many more.

The riots were brought to the forefront when the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission report was released in 2006 after six years of study by a state-appointed panel.

The panel found that the riots that led to a government overthrow in Wilmington were started by white supremacist leaders in a conspiracy to strip political power from black people and their allies.

State legislators have apologized for the conspiracy, but the state NAACP and other groups in a statewide coalition are calling for the state to make reparations to the families of those who died or lost their livelihoods as a result of the riots.

"You want to apologize, but you don't want to share the wealth with these people," said Fred Foster, head of the Durham branch of the state NAACP. "The only way to bring closure is to set things right."

The group also seeks reparations for forced sterilizations under a state program aimed at preventing the mentally ill and those with low IQs from having children. North Carolina's State Eugenics Board presided over a eugenic sterilization program from 1929 until 1974 that sterilized at least 7,600 people, almost all of them women and about 60 percent of them black.

The series of marches started Thursday in two places and will finish in Raleigh on Thursday. In Wilmington, the trek began with a service to commemorate those killed in the riots. In Winston-Salem, marches remembered victims of the sterilization program.

Duke University student Raquel McLennon, among the marchers in Durham on Sunday, said she learned of the riots in a high school African-American studies class.

She recently joined the Duke chapter of the NAACP and sees the public demonstrations as a way to carry on the work of civil rights leaders a generation ago.

"We, the younger generation, are benefiting from their legacy," said McLennon, 21.