NC conservative group is filming a ‘love story’ about the Wilmington Massacre. Seriously?
The John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank, announced it is shooting a short film about the “little-known” Wilmington Massacre, a white supremacist coup d’état that occurred in North Carolina in 1898.
The film, titled “In the Pines,” will depict the 1898 insurrection through a “captivating, fast-paced love story.”
Because apparently, we need to romanticize white supremacy and murder.
According to a casting call posted online, the film is a story of “two ill-fated lovers caught on opposing sides of the events of 1898.” The male lead is described as the adopted white son of a small-time Black newspaperman, and the female lead is the daughter of a wealthy Democrat media baron.
Representatives from the John Locke Foundation directed questions about the film to Greg de Deugd, the foundation’s creative director, who told me he was not authorized to speak on the record about it.
The Locke Foundation did publish an article this week about the “little-known” insurrection, which they say “few seemed to know or care about” until the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.
It makes some valid points: the Wilmington Massacre is important, and for a long time, many people acted like it never happened. But it also omits important context about why it matters — and why it was “forgotten.”
What happened in Wilmington in 1898 was more than just a tragedy, and it was more than just an insurrection. It was a massacre fueled by white supremacy — a direct, coordinated response to the rise of Black political power in a progressive Southern city with a thriving Black population. It was predicated by a months-long racist propaganda campaign that warned white residents about the threat of “Negro domination.”
Dozens of Black people were killed in the massacre. Thousands more were forced to flee the city. The government was overthrown. And it ushered in half a century of Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement that reduced generations of Black North Carolinians to second-class citizens.
The “wealthy Democrat media baron” in the film sounds quite similar to former News & Observer publisher Josephus Daniels, who used his paper to propagandize in support of the white supremacy campaign. And the small-time Black newspaperman could be inspired by Alex Manly, who operated The Daily Record, the state’s only African American newspaper. Manly was a frequent target of the white supremacist campaign, and The Daily Record was burned down during the massacre.
This history certainly wasn’t something that was taught in schools, but it wasn’t exactly “forgotten.” Powerful people made a conscious choice not to remember it. The truth was whitewashed to paint Black residents as the instigators of a “race riot” and white residents as the heroes who fought back against it.
No one was ever prosecuted for the crimes. Reparations were never issued. People like Charles Aycock, the North Carolina governor who rose to power after he helped lead the coup, are still widely memorialized as heroes.
John Locke claims it is making the film because “understanding history is critically important, regardless of how difficult or uncomfortable it might be for one group or another.” Which is ironic, considering the foundation’s fervent pearl-clutching when it comes to teaching about racism and history in schools (they call it “wokeism” and “indoctrination”).
The way to reckon with our history is not by fictionalizing it, or by pretending like it’s completely behind us. We still see attempts to suppress the political power of Black citizens through election laws and gerrymandering. We still see state-sanctioned violence against Black people. We still see white backlash to progress — backlash that sometimes turns violent. To tell the story of Wilmington without acknowledging the many parallels between our past and present won’t stop us from repeating it.
What happened in 1898 wasn’t a love story, and it’s absurd and callous to rewrite it as such. There’s nothing romantic about institutionalized racism. And most of all, we shouldn’t care about it simply because it was an “important historical event.” We should care about it because it was a violently racist insurrection that made North Carolina a white supremacist state — the remnants of which are still present today.
This story was originally published July 14, 2022 at 2:03 PM with the headline "NC conservative group is filming a ‘love story’ about the Wilmington Massacre. Seriously?."
