Final report on Wilmington 1898 released

Before 1898, the major southern port city of Wilmington, North Carolina boasted a thriving, highly successful Black community. African Americans were the majority of the citizens at the time, and they held prominent positions in local business, government, and civic life. The postmaster and the Port of Wilmington director were both Black men, and Black people played a major role in local Republican Party politics. This would all change on November 10, 1898.

A heavily armed group of about 500 white men launched a full-scale attack on the city government and the Black community, killing a still-unverified number of people and driving Republican leaders out of town. This massacre was merely the first part of a planned conspiracy to reassert white male political domination throughout North Carolina and the South, by attacking what was at that time the Tarheel State’s most populated city. For nearly a century afterward, the Black Nation in the Port City was politically devastated, economically depressed and fearful of repeated attacks on their safety and security. Rumors swirled for decades that the Cape Fear River was choked with the bones of Black corpses.

The long-awaited final report from the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission has been released today. Within the recommedations of the report, there is an unequivocal call for reparations to the city’s Black community. Even more stunning, the commission has declared that the events of November 10, 1898 were an “overthrow or coup d’état” that “took place within the context of an ongoing statewide political campaign based on white supremacy” (my emphasis).

For six years, the thirteen-member commission researched the social, economic, political, and historical impact that the massacre has enacted on the city and its residents. Their field of analysis extends from the date of the massacre (I personally prefer this term to “race riot”) to just before the start of World War I. Additional findings of the commission conclude that:

• The racial violence of November 10, 1898 precipitated an armed overthrow of the legitimately elected municipal government.

• The organizers of the overthrow took part in a documented conspiracy, and achieved their goals through violence and intimidation.

• Prominent media and political leaders, including Democratic Party officials and then-Raleigh News and Observer editor-publisher Josephus Daniels (pictured above), were involved at every level of the conspiracy.

• Government at the local, county, state, and federal levels failed to adequately respond to the violence or reverse the political overthrow.

• Significant migration of African Americans away from Wilmington led to a decline in economic opportunity for remaining Black citizens.

• The violence of November 10 took the lives of an unknown number of victims. Although local officials performed fourteen inquests, additional evidence points to as many as sixty homicide victims.

In their recommendations, the commission calls for strategic economic redevelopment targeted at the Black community, including business incentives for Black-owned enterprises and strategies to increase home ownership in majority-people of color neighborhoods. Also, the commission supports a program of “judicial redress” to compensate the descendants of WRR victims who can prove their claims of loss and injury to their loved ones in court.

I must say that I am pleasantly surprised; after-all, this is a state-sponsored commission comprised of prominent bourgeois movers and shakers. Even if the calls for reparations and economic empowerment are never fulfilled, at least we have a state commission declaring point-blank that North Carolina's white power structure murdered and violated Black people in their own city. Now the Black Nation of Wilmington knows for certain: They didn't imagine it.