The Rise and Fall of the Red Shirts

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Josephus Daniels had said that his campaign to end what he saw as black domination would need three kinds of men. The red shirts were white vigilantes, and their job in the summer and fall of 1898 was to write out through the Cape Fear countryside around Wilmington at night with guns. They would break into black homes and beat them and whip them and tell them if they dared to register to vote. And it worked because this rage just built up over the summer andFall leading to the election in early November.

“What I recall most is the way that she grabbed my wrist and, shaking a bit, she said over and over again, ‘If it happens, run. Don’t let that happen to you. Run. If it ever happens, run.’” It was years before Cynthia Brown understood what her great-grandmother, Athalia Howe, was talking about. Athalia Howe grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina in the late 1890s. At the time, Wilmington was called “the freest town in the country” for Black people, and by 1898, Black men had become integral in Wilmington’s government. White Supremacists in the state were determined to stop them, by "ballot or bullet or both.”

David Zucchino's book is Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy.

Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow.

We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery.

Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.

Episode transcripts are posted on our website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices