The White Men Win the Wilmington Municipal Government

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Waddell told the crowd, go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find a black man voting, tell him to leave. And if he doesn't, quote, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. The next morning on election day, armed vigilantes patrolled the streets, beating or intimidating black men who tried to vote. They would remove Republican ballots and replace them with phony Democratic ballots. In some precincts there were more, quote, Democratic votes than there were a number of voters registered in the precinct.

“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.

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