have to live up that legacy. you must be your own person. that is something that all of us carried with us for our entire lives. >> we are here on the river walk and historic wilmington and we continue our look into the city's nonfiction literary culture. we will hear one author story. >> standing right here in front of the eighth eight for more of which was put up on the 100th anniversary of the events here that occurred in wilmington in december of 1998 but it was a long time coming and it was sort of controversial because there were many citizens both black and white they really wanted to forget the whole thing and the black community thought that if

they brought it up so much it would bring further repercussions but in the white community they preferred the sword of no pun intended but two-watt wyche -- whitewash the past and is one radio host said the camp was something behind you. in 1898 wilmington had a very interesting status. you have to understand that this was a huge slaveholding area during the civil war because of the river about a block away. although plantations in north carolina were on the river so roanoke and a huge concentration of 330,000 slaves in north carolina in 1860 right here in the river valley. the slave uprising was the terrible nightmare you will and so they had laws against freed lacks in slaves all throughout this. back in when general sherman came in and invaded north

carolina from the south he liberated some 25,000 slaves. he got to the head of navigation which was dave sill and he put all those people on mule trains and brought them to wilmington where they were then brought to the friedmans through. a great many of them stayed here so in 1898 roaming tune was one of the largest cities in the carolina end of the 17,000 or so citizens, two-thirds of them are black so they had achieved an amazing thing in just a little more than a generation after being slaves and coming on the wantage with not even owning the clothing on their back literally. they achieved status of middle-class and they achieve political leadership and power. they have social standing and they have economic wealth. it got the reputation of to come to work if you are black. they were skilled artisans in cotton mills so it was a great

place and it was a thriving black middle-class predictive political power from the democrats in those days democrats or republicans and the reverse. in 1898 the democratic party decided they would quote unquote take back their cities from what they thought of as black domination. this was their way of putting it and they wanted to take back all the electoral offices that would be coming up in 1898 which included a lot of state offices but it didn't include city council what was called the board for the mayor. what they did was they sat shotgun at the polling booth literally people stealing ballot boxes and so forth and leading up to that they had a war of words and the war and the war of words took an interesting turn. there were all kinds of anti- black statements all over the state the most famous of

which was an ex-"confederate" colonel and there was another piece of writing in a newspaper editor named alexander manley. alexander manley published in the newspaper and he wrote the first afro-american newspaper called the daily record. it was written largely by the black community and largely ignored by the white community. in an editorial in august of 1898 he was responding to a speech given by rebecca sultan who was the wife of a congressman and i think she ended up in congress later result herself in georgia in which he said the greatest danger to white farm wives as being raped by -- he responded to this early is the newspaper did and there had been a little bit of doubt as to whether manley wrote it but in the editorial he says mrs. felton

from georgia makes a speech before the agricultural society in tybee georgia in which he advocates a lynching as an extreme measure. this woman makes a strong plea for the alleged crimes of raped were perhaps as frequent as oftentimes supported would be worthy of consideration but he goes on to say we suggest that whites guard their women more closely as giving opportunity for the human being be they white or black to -- and complain because they are taking away. he goes on to say sometimes white women are attracted to black men and the like and it's unclear whether this was meant in earnest or if this was satire or if you'd even wrote it himself but if you can imagine the reception this got in the white community. although two curious things about it. one is the thing he was her spawning two had happened as

much as a year earlier. why was that moment he chose to respond we don't know. also nobody in the white community read that paper until someone did and then they preprinted editorial on the front page of the daily messenger. pretty much every day until the election between august and november so it began to be called for manley to be removed from the city in the paper to be shut down and so forth. a couple of other events, white government unions from making the rounds of these are basically cadres of people that would come into the community and make the case that you should fire your black workers and get those jobs to whites and make people take a pledge to that effect. you are starting to see the employment picture shift a little bit. the third piece of that with a thing called the white man's declaration of independence. this was signed by more than 400 of the leading white businessmen in wilmington a little while before the election.

it begins this way. believing that the constitution of the united states contemplated the government carried on by an enlightened people there framers did not anticipate the franchise mode of an ignorant population and believing those men in the state of north carolina could join to form a union did not contemplate for their descendents objection to the inferior race. the night before election day the colonel stood on the stage gave what was later described as a sizzling speech and he said if you see -- tell them to go home. walk them home, shoot him down this track so there was nothing subtle about this and that place erupted in furious applause. that was the tone that was set for election day the following morning. you can see there was nothing subtle about this. there was nothing that was nuanced about it in the sense of

the power grab going on and furthermore they had already made arrangements in washington with the kinley administration that they would leave them to settle their own things their own way so they went into it knowing there had be no intervention. they ran the cable on election day. white supremacy candidates like it across-the-board but they still than half a mayor so november 10 they sent an ultimatum to the so-called committee that were supreme is chosen at random and the black community met and they decided pretty much to give them what they wanted. they were going to throw manley out and shut down the paper but their reply never reached what dell and white supremacists cohorts because the man that wasn't supposed to deliver it mail but instead. he was too afraid to go into that part of the white community.

november 10 at 8:00 in the morning or so a crowd of 1000 armed white men gathered in wilmington armory which is between fourth and fifth on market streets. they marched up following waddell at couple of blocks turned right onto seventh street and rampaged on down to the daily record which was at that point leasing a church hall called freelove hall. when i got there they surrounded it and bashed in the door. they shot one man who has remained unidentified in history who apparently ran out the back wounded and then they burned down the newspaper. manley was not the newspaper at that point that they not only shut down the newspaper but they actually burned the entire archive of the black community, all the back records. it's very hard to find even a single copy of the daily record. there are three or four that i know of. there's a famous picture of all these white men standing in front of his burned out daily record officeholding shotguns and winchesters.

they kept the black fire brigade from stopping the fire so it would burned to the ground. these guys started to disperse. they go home and mobs and they get to blaine street and there is are some black workingmen who came out to find out what's going on. they had been hearing this commotion and at that point gunfire erupted. we know a couple of things. one is that all the dead were black and the rampage lasted about three days. it was orchestrated and plan for many months and the outbreak on of blaine street was probably spontaneous but the white community under waddell and several leaders had been stockpiling winchester rifles and had a machine gun of the type used in the war and all of a sudden all these militia groups are coming in from elsewhere from goldsboro and kingston so would take a couple of hours for them to get here

and they showed up immediately. you had the wilmington light infantry which was a paramilitary organization with all their high powered rifles. you have the wilmington naval reserve and they have a small -- and these people shut down wilmington. they were strip searching men women and children, black men women and children in every corner. there were a number of black letter carriers who were beaten to death by white mobs and some white women came to the rescue and gave them shelter in their homes. there were a number of other white women who sheltered black servants in their homes to keep them safe but this was catastrophic or wilmington in so many ways. a lot of these people that were being chased and harassed and shot at left the city and swam the river and hid in the swamps. they went to cemeteries. for three days wilmington shut down. you can pretty much mark the end of wilmington's ascendancy in

the city of north carolina to the day of this coup and it was called the riot but it was really a coup d'état because the next thing they did was round of the alderman and a gun pointed at city hall megamall resigned and appointed white supremacist down the line. the leader of the violence becomes the mayor and becomes a multi-term mayor. we guys later on there's a huge huge -- and he is eulogized as the fine figure of southern chivalry if you can believe that. no legal action was ever taken. in fact george rowntree later judge rowntree went to the statehouse and he concocted a piece of legislation popularly called the grandfather clause. this single piece of legislation basically took voting rights away from blacks until 1965. not just north carolina but throughout the south.

this had a huge national repercussion. it had a huge repercussion right here locally where the economy was sitting and of course it took the african-american community about 1000 people we know with were driven to hanover county and included people who were put on the train. these were local leaders. they were lawyers. they were preachers. they were funeral directors and local politicians. they were the people who up to this point it and the african and american alderman the african-american firemen and sheriffs deputies and so on. ..

>> the family was gone and he came back in 1925 searching for properties that he said he own. he said he never own property here but i saw the deed. >> so, you have a situation where the intelligence and leadership of the black community is wiped out for generation. from there were looking at something more than hundred years later and people are asking the questions what can we do to change that. now behind every decision about rezoning, redistrict in school or neighborhood schools or whether not we should have that large voting for city council, all of that has a legacy directly tied to 1898 because we have a future with that history.

so i think of that is being like the tunnel come about seventh street on down to the river are these old drainage tunnels. they used to come up the houses and churches down to the river. they were originally for drainage but may be also used for other things. their secret underneath the traffic on the street of bloomington. i was thinking of that running underneath the city. until this memorial this was not acknowledged. it was something that was whispered about inversions for less accurate we don't have any people died at think they said ten on the monument because that's the number of stories. jl kirk was a black preacher took the number over 400. they say wagon loads of bodies

would jump into the river and that became the iconic image of bodies being dumped into the river. it's hard to know if this was removed because there's no investigation or nobody counting or going around with witnesses. it's all speculation at this point. my guess is more than ten peop people, but it really rocked the core of this community, black and white. i come from chicago, very diverse city. i got here and realize that everywhere i went i was either with all white people are all black people. at the church is all white, theater all black. i thought what is going on? as i begin digging i realize nobody head written about it much. the most famous one with was charles chesnutt. i was interested in the motivation of these guys.

you're talking about family men, good fathers and husbands and in one case a pastor of a church. i was trying to imagine my way into their imagination and mindset. the practical question was there 70 or 80 people figured into the narrative what i did was put representatives of each of the facets, the planners, victims and using those to tell the story. i was as scrupulous as i could be. so within the novel you read about someone being shot at a certain intersection, that happened. where i took liberties was creating composite characters that can move back-and-forth into the seeker council because these guys did not leave minutes of their meeting. i knew they went in and knew

what happened when they came out. i was very much interested in imagining my way into their morality and way of thinking and trying to pull some truth about how that character behaved while remaining true to the basis of the event. that's why wrote -- is a novel. many people had the reaction that he just made that whole thing up. that never happened. i can't tell you how many radio interface i did. and i've had conversations with hundreds of people over the years who said i grew up in this county we studied history learned about the civil war, we never heard anything about this. i've been asked to meet with all the officials were concerned that something would happen. the sheriff at that point in the

local police chief got involved the got together with a chance on campus and talked about what might happen in the black and white community when the book came out. nothing like that really happen. but what did happen was phone calls, letters to the editor speaking engagements that went away to various organizations. there is a couple of boards on certain, they met related to various places in wilmington and try to figure out if they could sue me for this but everybody in the book was deceased of there's nothing there. i learned last year because i wrote this book, just learned last year that our board of trustees would deny my tenure based on this book. there were a number of descendents on the board of trustees at that point. it turned out it was owen

keenan, one of the descendents. he apparently stood in for the integrity of the diversity in the system and said you cannot do that. i never knew this for all those years. all that is to say that this event, while seems like ancient history been well over 100 years now, in the past it isn't. it resonates most is that happened yesterday for many people in the community. we have recognizes sits in the sunlight. i'm not signaling the start as a defining thing that's all the black community is about, their only victims because of their own success in doinone of the most markable transformation of anyone in history coming from slavery into a middle-class leadership and so forth. what i would like to do and it's been a slow road back is to encourage the process by which

we give back to the position of having the robust leadership and all the communities working together for the common good. >> located in downtown richmond, the white house of the confederacy's work confederate jefferson davis and his family lived in 1861 until april's 1865. following the end of the war it became a headquarters for the u.s. army in 1870 was given back to the city of richmond. the home has since been restored and is open to the public as a museum. up next we visit the edgar allen poe museum. >> edgar allan paul is the writer that put american literature on the mat. he's the one the first internationally influential american writer.