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Speaker 1: Welcome to steph you missed in history Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we

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Speaker 1: are talking about something we're actually going to talk about

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Speaker 1: it for the next two episodes, and it is sometimes

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Speaker 1: called the Wilmington's Race Riot of eight. We've mentioned on

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Speaker 1: the show before that the term race riot tends to

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Speaker 1: be pretty misleading. Race riot really suggests an incident in

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Speaker 1: which people of two or more races are equal aggressors

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Speaker 1: and some kind of mass violence, but that is not

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Speaker 1: usually what happened. In the United States. The incidents that

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Speaker 1: are described as race riots usually involved violence against a

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Speaker 1: racial or ethnic minority carried out by a white mob.

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Speaker 1: The incident we're talking about today and this two parter

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Speaker 1: follows that pattern. It is an appalling example of violence

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Speaker 1: against Wilmington, North Carolina's black community, and it was carried

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Speaker 1: out by a mob of armed white men. In addition

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Speaker 1: to that, it was a coup. It was the only

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Speaker 1: known successful coup data in the in the United States history.

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Speaker 1: This white mob over through the duly elected government of

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Speaker 1: Wilmington's or replaced it with one of their own choosing.

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Speaker 1: This whole incident is directly tied to the end of

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Speaker 1: reconstruction and how that affected North Carolina electoral politics. So

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Speaker 1: we're gonna start with a little bit of scene setting

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Speaker 1: related to all of that. Then we are going to

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Speaker 1: talk about an immediate and pretty dramatic precursor to the

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Speaker 1: whole coup and riot. Next time we will talk about

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Speaker 1: the qu itself and its aftermath and as it heads up.

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Speaker 1: The last section of today's episode includes a discussion of

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Speaker 1: a rape. So for background. After the US Civil War,

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Speaker 1: the federal government, community leaders, religious organizations, and activists all

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Speaker 1: took steps to try to rebuild the nation and correct

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Speaker 1: the social, economic, and political problems that had grown out

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Speaker 1: of the institution of slavery. These efforts came to be

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Speaker 1: known as reconstruction, and they included things like amendments to

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Speaker 1: the Constitution, civil rights legislation, and the establishment of the U.

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Speaker 1: S Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also known

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Speaker 1: as the Freedman's Bureau. As part of reconstruction, the nation

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Speaker 1: had to figure out how the states that had succeeded

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Speaker 1: from the Union could be readmitted into it, and until

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Speaker 1: that could happen. The former Confederate states were placed under

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Speaker 1: martial law. The idea was that troops would occupy each

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Speaker 1: state until it established a quote loyal Republican government. The

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Speaker 1: occupying troops were meant to protect the progress of reconstruction

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Speaker 1: as well as protecting the freed people and their allies.

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Speaker 1: The federal government went through a lengthy back and force,

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Speaker 1: interrupted by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, about exactly what

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Speaker 1: the requirements for readmission into the Union would be and

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Speaker 1: how to carry those out. In the end, the states

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Speaker 1: in question had to ratify the fourteenth Amendment to the U.

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Speaker 1: S Constitution, as well as hold a new constitutional convention.

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Speaker 1: At the state level. The new state constitutions had to

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Speaker 1: include voting rights for black men. As states were readmitted

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Speaker 1: into the Union, they were generally at least temporarily under

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Speaker 1: the control of the Republican Party, and for a time

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Speaker 1: the Republican Party was also highly focused on civil rights

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Speaker 1: and equality for both the freed people and poor white citizens.

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Speaker 1: Black voters overwhelmingly voted for Republicans, and Republicans proposed sweeping

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Speaker 1: changes that they believed would reshape the nation into one

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Speaker 1: in which all men really were created equal, said men

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Speaker 1: on purpose here, because although there were activists for women's suffrage,

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Speaker 1: the focus was really on men. But this had started

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Speaker 1: to shift. By the eighteen seventies. Southern Democrats vehemently objected

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Speaker 1: to what the Republicans were doing. Many Democratic Party leaders

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Speaker 1: were former Confederates and slave owners, and they pushed back

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Speaker 1: against both new economic policies and the idea that black

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Speaker 1: people should be equal citizens. The ku Klux Klan was

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Speaker 1: established in eighteen sixty six and worked both within and

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Speaker 1: outside the Democratic Party to undermine Reconstruction Arab policies and

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Speaker 1: terrorized the black community. As Reconstruction went on, Democrats started

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Speaker 1: alleging that the Republican governments were corrupt, and while there

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Speaker 1: certainly were incidents of corruption, that almost goes without saying

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Speaker 1: some of this criticism really boiled down to the Republican

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Speaker 1: governments spending money on things that the Democrats didn't agree with,

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Speaker 1: along with a sort of chicken and egg assumption, which

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Speaker 1: was also racist, that any government that allowed the full

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Speaker 1: participation of black people was automatically corrupt. Many in the

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Speaker 1: Republican Party also started to pull back for making really

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Speaker 1: sweeping civil rights changes and instead started proposing more moderate

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Speaker 1: incremental steps. By the mid eighteen seventies, radical Republican power

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Speaker 1: was waning and state governments in the South were returning

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Speaker 1: to the Democratic Party's control. By eighteen seventy six, the

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Speaker 1: only Southern states still governed by the Republican Party were

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Speaker 1: South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. This brings us to the

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Speaker 1: presidential election of eighteen seventy six. This was a highly

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Speaker 1: disputed and deeply divisive election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes

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Speaker 1: and Democrats Samuel J. Tilden. On election date, Tilden had

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Speaker 1: a lead of two hundred and sixty thousand in the

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Speaker 1: popular vote, but he was one vote shy of an

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Speaker 1: electoral college victory. So, for our listeners living outside the

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Speaker 1: US who may not be as familiar with this, every

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Speaker 1: state has a number of electors that's based on its population,

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Speaker 1: and technically people are voting for those electors, who then

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Speaker 1: vote for president. Meanwhile, the electoral votes for South Carolina, Florida,

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Speaker 1: and Louisiana were all in dispute due to allegations of

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Speaker 1: fraud and voter intimidation and vote counts that did not

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Speaker 1: match up. One Oregon elector or was also in dispute.

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Speaker 1: Hayes had clearly won the state of Oregon, but the

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Speaker 1: Democratic governor had tried to replace one Republican elector with

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Speaker 1: a Democrat on the ground, so the Republican was postmaster

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Speaker 1: and therefore not eligible to serve. After weeks of bitter

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Speaker 1: infighting and increasing fears that the country was headed for

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Speaker 1: a second Civil war, Congress created an Electoral Commission to

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Speaker 1: try to sort this whole thing out. After still more

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Speaker 1: secret negotiations than political maneuvering, on March second, the Commission

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Speaker 1: voted seven to eight to award the disputed electoral votes

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Speaker 1: to Hayes. The commission's final vote was strictly along party lines. Unsurprisingly,

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Speaker 1: a lot of people, especially Democrats, didn't see Hayes as

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Speaker 1: a legitimate president after all of this. But at the

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Speaker 1: same time, all that political maneuvering, which came to be

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Speaker 1: known as the Compromise of eighteen seventy seven, had included

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Speaker 1: several appeasements for Democrats in the South. One of these

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Speaker 1: was that if Democrats accepted Hayes's president, the federal government

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Speaker 1: would stop using federal troops to bolster reconstruction efforts in

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Speaker 1: the South. So this is really the thinnest of overviews.

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Speaker 1: Reconstruction was a really turbulent time. There was a lot

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Speaker 1: going on, and a lot of it was happening simultaneously.

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Speaker 1: We're really just trying to give a general sense of

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Speaker 1: what the nation had gone through by the late eighteen seventies.

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Speaker 1: It was even more chaotic and violent than we can

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Speaker 1: really do justice to in one episode, even if that

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Speaker 1: one episode was only about reconstruction and nothing else. Up

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Speaker 1: Slate has been doing an academy on reconstruction, and they

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Speaker 1: literally have an episode zero that is essentially a basic

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Speaker 1: timeline of stuff that happened that was important during reconstruction,

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Speaker 1: which gives you a sense of those important things, but

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Speaker 1: not so much of like how that the flavor of

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Speaker 1: the time. As Reconstruction ended, former Confederate leaders once again

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Speaker 1: rose to power in many Southern states in a return

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Speaker 1: to white supremacy that white premissts framed as quote redemption.

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Speaker 1: Discriminatory legislation known as Jim Crow laws followed in some places.

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Speaker 1: This shift, which had really been going on before the

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Speaker 1: end of Reconstruction, seemed both immediate and uninterrupted. But what

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Speaker 1: happened in North Carolina shows how it wasn't really a

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Speaker 1: continual linear progression from reconstruction to Jim Crow, which is

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Speaker 1: how it's often imagined or framed. So historians marked a

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Speaker 1: number of different spots as the end of reconstruction, and

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Speaker 1: the Compromise of eight seventy seven is one of them,

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Speaker 1: and we will talk about how that wound up playing

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Speaker 1: out in North Carolina after a quick sponsor break. Once

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Speaker 1: reconstruction ended the United States, the Democratic Party regained control

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Speaker 1: of North Carolina, and at that time the party was

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Speaker 1: primarily run by wealthy landowners and businessmen. It took a

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Speaker 1: really lace affair approach to the economic needs of US

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Speaker 1: affluent people, so their party really started to suffer during

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Speaker 1: an economic downturn in the eighteen eighties. North Carolina was

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Speaker 1: a very rural state. I mean, there's still big stretches

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Speaker 1: of North Carolina that are really rural. But this is

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Speaker 1: even more true. Small farmers felt like the Democrats weren't

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Speaker 1: doing enough to help them in this rocky economy, and

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Speaker 1: instead railroads, banks, and big businesses were getting lots of

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Speaker 1: perks while small farmers got nothing. At first, the Democrats

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Speaker 1: tried to adjust their platform to address these concerns, but

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Speaker 1: nothing really got done, so people started abandoning the Democrats

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Speaker 1: for a third party, the Populists. At first, the Populists

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Speaker 1: tried to work with Democrats to advance their own economic agenda.

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Speaker 1: When this failed, they turned to another ally, the Republican Party.

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Speaker 1: The Populists, also known as the People's Party, formed a

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Speaker 1: coalition with Republicans and what came to be known as

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Speaker 1: fusion politics. On their own, the Populists and the Republicans

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Speaker 1: didn't have enough power to unseat the Democrats. Not only

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Speaker 1: did the Democrats have solid control of the state legislature,

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Speaker 1: they're also using a number of tactics to stay in

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Speaker 1: power throughout the state. These tactics included gerrymandering and laws

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Speaker 1: that allowed the state government and Raleigh to appoint people

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Speaker 1: at the local level regardless of what the local vot

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Speaker 1: voters actually wanted, so it didn't matter, for example, if

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Speaker 1: a local population was overwhelmingly Republican, legislators and Raleigh would

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Speaker 1: still appoint Democrats to those positions. But together Republicans and

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Speaker 1: Populists did have enough support to challenge the Democrats. Although

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Speaker 1: race had long been used as a political wedge in

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Speaker 1: the South, white populists set aside their racial differences with

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Speaker 1: the Republican Party to try to advance the issues that

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Speaker 1: both parties agreed on. These issues included education, jobs, and

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Speaker 1: voting rights. Republicans and populists still maintained their own platforms

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Speaker 1: on issues that they disagreed on, such as the gold standard.

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Speaker 1: So I could point out that, um, the race has

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Speaker 1: been used as a political wedge everywhere. It was just

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Speaker 1: most explicitly used as a wedge in the South, which

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Speaker 1: is one of the things we're going to talk about later.

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Speaker 1: So the idea of political parties working together to achieve

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Speaker 1: a common goal was not unique to North Carolina. Wasn't

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Speaker 1: unique to these particular parties, but the way the Fusion

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Speaker 1: movement played out in North Carolina was unique had a

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Speaker 1: dramatic effect on the political landscape of the state. In

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Speaker 1: eight nine four, roughly seventeen years after the end of Reconstruction,

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Speaker 1: the People's Party and the Republican Party in North Carolina

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Speaker 1: agreed on a slate of candidates that included members of

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Speaker 1: both parties. They endorsed these common candidates rather than running

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Speaker 1: against one another. This strategy was extremely successful. The Fusion

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Speaker 1: alliance of populists and Republicans won races all over the state.

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Speaker 1: They took control of the state legislature and several statewide offices,

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Speaker 1: and several Fusion politicians were elected to Congress. This new

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Speaker 1: Fusion government started making changes as soon as they were

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Speaker 1: sworn in. They repealed the County Government Act of eighteen

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Speaker 1: seventy seven, which was one of the laws that had

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Speaker 1: allowed state lawmakers to appoint people to local offices rather

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Speaker 1: than leaving those offices in control of the local voters.

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Speaker 1: The Fusion Coalition increased funding for schools, prisons, and charitable

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Speaker 1: institutions by raising taxes, and they required that political parties

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Speaker 1: used standard colors and symbols so that people who were

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Speaker 1: not literate could still exercise the right to vote in

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Speaker 1: future elections. Some of the Fusion government's efforts also targeted

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Speaker 1: the economic issues that had led white voters to leave

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Speaker 1: the Democratic Party in the first place. They cut back

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Speaker 1: on the privileges offered to railroads, which had been seen

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Speaker 1: as favoring big business over working people. They set a

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Speaker 1: cap on interest rates, which angered banks and their investors.

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Speaker 1: Thanks in part to this increased access to voting, the

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Speaker 1: Fusion Alliance had an even greater success two years later,

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Speaker 1: in a teen Fusion candidates won every statewide election, and

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Speaker 1: they completely supplanted the Democrats. After this election, the State

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Speaker 1: House included thirty nine populists, fifty four Republicans, and twenty

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Speaker 1: four Democrats. The state Senate included twenty five populists for

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Speaker 1: eighteen Republicans and seven Democrats. So this gave Democrats, who

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Speaker 1: previously had had total control of the entire state government,

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Speaker 1: about twenty percent of the State House and less than

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Speaker 1: fifteen percent of the state Senate. Republican Daniel L. Russell

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Speaker 1: became North Carolina as governor following this election. North Carolina's

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Speaker 1: black population also had more representation in the government. More

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Speaker 1: than one thousand black citizens held elected and appointed offices

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Speaker 1: across the state. This still wasn't even close to proportional

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Speaker 1: to how many black citizens lived in the state, but

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Speaker 1: it was a lot more than it had been the

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Speaker 1: Fusion coalition. And these two elections also had a huge

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Speaker 1: impact on the city of Wilmington's Specifically, Wilmington is on

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Speaker 1: the coast of North Carolina along the Cape Beer River

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Speaker 1: and separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the by a

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Speaker 1: chain of Barrier islands. It was also an important port

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Speaker 1: during the Civil War, and after the Union took Wilmington

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Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty five, it had become home to an

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Speaker 1: increasing number of black refugees. By eighteen seventy, the city

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Speaker 1: was majority black. That meant that after the end of reconstruction,

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Speaker 1: the state government had to pull a lot of tricks

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Speaker 1: to keep white Democrats in power in Wilmington's in defiance

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Speaker 1: of the city's majority black Republican voters. In addition to

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Speaker 1: the gerrymandering and the County Government Act that we talked

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Speaker 1: about before, there was also a lot of voter intimidation

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Speaker 1: and a habit of just not holding elections once a

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Speaker 1: Democrat was in office. In addition to the other reforms

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Speaker 1: that we already discussed, the Fusion government revised the Wilmington's

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Speaker 1: city charter to require municipal elections every two years so

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Speaker 1: that people could actually vote candidates out of office if

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Speaker 1: they wanted. A new city charter also allowed the governor

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Speaker 1: to appoint five people to the Wilmington's Board of Alderman,

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Speaker 1: with Wilmington's voters electing one alderman per ward to fill

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Speaker 1: the rest of the positions. In this case, the Fusion

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Speaker 1: government was doing something similar to what Democrats had been

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Speaker 1: doing before. They were trying to limit black voters power

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Speaker 1: in the Wilmington's government. The Fusion Coalition's justification for this

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Speaker 1: was a fear that if Wilmington's elected a majority Blackboard

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Speaker 1: of Alderman, the Democrats would then use that as fuel

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Speaker 1: for their campaigns. And while I mean this this might

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Speaker 1: have been a justified fear, was definitely justified based on

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Speaker 1: what happened next. Uh, that rationale was still discriminatory and

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Speaker 1: it did nothing to prevent violence. Like that their their

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Speaker 1: rationale for doing this did not prevent the violence that

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Speaker 1: they said they were trying to prevent. Governor Russell's five

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Speaker 1: appointments to the Wilmington's Board of Alderman were all Republicans,

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Speaker 1: for white men and one black man. Then, on March

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Speaker 1: twenty if the eight nine seven, the City of Wilmington's

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Speaker 1: held its first municipal election in four years. The result

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Speaker 1: was a majority Republican Board of Aldermen that included three

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Speaker 1: black men. This new Board of Alderman then elected Silas P. Wright,

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Speaker 1: a white Republican, as mayor. The incumbent Democrats didn't take

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Speaker 1: this well at all. They refused to vacate their seats

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Speaker 1: on the Board of Aldermen. The three Democrats who were

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Speaker 1: newly elected to the Board of Aldermen also teamed up

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Speaker 1: with the Democrats who had been defeated, and together they

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Speaker 1: claimed that the new election rules were unconstitutional and that

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Speaker 1: they would have been elected under the old rules, meaning

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Speaker 1: that they were therefore they were the real board of Aldermen.

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Speaker 1: So for a time Wilmington's had three competing boards of Aldermen,

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Speaker 1: each claiming to be the legitimate one. This sounds a

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Speaker 1: little bit like, uh, you know, European royalty dispute over

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Speaker 1: who actually is running any given country at any time. Uh.

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Speaker 1: This dispute went all the way to the state Supreme Court.

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Speaker 1: Months later, the court ruled in favor of the Fusion

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Speaker 1: Board of Aldermen that had been appointed and elected under

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Speaker 1: the revised Wilmington's city charter. The Democratic Party was outraged

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Speaker 1: at the success of the Fusion coalition, both in North

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Speaker 1: Carolina in general and in Wilmington's specifically. Not only had

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Speaker 1: Democrats essentially lost all political power in North Carolina, as

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Speaker 1: we talked about before, a lot of people in the

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Speaker 1: party were white supremacists. They objected to the very idea

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Speaker 1: of black people holding office at all. Infuriated by their

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Speaker 1: losses in North Carolina and Wilmington's uh, Democrats embarked on

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Speaker 1: a campaign to take back political power in the state,

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Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about how they did that.

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Speaker 1: After we first paused for a little sponsor break. After

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Speaker 1: the widespread success of the Republican and populist fusion cooperation

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Speaker 1: in North Carolina's statewide election in eighteen nine, Democrats in

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Speaker 1: North Carolina started preparing for a bitter election in eighteen

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Speaker 1: Democratic Party leader Daniel Schnect said quote, it will be

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Speaker 1: the meanest, vileist, dirtiest campaign since eighteen seventy six. That

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Speaker 1: was in reference to the presidential election that we talked

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Speaker 1: about in part one of this episode. As part of

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Speaker 1: this campaign, Democrats started accusing the Fusion government of corruption

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Speaker 1: and mismanagement. But as had been the case during Reconstruction,

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Speaker 1: many of these charges of corruption boiled down to the

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Speaker 1: fact that the Fusionist government was spending tax money on

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Speaker 1: things the Democratic Party didn't want it to be spent on,

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Speaker 1: like the school and prison funding that we mentioned before

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Speaker 1: the break. As was the case with some of the

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Speaker 1: criticism of Republican governments during reconstruction. Democrats also made the

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Speaker 1: racist assertion that black people were inherently untrustworthy, so a

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Speaker 1: government that had the participation and support of black people

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Speaker 1: must be inherently corrupt. But his claims of corruption and

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Speaker 1: overspending were really a small part of the Democrat strategy

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Speaker 1: to undermine the Fusionist government and to take back political power.

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Speaker 1: A much bigger piece of the strategy was an explicit

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Speaker 1: statewide white supremacy campaign. Democrats actively stoked racism and racial resentment,

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Speaker 1: hyping up terrors of the so called quote negro rule

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Speaker 1: and framing black citizens and leaders as an active threat

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Speaker 1: to white virtue and the white way of life. They

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Speaker 1: spread horror stories of brutality at the hands of black

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Speaker 1: police officers and painted black civic leaders as threatening white womanhood,

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Speaker 1: and they condemned white men who allied with black Republicans

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Speaker 1: as race traders and unscrupulous devils. Again and again, white

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Speaker 1: democrats brought up the idea of home protection against the

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Speaker 1: widespread quote threat of black people and the need to

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Speaker 1: return to the safety and security that had supposedly existed

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Speaker 1: under white democratic rule. Although a lot of our folk

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Speaker 1: us and these two episodes as on black men. Black

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Speaker 1: women were targets of this as well. They were portrayed

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Speaker 1: in the white media and in propaganda as shrieking, disrespectful

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Speaker 1: herodans who were lewed and promiscuous. For example, there was

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Speaker 1: a group of black women who started a campaign to

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Speaker 1: get the same courteous treatment that white women received on

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Speaker 1: public transportation, like the street car driver offering them a

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Speaker 1: hand as they got on and off the car. Democrats

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Speaker 1: propaganda portrayed this effort as a belligerent tantrum and quote

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Speaker 1: trying to rise above their station. North Carolina Democrats got

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Speaker 1: some fuel for their white supremacy campaign from outside the state,

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Speaker 1: thanks in part to a speech given by Rebecca Latimer

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Speaker 1: Felton of Georgia. Felton had played a big part in

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Speaker 1: the political career of her husband, William Harold Felton. She

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Speaker 1: was such an influence on his work that an editorial

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Speaker 1: about them ran under the headline quote which Felton is

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Speaker 1: the congressman and which the wife. She also had a

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Speaker 1: political life of her own as a suffragist, prohibitionist, and reformer,

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Speaker 1: and she would eventually become the first female U. S Senator.

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Speaker 1: She was appointed following the death of Senator Thomas E. Watson,

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Speaker 1: if you've ever walked through that tunnel in Hartsfield Jackson

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Speaker 1: International Airport. With this section on Atlanta history, there is

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Speaker 1: a picture of Rebecca Latimer Felton. In August of she

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Speaker 1: gave a speech called Woman on the Farm before the

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Speaker 1: Georgia Agricultural Society, which was later reprinted in the Wilmington's

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Speaker 1: Morning Star. This was a speech she had given in

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Speaker 1: various forms before, outlining the issues that were facing farm wives.

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Speaker 1: She argued that the biggest threat to a white farmer's

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Speaker 1: wife was the risk of being raped by a black

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Speaker 1: man while her husband was away in the fields. She

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Speaker 1: criticized white men for failing to protect their women, and

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Speaker 1: she explicitly advocated lynching black men in order to prevent rape.

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Speaker 1: In this speech, she said, quote, if it needs lynching

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Speaker 1: to protect woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts,

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Speaker 1: then I a lynch a thousand times a week if

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Speaker 1: necessary for some context on this statement. Lynching was one

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Speaker 1: of the primary ways that white supremacists tried to incite

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Speaker 1: terror and submission among the black community following the end

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Speaker 1: of slavery. Victims of lynching were frequently accused of having raped, groped,

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Speaker 1: or otherwise assaulted a white woman. These kinds of allegations

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Speaker 1: could also lead to mass violence, which is what happened

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Speaker 1: in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in and in Rosewood, Florida in nine

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Speaker 1: Those are two massacres that we have talked about on

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Speaker 1: previous episodes. Exact numbers are really hard to PenPoint, but

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Speaker 1: today it is estimated that only two to ten percent

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Speaker 1: of rape allegations in the United States are false. But

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Speaker 1: during the period that we are talking about here, the

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Speaker 1: rape allegations that were used to justify lynchings and massacres

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Speaker 1: were overwhelmingly false. The idea of a threat to white women,

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Speaker 1: particularly a white woman's virtue, was basically being used as

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Speaker 1: an excuse to torture and murder black men. The murders

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Speaker 1: themselves also tended to be horrifying, gruesome, and carried out

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Speaker 1: in public, with the victims bodies desecrated after their deaths.

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Speaker 1: On top of that, the idea that black men were

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Speaker 1: rapists who were inactive and ongoing threat to white women

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Speaker 1: was widespread. It was actively used by white supremacists as

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Speaker 1: part of their efforts to retake control of the government.

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Speaker 1: So a week after Felton's address, Wilmington's black newspaper, The

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Speaker 1: Wilmington's Daily Record, which may actually have been the only

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Speaker 1: daily black round newspaper in the United States at the time,

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Speaker 1: published a response. That response was most likely written by

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Speaker 1: its editor and co owner Alex Manley. This editorial framed

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Speaker 1: these rape allegations as starting with consensual relationships between black

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Speaker 1: men and white women, and it compared these relationships to

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Speaker 1: those between white men and black women. The editorial went

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Speaker 1: on to say, meetings of this kind go on for

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Speaker 1: some time until the woman's in actuation or the man's

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Speaker 1: boldness bring attention to them, and the man is lynched

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Speaker 1: for rape. Every negro lynched is called a big, burly

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Speaker 1: black brute, when in fact, many of those who have

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Speaker 1: thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers.

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Speaker 1: And we're not only not black and burly, but we're

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Speaker 1: sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to

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Speaker 1: fall in love with them. As is very well known

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Speaker 1: to all. This peace recommended that the white community quote

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Speaker 1: teach your men purity, and it concluded, you set yourselves

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Speaker 1: down as a lot of carping hypocrites in fact, you

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Speaker 1: cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you

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Speaker 1: seek to destroy the morality of ours. Don't ever think

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Speaker 1: that your women will remain pure while you are debauching ours.

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Speaker 1: You sow the seed, the harvest will come in due time.

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Speaker 1: There is a lot to unpack with this editorial. In

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Speaker 1: white society, relationships between white men and black women were

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Speaker 1: sort of an open secret. Alex Manly himself was descended

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Speaker 1: from former North Carolina Governor Charles Manly and a woman

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Speaker 1: who was enslaved in the governor's household. But it's not

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Speaker 1: accurate to suggest that relationships between white men and black

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Speaker 1: women were all consensual, especially those that had taken place

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Speaker 1: during slavery. And we're between between a free white man

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Speaker 1: and an enslaved black woman. Even after the end of slavery,

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Speaker 1: there were still substantial innate power differences to consider, especially

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Speaker 1: between white men and black women's. Regardless of all that,

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Speaker 1: this editorial spread well beyond the Daily Records readership, it's

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Speaker 1: suggestion that a white woman would have a consensual relationship

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Speaker 1: with a black man sparked outrage among the white community.

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Speaker 1: The newspaper was evicted from its downtown Wilmington's offices and

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Speaker 1: had to relocate to the black owned Love and Charity Hall.

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Speaker 1: Democratic newspapers across the state, including their Raleigh News and

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Speaker 1: Observer and the Wilmington's Messenger, reported on the Daily Records

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Speaker 1: editor real under headlines that focused on the pieces purported

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Speaker 1: slander and defamation of white women. The coverage also suggested

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Speaker 1: that Manly himself must have been involved with some poor

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Speaker 1: white man's wife and was writing from his own experience.

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Speaker 1: This Daily Record editorial then became a huge part of

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Speaker 1: the Democratic party line on quote home protection. According to propaganda,

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Speaker 1: here in print was evidence of just how depraved and

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Speaker 1: dangerous black men were and how great a threat to

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Speaker 1: white womanhood. As they focused their campaign efforts on the

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Speaker 1: urgent need to return North Carolina to a state of

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Speaker 1: white supremacy, Democrats started using the Daily Record editorial as

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Speaker 1: a talking point in their political pamphlets and speeches. They

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00:26:45,760 --> 00:26:50,080
Speaker 1: made explicit efforts to encourage racist violence. In the words

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00:26:50,080 --> 00:26:52,920
Speaker 1: of Alfred Moore Waddell, who would be a major part

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Speaker 1: of the coup we're talking about next time, quote, we

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Speaker 1: will not live under these intolerable conditions. We will never

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00:26:59,520 --> 00:27:02,520
Speaker 1: surrender to a ragged raffle of negroes, even if we

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Speaker 1: have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses,

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Speaker 1: and with that threat, we are going to pause this

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Speaker 1: story and leave the rest of it for next time.

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Speaker 1: Do you have some listener mail that is not full

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00:27:18,320 --> 00:27:22,280
Speaker 1: of so many yucky things to say? Um, it is

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00:27:22,359 --> 00:27:29,320
Speaker 1: full of correction for my embarrassing error. Uh. This is

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00:27:29,359 --> 00:27:34,080
Speaker 1: from Joe. It's about our Unearthed in seventeen part one.

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00:27:35,040 --> 00:27:38,080
Speaker 1: Joe says, Hi, I'm a loyal listener and love the podcast.

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00:27:38,280 --> 00:27:41,720
Speaker 1: You made a mistake in the recent Unearthed part one

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00:27:41,800 --> 00:27:45,040
Speaker 1: about the sphinx head found buried on the old movie

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00:27:45,040 --> 00:27:51,280
Speaker 1: set in California. You got the wrong film, the wrong decade,

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00:27:51,440 --> 00:27:53,760
Speaker 1: and you were about three hundred miles off. You got

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00:27:53,760 --> 00:27:56,600
Speaker 1: the right director though. It is Cecil B. De Mill's

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00:27:56,640 --> 00:28:00,400
Speaker 1: original silent version of the Ten Commandments from nineteen twenty three,

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00:28:01,000 --> 00:28:04,760
Speaker 1: not the nineteen fifty six Strolton Heston epic, and it's

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00:28:04,800 --> 00:28:07,840
Speaker 1: buried on the beach in the coastal town of Guadalupe

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Speaker 1: in central California, which is nowhere near the desert. Thanks

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Speaker 1: show from California. Thank you, Joe. Not only is this

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00:28:17,960 --> 00:28:20,960
Speaker 1: my mistake, I mean I could not really speak for

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Speaker 1: why the articles that I was reading described it as

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00:28:23,160 --> 00:28:26,000
Speaker 1: having been buried in the desert. Maybe they said sand

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00:28:26,320 --> 00:28:33,359
Speaker 1: and I auto filled desert. Uh. This is the second

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Speaker 1: time in recent memory when something was right in my notes,

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00:28:37,320 --> 00:28:41,640
Speaker 1: and then when I was, uh, you know, reading through

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00:28:41,800 --> 00:28:44,360
Speaker 1: my notes to make sure everything was correct, I went,

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Speaker 1: is that right? And then when I looked it up,

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Speaker 1: I confused myself and made the thing that had correctly

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00:28:50,760 --> 00:28:59,600
Speaker 1: said nineteen three instead say nineteen Uh sorry about that.

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Speaker 1: Uh uh. We all make mistakes, and that one was

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Speaker 1: just particularly embarrassing, especially since I had so many layers. Well,

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00:29:10,440 --> 00:29:15,280
Speaker 1: to be fair, um, you know, those episodes were ones

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00:29:15,360 --> 00:29:17,920
Speaker 1: that we were working on and that you were writing

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00:29:18,200 --> 00:29:20,680
Speaker 1: right as we were trying to put a bunch of

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00:29:20,720 --> 00:29:23,720
Speaker 1: work into the can so that we would have a

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00:29:23,720 --> 00:29:26,040
Speaker 1: backlog because we were not going to be recording for

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00:29:26,080 --> 00:29:28,160
Speaker 1: several weeks in a row over the holidays and then

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00:29:28,160 --> 00:29:30,920
Speaker 1: some travel that produce Gol and I had together, So

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00:29:31,600 --> 00:29:33,680
Speaker 1: like that's part of it. There's just a volume issue

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00:29:34,160 --> 00:29:36,840
Speaker 1: going on. That is, it's very easy when you have

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00:29:36,920 --> 00:29:40,680
Speaker 1: researched seventy kijillion different things, and if you look at

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00:29:40,720 --> 00:29:42,680
Speaker 1: our show notes for those episodes, there are more than

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Speaker 1: a hundred sources Like that's still a high success rate

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00:29:46,880 --> 00:29:48,920
Speaker 1: if you go by percentages in my book, so I

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00:29:48,960 --> 00:29:52,640
Speaker 1: wouldn't get fret too much over it. I still apologize

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00:29:52,720 --> 00:29:57,400
Speaker 1: for the error, especially since I introduced it myself. If

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00:29:57,400 --> 00:29:58,920
Speaker 1: you would like to write to us about this or

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00:29:58,960 --> 00:30:01,440
Speaker 1: any other podcast where he Street podcast at how Stuffworks

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00:30:01,480 --> 00:30:04,880
Speaker 1: dot com. We're also on social media all over, as

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00:30:04,960 --> 00:30:10,640
Speaker 1: missed in History. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram,

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00:30:10,680 --> 00:30:13,800
Speaker 1: all of that. Uh, speaking of Unearthed, I need to

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00:30:13,800 --> 00:30:17,920
Speaker 1: start the new Unearthed and eighteen board on Pinterest because

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00:30:17,960 --> 00:30:19,880
Speaker 1: I haven't done that yet, So look forward to that

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00:30:19,920 --> 00:30:22,960
Speaker 1: on our Pinterest soon, probably already done by the time

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Speaker 1: this episode comes out. You can also come to our

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00:30:25,600 --> 00:30:28,080
Speaker 1: website which is missed in history dot com, where you

495
00:30:28,120 --> 00:30:32,480
Speaker 1: will find the comprehensive archive of every episode we have

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00:30:32,520 --> 00:30:34,600
Speaker 1: ever done, and you will find the show notes the

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00:30:34,640 --> 00:30:37,680
Speaker 1: episodes that Holly and I have done together. Um, you

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00:30:37,720 --> 00:30:41,040
Speaker 1: will have the show notes for this episode, which includes

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00:30:41,120 --> 00:30:44,160
Speaker 1: lots of primary sources on this whole incident. You can

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00:30:44,160 --> 00:30:46,000
Speaker 1: do that in a whole lot more at our website

501
00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:48,920
Speaker 1: which is missed in history dot com, and you can

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00:30:49,000 --> 00:30:59,640
Speaker 1: subscribe to our show wherever you can podcasts. For more

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00:30:59,640 --> 00:31:02,560
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't housetop works

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Speaker 1: dot com, m