Narrative, Political Unconscious and Racial Violence in Wilmington, North Carolina

Leslie Hossfeld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415650366
• eBook ISBN: 9781135931643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This work examines the counter-narratives of social actors that may be used as resources to promote and create social change, particularly racial change. A policy implication emanating from this research is to institute an educational component for the North Carolina public school curriculum that addresses the racial violence in Wilmington in 1898. A model syllabus is provided.

Chapter One
Introduction

I grew up in a town in which stories had tremendous power. I was always puzzled by this, as it often seemed that the stories told were more important than the lives being led. People were identified by their recipes as well as by what their mothers and fathers had or had not accomplished. It was a southern town, indeed a Deep South delta town, yet this quality did not make it unique. The new lore about the U.S. South stakes claims on the geography of storytelling—that the defeated Confederacy has a richer storytelling tradition full of myths and lore unlike other parts of the United States—and that by virtue of its defeat and oppression has greater rights to storytelling. Yet stories, collected stories, potentially have tremendous power in any community, anywhere on the globe. Events and their actors’ actions are often retold in communities over many generations, frequently setting the stage for the way future events and actors should behave. Certainly the South offers numerous examples of such collective memory-the mythological power of stories about the Civil War are immediate examples that come to mind. Similar forces around folklore concerning events and actors exist in communities all over the world. In Spain, I heard stories in small towns about their Civil War and the actors and events in their communities. In Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa, stories I heard about the liberation movement and actors and events take on a collective quality, passed down by community members over time. These stories often mark the path for future action or expectations about the “way things ought to be.”

Since stories can have this kind of power to frame expectations and paths of future action it is important to know how this comes about. What are the mechanisms that frame some stories about events and people in communities yet ignore or even suppress other stories about events and people in the same community? Who has the power to frame and manipulate stories, and to ensure their reproduction over time? To examine these questions sociologically, I researched the stories told in one community in North Carolina with a violent racial past.

In the autumn of 1998, I attended a lecture at an African-American church in Wilmington, North Carolina. The lecture was given by a white academic on an ex-slave, Abraham Galloway, whose successful career after Emancipation led him to a position as a senator in the state legislature in Raleigh from 1868-1870. Galloway’s home town was Wilmington, North Carolina. During the question and answer session after the lecture, an African-American member of the audience stood and asked, almost in an accusatorial tone, why he had never heard of Abraham Galloway. Why were there no monuments or plaques dedicated to Galloway? Wilmington is an historical city where one can find plaques and monuments devoted to important local figures strewn throughout its historic district. Why, he wondered, were no African Americans honored in his city so rich with history and one so interested in preserving its historical figures? He felt it had to do with the racial violence that took place in Wilmington in 1898 and provided an example from his own past as evidence. He told the group assembled in the church that when he was a child, his grandmother would caution him and his siblings in a firm whisper to: “Stay away from whites. They’ll throw you in the river if you don’t watch out.” As if on cue, sunlight beamed in through the enormous windows of the chapel, illuminating the speaker. His voice changed as he remembered his grandmother’s words and he spoke in an alarming manner. As an onlooker, it was a powerful moment. As a researcher already interested in the events surrounding 1898, it was a moment that focused my research: How do historical events impact social relations long past the event itself?

The reference he alluded to from his grandmother’s warnings went back to racial violence in 1898, where local lore has it that African Americans were thrown into the Cape Fear River en masse. It was clearly a potent forewarning for this child, now an adult, as in his telling he evoked the fear his grandmother either felt or wished to instill. For me, as a researcher, it was an illuminating moment, literally and figuratively, as it directed my thoughts to the function of stories. I knew from research on the 1898 violence that the story of blacks drowning in the Cape Fear River was commonly used by whites to intimidate blacks. Why does an event in the past resonate in current discourse? What function does it serve when it is used? How does this event impact current relations among various groups? Intuitively one might think that these stories would have powerful consequences for social relations in a community. I wanted to investigate this empirically.

I directed my research focus to the function of stories that circulate in communities-stories that linger over years and often appear to serve interests of the dominant groups in society. In terms of race relations, U.S. history is inundated with accounts of dramatic confrontations between dominants and subordinates. Examples include places like Elaine, Arkansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; 2 NARRATIVE, POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS AND RACIAL VIOLENCE and Wilmington, North Carolina, all cities with violent racial pasts. In each, researchers have noted longstanding lore, myths, or narratives about violent racial events that often serve as localized explanations about the way things used to be, or still are today (Nash 1972; Ellsworth 1982; Thomas 1992; Cody 2000; Stockley 2001).

What is remarkable about Wilmington is the pervasiveness of references to the violence in public and private meetings, newspaper articles, and local television news reports. Here are a few examples:

• On 12 November 1999, Mr. E.B. Davis Sr., told local television reporters that the recounting of votes for a City Council election between white councilman Quinn and newly elected black councilwoman Spaulding-Hughes…“goes back to 1898 when the powers that be tried every way they could to keep their control.”
• In a February 1999 newspaper article about the lack of black representation on the Azalea Festival executive committee, Reverend Johnny Calhoun said…“these problems we’re dealing with are a lot older than you and I.”
• Sociologist Christopher Mele’s (in Rose 1998) research on resident mobilization in a Wilmington housing project found that activists attribute the apathy and lack of mobilization among local blacks to the 1898 violence, quoting one resident as saying “you have to fight the past all over again.”
• In a 2000 public meeting in Wilmington, a community member said, “Theproblems we have in Wilmington are not new. We are fighting battles that my great, great-grandmother and grandfather fought.”

While these examples offer recent references, both direct and oblique, to the 1898 violence, narratives generated in earlier decades also point to a persistent story about the violence in 1898:

• On July 11, 1943, North Carolina Governor Melville Broughton reminded his audience at the banks of the Cape Fear River in Wilmington, North Carolina, of the racial violence that had occurred nearly a half century earlier: “Forty-five years ago…blood flowed freely in the streets of this city…” (Tyson 1998)
• During a 1951 New Hanover County School Board Meeting, Dr. Hubert Eaton petitioned the school board for desegregated schools. Dr. Eaton explains in his autobiography: “Near the close of the meeting, the school board attorney, Mr. Hogue, alluded to the race riots of 1898. However innocuous his intention, his statement was inescapably interpreted as an effort to intimidate-to warn that it could happen again.” (Eaton 1984)
• An interview by Leon Prather of a Wilmington resident in the early 1980s explains: “My grandparents told me the Cape Fear was saturated at the mouth with dead Negroes. And you know what? The Cape Fear is a very large river.” (Prather 1984)

Wilmington, North Carolina offers a rich resource for examining the role narratives play in maintaining power in communities and for studying the link between narrative and ideology. An analysis of narratives is useful for an inquiry into ideology. As Thompson (1984) put it,

…ideology, in so far as it seeks to sustain relations of domination by representing them as ‘legitimate’ tends to assume a narrative form. Stories are told which justify the exercise of power by those who possess it, situating these individuals within a tissue of tales that recapitulate the past and anticipate the future (1984:11).

Stories about the violence in 1898 have circulated in Wilmington for 100 years. Today, it is common to hear reference to 1898 as an explanation for racial tension in the city, or why blacks have not fared well over the years.

RACIAL VIOLENCE IN WILMINGTON, 1898

The November 1898 violence was the local culmination of a white supremacy campaign sweeping the South at the time. Democrats in the state of North Carolina had convened early in the year to ensure victory, by whatever means, in the 1898 elections. They had lost the 1894 elections to the Fusion Party, a coalition of Republican and Populist parties that combined tickets to ensure victory. The Fusion coalition represented a cross-race coalition: blacks formed a large percentage of the Republican Party. And according to Edmonds (1951: 37), “while some Populists opposed the Negro as an officeholder, there was some degree of unity in 1894 for the sake of holding a ticket together.” Wilmington represented a particularly sore point for the Democrats. The success of Fusion and Republican parties in Wilmington hampered Democrats. Wilmington had a black majority (56 percent) that supported the Republican Party. In addition, Wilmington was considered a place where African Americans were doing well and could succeed, holding political office, as magistrates, police officers, and firemen. African Americans were also successful as business entrepreneurs (Prather 1984).

The Democrats worked feverishly through the summer of 1898 with propaganda and race-baiting campaigns supported by state and local newspapers, In August 1898, the Wilmington newspaper, an organ of the Democratic Party, resurrected a speech by Rebecca Fulton of Georgia from the previous year that advocated lynching a thousand Negroes a day to deter black men from making sexual advances toward white women. As part of the racebaiting white supremacy campaign, the newspaper neglected to provide the dateline of the year before, so the editor of the black-owned Wilmington Daily Record, Alex Manly, thought he was responding to a recent lecture by Mrs. Fulton. Manly’s editorial denounced Mrs. Fulton’s speech, arguing that white men should keep better watch over their property and that black men “were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them as is very well known to all.” Democrats seized the moment, ran Manly’s editorial throughout the state, and anti-black sentiment grew. The Democrats used Manly’s editorial to spearhead the white supremacy campaign, and to attract poor and working class whites. The editorial proved to be the catalyst for the November 10th violence.

Blacks stayed away from the Wilmington voting booths on November 8th and Democrats easily won local elections. On November 9th, a “White Declaration of Independence” was signed by 457 white male citizens on the steps of County Courthouse, who declared that Wilmington would no longer be run by Negroes and that white labor would henceforth be the desired labor in the county. On November 10th 1898, a mob of approximately 1000 white men marched through the streets of Wilmington to the offices of the Daily Record and burned it down. The leaders of the violence then proceeded with a political coup d’etat: the newly elected Democrats were placed in office immediately after the elections. Under normal circumstances officials assumed their duties in late spring. In this case, individuals serving out their terms were thrown out of office. Prominent black and white Republican and Fusion leaders were escorted out of town and put on trains. Many blacks were shot. Scores of black citizens spent days and nights hiding in the local cemetery on the edge of town. For days following the violence local newspapers reported that trains were full of black citizens leaving Wilmington; additional trains were provided to accommodate the exodus (Edmonds 1951; Prather 1984; McDuffie 1979). Over the next two years, Jim Crow laws effectively disenfranchising blacks were created at both the local and state level (Edmonds 1951). In one decisive event, African- Americans in Wilmington were effectively marginalized from both political and economic arenas.

Immediately following the violence, an account of the events that justified white leaders’ violent actions on November 10 and the political coup d’etat emerged. This white version of the November 10 violence was distributed by local and state newspapers. The white account of events in 1898 would become a common thread over the years to come. It persisted in public dialogue and private narrative in tandem with the social and economic inequalities that continued to mark relations between black and white communities in Wilmington. The intractability and persistence of the white account suggests that it may have been sustained purposively and used as a tool by the dominant group in Wilmington as a reminder to the subordinate group of their social position, playing a key role in shaping and maintaining racial inequality in Wilmington.

If reality comes to us in the form of narratives, narrative is a crucial medium that connects subjects to social relations (Jameson 1981). Narratives about critical events can reveal how social actors understand social relations and how social groups sustain these interpretations over time. The general sociological question of this research is: How do events in the past impact present day social relations long past the event itself? Specifically, this research examines the role and function of narrative in bolstering and sustaining hegemonic dominance in communities. Ultimately it poses the question: How does fundamental social change occur over time? Whereas some social science research focuses on the role of institutions in fostering social change (Sampson, Squires, Zhou 2001), this research points to and illuminates the role of narrative and ideology in averting constitutive social change.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

In Chapter Two, I examine the theoretical literature relating to ideology, narrative, hegemony and political unconscious and collective memory. I follow this with a chapter on research questions and methods. In Chapter Four, I provide what I call a ‘baseline’ narrative. In essence, I walk through public reference to the 1898 event over a hundred-year period. I examine archival data and describe the context in which public reference to 1898 surfaces over the years, paying close attention to the speaker, the audience receiving the public reference, and the material conditions of black and white Wilmingtonians at the time of the reference. I suggest that there is both a dominant narrative about the 1898 event as well as subordinated narratives about the event, and these mutate over time. Tracing this ‘mutation’ is an important part of understanding the function of narrative in communities. The research question guiding this chapter is: How and in what ways has the dominant narrative been used to maintain a hegemonic ideology and suppress other narratives?

In Chapter Five, I describe the development of the new narrative that emerged in 1998 during the centennial commemoration of the event. The analysis in this chapter identifies the mechanisms by which narratives combine elements of the dominant ideology with subordinate narratives to produce new narratives which, in this case and I suspect usually, sustain rather than challenge ruling hegemony.

Chapter 6 turns to contemporary narratives about 1898.1 interviewed black and white Wilmingtonians from various age, sex and class categories and examined their ‘narratives’ about 1898 using the concept of political generations (Zeitlin 1970). I wanted to know when and how they learned about 1898, how they view it today, and whether they support the new narrative that emerged in 1998 about reconciliation. I compare and contrast these findings based on the expectations about generational cohort effects and collective memory.

In Chapter Seven I examine the findings presented in the previous chapters and draw conclusions using the concept of political unconscious. I close with a discussion concerning the ways narratives deny or repress history, and the implications for sociological research on race.

Chapter Two
Theoretical Context

In Coffee and Power (1997) Jeffrey Paige uses narratives to elucidate the underlying structure of social relations in El Salvador, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and the ideological mystification that obscures these relations. He explores the transformation of ideas as well as the political-economic transformation that led these three Central American countries to parliamentary democracy and neo-liberalism despite their varied political pasts. Paige’s analysis of narratives collected from members of coffee dynasties in the three countries employs three related concepts to understand the ideological transformation among elite. He utilizes Marx’s concept of ideology, the concept of narrative developed in literary criticism and now used by social scientists, and the concept of the political unconscious developed by Frederic Jameson. I, too, seek to understand the link between narrative and ideology and like Paige use the concepts of ideology, narrative and political unconscious. For the purposes of this study I add the concepts of political generations, hegemony and counter-narratives.

Ideology. Paige employs Marx’s notion of ideological mystification as described in The German Ideology,

Ideology is that set of beliefs that is a product of a particular social process of inversion in the realm of reality, and second in the realm of ideas. The production of ideology is an attempt to resolve in the realm of ideas contradictions that are unresolvable in the realm of social reality (Paige 1997:340).

As Marx points out in The Eighteenth Brumaire, ideology is not simply false consciousness-an illusive depiction of reality. Marx’s concept of ideological mystification involves the inversion or ‘camera obscura’ of reality. So, to use Paige’s example, the inversion of the workings of capitalism mystifies the real social relations between capitalists and workers. The commodity form and realm of ‘exchange’ presents the ‘freedom’ of the market while concealing the subordination of workers to capital. Zizek (1989:21) argues that this is where Marx detects the ‘symptom’: a crack or a

“certain ‘pathological’ imbalance which belies the universalism of the bourgeois ‘rights and duties’…The symptom…is a particular element which subverts its own universal foundation, a species subverting its own genus…In this sense we can say that the elementary Marxian procedure of ‘criticism of ideology’ is already ‘symptomatic’: it consists of detecting a breakdown…”

For both early and late Marx, ideology involves inversion and concealment of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism.

Narrative. Narrative analysis has been the domain of literary criticism and only recently has the ‘narrative turn’ occurred in the social sciences (Polkinghorne 1988; Mishler 1991; Mishler 1995; Maines 1993; Riesman 1993; Denzin 2000; Andrews, Sclater, Squires and Treacher 2000). Consequently, narrative analysis in the social sciences has lacked a clear research methodology, although recent steps to address the broad range of research labeled ‘narrative research’ have been taken (see Polkinghorne 1988; Reisman 1993; Lieblich, Ruval-Mashiach and Zilber 1998; Andrews, Sclater, Squires and Treacher 2000). The tendency has been to blend methods of literary criticism, subjectivism in the social sciences and cultural studies (Andrews, Sclater, Squires and Treacher 2000:5). Mishler (1995) however, does not believe that narrative studies is a

…separate and distinctive discipline…rather…a problem-centered area of inquiry. From that perspective, it will always include a multiplicity and diversity of approaches. However, I believe we can learn from one another and thereby strengthen our separate directions of work.

The many directions of narrative research are seen in the varied definitions of what narratives are. Lieblich, Rubal-Mashiach and Zilber (1998:2-3) define narrative research as “any study that uses or analyzes narrative materials” and propose a model that can be used for the “analysis of a wide spectrum of narratives, from literary works to diaries and written autobiographies, conversations, or oral life stories obtained in interviews.” For Polkinghorne (1988) and Craib (2000), narratives are stories. Craib believes narrative research “can be defined so broadly that the term applies to any and everything a sociologist or psychologist might want to study (quoted in Denzin 2000:xi).” Narratives are to be found in, “novels and epic poems, but also in movies, comic strips and ballets and puppet shows and anecdotes told at cocktail parties (Dowling 1984:24).” For social scientists narratives are “provoked by researchers’ interventions, such as oral histories, interviews and written life stories (Steinmetz 1992:490).” Also important are “naturally occurring” personal documents, including working-class autobiographies, letters and diaries. While the emphasis in the social sciences has been on narrative as a source of data, a recent shift has situated narrative as a “fundamental category of human consciousness” (see for example Steinmetz 1992; Maines 1993; Somers 1992; Personal Narratives Group 1989; Hall 1985).

A common theme in all the social science ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Theoretical Context
• Chapter Three: Research Questions, Methodology and Analytical Strategy
• Chapter Four: “Men of the Cape Fear”
• Chapter Five: A New Narrative
• Chapter Six: Contemporary Narratives and Political Generations
• Chapter Seven: Do Narratives Matter?
• Appendix One: Declaration of White Independence
• Appendix Two: The Story of the Wilmington, N.C., Race Riots by Col. Alfred M.Waddell
• Appendix Three: 8th Grade Educational Component on Racial Violence in Wilmington, North Carolina 1898 to Supplement North Carolina Department of Education “North Carolina— History of an American State” Syllabus
• Notes
• Bibliography