Democracy Betrayed

The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy

David S. Cecelski, Timothy B. Tyson, David S. Cecelski, Timothy B. Tyson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807847558, 9780807824511
• eBook ISBN: 9780807866573
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

At the close of the nineteenth century, the Democratic Party in North Carolina engineered a white supremacy revolution. Frustrated by decades of African American self-assertion and threatened by an interracial coalition advocating democratic reforms, white conservatives used violence, demagoguery, and fraud to seize political power and disenfranchise black citizens. The most notorious episode of the campaign was the Wilmington “race riot” of 1898, which claimed the lives of many black residents and rolled back decades of progress for African Americans in the state.
Published on the centennial of the Wilmington race riot, Democracy Betrayed draws together the best new scholarship on the events of 1898 and their aftermath. Contributors to this important book hope to draw public attention to the tragedy, to honor its victims, and to bring a clear and timely historical voice to the debate over its legacy.
The contributors are David S. Cecelski, William H. Chafe, Laura F. Edwards, Raymond Gavins, Glenda E. Gilmore, John Haley, Michael Honey, Stephen Kantrowitz, H. Leon Prather Sr., Timothy B. Tyson, LeeAnn Whites, and Richard Yarborough.

Index

• Abolition, 44, 47, 48;
  • and Northern whites, 45, 100, 102;
  • in Ohio, 48, 68 (n. 23). See also Underground Railroad
• Accommodation, 9, 221, 254. See also Racial etiquette
• African American church, 54, 55, 208–10, 212;
  • African Methodist Episcopal Church, 51, 56, 79, 188, 214, 216, 247;
  • ministers in, 144, 146, 149, 209, 210. See also African American community institutions
• African American community institutions, 48, 51, 55, 127, 174, 194–95, 285
• African American heroes, 232–35, 239
• African American literature, 225–48 passim
• African American manhood. See Manhood: African American
• African American middle class, 16, 17, 170–71, 227;
  • and paternalism, 212, 213, 215–17;
  • and Republican Party, 188, 211;
  • and resistance to white supremacy campaign, 123, 210
• African American militia, 51, 61, 65
• African American newspapers, 4, 18, 77, 158, 170, 213, 257;
  • Wilmington Daily Record, 18, 77, 85, 95, 171, 238
• African American political leadership, 4, 20, 51, 55, 188, 210, 212, 217, 227
• African American resistance: during Civil War, 43–45, 49–52, 61, 66 (n. 1), 69 (n. 33);
  • to disfranchisement, 219;
  • in li...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Democracy Betrayed
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• We Have Taken a City
• Abraham H. Galloway
• Murder, Memory, and the Flight of the Incubus
• The Two Faces of Domination in North Carolina, 1800–1898
• Captives of Wilmington
• Love, Hate, Rape, Lynching
• Class, Race, and Power in the New South
• Fear, Hope, and Struggle
• Race, Rhetoric, and Revolution
• Violence, Manhood, and Black Heroism
• Wars for Democracy
• Epilogue from Greensboro, North Carolina
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index