Remembering the 1898 Massacre
Fairley Lloyd
As I find myself navigating racism and anti-blackness that has been forced to the front due to the yet again senseless murders of innocent black lives, I find myself confronting racism and what I can do to dismantle it in my very own hometown: Wilmington, North Carolina. Like the rest of the United States of America, this city has its own ugly history of racism, one of the most memorable being the 1898 massacre that took place.
Diving into all the actions that led to 1898 would take up entire novels, but it essentially grew from years of growing unrest due to racial tensions. Prior to 1898, Wilmington was a predominately black town, and black people were in positions of power. This didn’t sit well with many lower-class whites; many of them wanted to see the black officials out of office.
One of the igniting flames of the massacre came from an article published by Alex Manly, a biracial man who ran Wilmington’s only black newspaper at the time, The Daily Record. The article rebutted statements made by Rebecca Fulton’s, a Georgian politician, who advocated for lynching black men, insisting that they “preyed” on white women. The Daily Record’s article posited that most black men and white women engaged in consensual relationships and that those white women pursued relationships with black men because the black men treated the white women “better” than the white men treated them.
This article, combined with general white supremacist ideology pervading many political leaders, fueled the racial unrest that eventually unfolded into the historic massacre. On November 10, 1898, 2,000 a group of white supremacists burned down The Daily Record. Fortunately, Manly had been warned by a friend beforehand of this plan and fled Wilmington, but an innumerable number of black people were murdered. There is no clear estimate of how many were killed, but numbers have ranged from the hundreds to thousands of black citizens.
This clearly shaped Wilmington’s population today. Yet I did not know about this event until I attended college. The fact that I, a fifth-generation Wilmington native, didn’t know about this important part of our history, speaks volumes about how much it has still impacted the racial structure of our society today.
Last year, while I was researching more about 1898 for a class project, I found a letter archived by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from Caroline Sadgwar Manly written after her husband Alex had died. The three-page letter, addressed to Sadgwar’s children, detailed what happened in 1898 in Wilmington and how Manly was victimized. “I should let the ‘dead past bury its dead,’” Sadgwar wrote, “but as I think of the happy days I spent with the boys in that paper, it brings back happy days of long ago. Every man connected with that paper has gone to his rest where there will be no more sorrow or riots.”
A part of me feels like I shouldn’t be so upset about 1898. I didn’t experience the pain Caroline Sadgwar did, the threat of her husband being lynched, his building burned down, his family forced to leave town for their own safety. I was fortunate enough not to live during this horrible ordeal.
But, just like I am heartbroken over the murders of Breonna Taylor and other innocent black lives, I am heartbroken over the 1898 massacre that stole so many black lives. Those white men attacked people who looked like me. These murders could have very well happened to me or someone I love.
As a black writer, as a black person, I feel obligated to bring this record of the past to the surface. The history of 1898 may have been buried, but I refuse to bury it. This story and several other untold stories highlight a long history of racism in our country. Police brutality didn’t come out of nowhere. Anti-blackness didn’t come out of nowhere. Racism against Black Americans has existed in this country at least since the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It exists, and we can’t ignore it. Black people have never had the luxury of ignoring racism.
The past is the roadmap for our present. By learning from history, we have the knowledge and power to make the world a better place for everyone.