His Assignment

HIS 1005

Assignment #1

“We have taken a city” is an essay about a race violence took place in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. This riot was seen to be the capstone of the white supremacy campaign in North Carolina and signaled its victory across the nation.

In the late 19th century, Wilmington was the largest and most important city of the Old North State, where located an African-American middle class. Among them, Black people played significant and power roles in the key fields of the city, especially economy and politics, which formed relatively harmonious race relations in the city. This community also had their own newspaper, the Daily Record, edited by Alex Manly, a mixed race man whose father had been the governor of the state of NC right before the Civil War. In 1898, racial massacre in Wilmington occurred with the statewide white supremacy campaign. Responding to a public speech by Rebecca Felton, a Georgian who’d spoken out about the threat of rape that white women faced by black men and called for a campaign of lynching, Manly not only condemned such crimes by blacks, but also extended it to white men abusing black women in the same way. During which, he mentioned his mother’s experience serving as a slave and mistress to a former governor of the state before. However, unpredictably, excerpts of Manly’s editorial began to circulate in newspapers across the country. As a result, a few days ahead of the election in that November, a group of white “redshirts” led by Alfred M. Waddell, marched on Manly’s newspaper and burned the building down. During the event, a white man was shot, which provided an excuse for armed white men began to interfere more in the black community where they faced minor resistance. Eventually, a number of men were killed and most of the black leaders were rounded up and exiled from the city. Blacks lost their local majority, and Whites finally started to dominate the community for all.

From then on, those who had...