Wilmington’s Lie: The murderous coup of 1898 and the rise of white supremacy. David Zucchino. New York: Grove Press. 2020. 426 pages.
Kyle Rittenhouse is a free man tonight, as I begin to write this. Having crossed state lines with an illegal assault rifle to counter a peaceful protest, having killed two men and wounded a third, he was acquitted by our “justice” system which is far from just most of the time. As far as I know, charges have never been considered for his mother, who drove him across the state line with an assault rifle — where? in the trunk? in his lap?
There is little surprise but a lot of outrage. Many will claim the system “worked,” and we should trust the courts. Others will likely complain that “this is not who America is.” But we know better.
In other news, the GOP is gerrymandering the hell out of congressional districts and passing law after law to suppress voters of color, to dismantle any political power that might have accrued to them. The Trump cartel is still in assault mode, and one of his acolytes, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, has stated this week that the United States has too many religions to be “one nation under God” and needs to shed all but one. We know which one he means. Fascism is on the rise.
But white supremacy is not news. Kyle Rittenhouse is not an anomaly.
In one more instance most of us have probably never heard of, David Zucchino tells of Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898, the time white supremacists upended a peaceful, racially integrated town, destroyed black wealth, killed a lot of people, and forcibly took over the offices to which others had been duly elected by the people. A violent overthrow of the government of an entire American town.
In this case it was the Democrats. Post-Reconstruction and pissed about their losses, the white bigots could not fathom being governed by Black people or racially-tolerant white people. Democrats had lost the elections of 1868, as a Reconstruction tide turned in favor of Black voters, who showed up in massive numbers to cast their ballots and adopt a new state constitution. (“One rode an ambulance to the polls a half hour after having a leg amputated.”) The new constitution was adopted, but white politicians immediately began shouting about voter fraud, and doesn’t that sound familiar.
By 1898, Wilmington was, if not racial nirvana, at least a sort of peaceable kin-dom. At least on the surface. While people white and Black were living in relative harmony, going about their days, living their lives, other white people, Democrats, were seething and vowing something else. They took their time organizing, because Rome wasn’t overthrown in a day.
The strategy of violence was supposed to be a Plan B, in case the strategy of intimidation didn’t turn the election their way. The intimidation worked, though, and white people won all the posts that were on the ballot. But other offices were not on the ballot that year, and these racist whites decided to go ahead with Plan B anyway.
“Said an attendee at an event… ‘When do we get to use the guns?’ The audience responded with applause. ‘How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?’”
Only that quote is not from the book; it is from the Atlantic, current issue. The event was held by a group called Turning Point USA in October 2021.
The Wilmington vigilantes had uniforms sewn by their wives, mothers and girlfriends; they had manipulated a blockade of weapons to ensure only white people were armed; a weak governor was unwilling to risk the political capital to intervene. Manifest Destiny was on their side. They instigated and stoked violence and blamed Black people for it. Again, deja vu, y’all. Summer 2020, white supremacists showed up in makeshift uniforms bearing patches of identity and white pride. They set fires and looted, in order to make it appear “antifa” was violent. Indeed, Rittenhouse killed protesters in Kenosha because he was afraid they would take his assault rifle away and hurt him with it. Pre-emptive violence, provocative violence, long a tactic of white imperialism.
Reading this book, I was struck by the political parties’ MOs — the expediency, easy violence and lies of Democrats and white supremacists, and the cowardice and political pandering of Republicans. Which is something of a flipped 21st century script, but the same dynamics built on the same racism. There was also the racist press that sided with white supremacists, including then the New York Times, and no small number of white clergy, who helped shaped the story as it would be told for generations. One, Pastor Kramer of the Brooklyn Baptist Church, “gazing from the pulpit at his congregation, told the men seated before him that they were the vanguard of a dominant race chosen by the creator.” Rittenhouse has similar “righteous” support; a so-called Christian fundraising site raised half a million dollars for his legal defense.
“No one was ever charged, much less convicted, of a crime stemming from what whites called their ‘white revolution.’ Wilmington’s leading white citizens had pioneered a formula that was soon duplicated across the South: deny Black citizens the vote, first through terror and violence, and then by legislation.”
The story isn’t surprising, but as the Tulsa Race Riot gained long overdue attention for its 100th anniversary last month, it is painful to realize that there are so very many stories we have yet to hear. The U.S. is as racist as it has ever been, despite the feel-good stories that churches and neighbors like to tell. It is the system that is poison, and until we change that, nothing will change.
This story isn’t surprising, but I learned a couple of new things, met new heroes, filled out a little more my understand of America’s racist history.
Zucchino’s Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative is compelling and haunting, if only for the feeling we can’t shake that we’ve seen this before and know how it ends. Rittenhouse was a vigilante, in the mold of these 19th century seditionists. His acquittal will embolden and empower many more like him. We see the story of Wilmington and Tulsa playing out among us more than a century later. Which is enough of a reason to read this book. Because history repeats. Because we are in the early throes of something very ugly.
Keep watch. And learn, as if our lives depend on it. They do.