NC: Wilmington's 1898 Race Riot Frequently Asked Questions

 The following is presented in the interest of providing accurate information and what is known about the “race riot” (contemporaries referred to it as the “Wilmington Rebellion”) and based upon the bestinformation available – primarily as close to the conflict as possible and by credible eyewitnesses or scholars. Most if not all responses to questions have their sources cited for further reading.

For an accurate understanding of the political and racial atmosphere in late 1860s through 1890s North Carolina and Wilmington, we highly recommend the following titles as worthy of the reader’s time, and they are cited below:

Reconstruction in NC, Jos. deR. Hamilton, 1971

Politics in Wilmington/New Hanover County, McDuffie, 1979

Editor in Politics, Josephus Daniels, UNC Press, 1941

Life and Speeches of Charles B. Aycock, Conner/Poe, 1912

Prince of Carpetbaggers, Jonathan Daniels, 1958

Chronicles of the Cape Fear, James Sprunt, 1916

Pictorial/Historical New Hanover County/Wilmington, deRosset, 1938

Memoirs of An Octogenarian, John D. Bellamy, Jr. 1941

 General Overview

Black newspaperman Alexander Manly, perhaps due to lagging revenue and prone to inflammatory editorials like the one cited below, was responding to an 1897 speech by Georgian Rebecca Felton to a Georgia Agricultural Fair assembly. She decried the rape of white farm women by black men while the white farmers were working the fields, and that this crime had become epidemic. She blamed the Republican party for fostering the belief among blacks that their crime of rape would not be punished.  Manly's editorial was seen as suggesting that the rape was somehow consensual and absolving the criminal.

The following from the DeRosset source, published in 1938:

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