Transcript: Wilmington: A Peaceful City Turned Violent

NARRATOR: Blacks meant to win by legal means. Whites by any means.

ALFRED WADDELL (ACTOR): We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns. If we have not the votes to carry the election, we must carry it by force. If you find a negro voting tell him to leave the poll. If He refuses, kill him.

ROBERT WOOLEY (HISTORIAN): Despite all the intimidation, many, many black voters were turning out and were voting. So the word goes out from Democratic headquarters that if we can’t intimidate the black voters and get a majority that way, we will simply stuff the ballot boxes. And that’s exactly what they do.

NARRATOR: Every black candidate in North Carolina was defeated. But in Wilmington, the political victory did not satisfy white anger. A mob set Manly’s newspaper on fire, and every black official was driven out of office.

BERTHA TODD (V.O.) (WILMINGTON RESIDENT): They could not wait for the time of the change of office to take place.

KENNETH L. DAVIS (V.O.) (WILMINGTON RESIDENT): They decided to take control of everything.

GLENDA GILMORE (HISTORIAN): It was basically a coup. They just took the offices away from the duly elected office holders.

ROBERT WOOLEY (HISTORIAN): So there are no longer any black officials in Wilmington city government.

NARRATOR The coup was followed by a massacre.

REVEREND ALLAN KIRK (ACTOR): Firing began and it seemed like a mighty battle in war time. They went on firing it seemed at every living Negro, poured volleys into fleeing men like sportsmen firing at rabbits in an open field; the shrieks and screams of children, of mothers and wives, caused the blood of the most inhuman person to creep; men lay on the street dead and dying while members of their race walked by unable to do them any good.

GLENDA GILMORE (HISTORIAN): They went after business owners, they went after voters, they went after doctors and black lawyers, those are the people they ran out of town because those were the people they saw as getting out of their place, and therefore encouraging other black people to get out of their places.

NARRATOR: Despite the odds against them, some blacks fought back. Others protested to the federal government.

KENNETH L. DAVIS (WILMINGTON RESIDENT): Blacks from all over the United States wrote letters to the President of the United States begging him to intervene and to stop the violence and the killing in Wilmington.

NARRATOR: In Washington, President William Mckinley remained silent.

JOHN HALEY: I think it showed that the national government had lost its commitment to protecting the civil and political rights of blacks, especially in the South.

NARRATOR: Charles Francis Bourke witness hundreds of blacks fleeing from the city.

CHARLES FRANCIS BOURKE (ACTOR): In the woods and swamps hundreds of innocent terrified men and women wander about fearful of the vengeance of whites, fearful of death. Without money or food, insufficiently clothed, they fled from civilization and sought refuge in the wilderness. In the night I hear children crying and a voice crooning a mournful song.

BERTHA TODD (WILMINGTON RESIDENT): And those of us who were left found our places and stayed there.

NARRATOR: The destruction of black political power in North Carolina unleashed a wave of racial discrimination triumphantly announced in newspapers and printed on postcards. Facilities that were once integrated were now legally segregated- public transportation and parks, restaurants and theaters, jobs and juries. The relative oasis that North Carolina had been for blacks was now a desert of white supremacy.