"... and the Wilmington tragedy began."

Via the UNC library

There's a curious line on page 248 of Hopkins' "As the Lord Lives ...". As Stone/Jim is explaining himself to the Reverend Stevens, he says:

I came out West from Wilmington, North Carolina, Jones and I were together. We were both college men and chums from childhood. All our savings were in the business we had at home when the leading mean of the town conceived the idea of driving the Negroes out, and the Wilmington tragedy began.

This small mention probably doesn't mean a lot to us as modern-day readers. But Hopkins' contemporaries, especially black readers, would have gotten the import of this passage immediately.

The "tragedy" that Stone/Jim speaks of is actually known as an "insurrection" among historians. I'll try to provide a brief outline of what this Wilmington tragedy was and meant below, but I encourage you to follow some of the links and learn a little more for yourselves.

"Honest White Man" v. "Negro Rule"
News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), 30 August 1898.
See more cartoons at UNC library.

In the election of 1894, Southern Democrats, the party of Jim Crow and white supremacy, last their control of the state to what was known as a "Fusion" Republican party, one composed of white and black Republicans. Campaigning on a platform of white supremacy and anti-miscegenation, Democrats planned on wresting power back from the Fusionists in the election of 1898.

They did this through violence. No one knows for certain how many black citizens died in the race riot that followed, but the Wilmington tragedy still stands today as the only time a coup d'état was successful in the United States.


According to the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources:

In elections on Nov. 8, Democrats won easily by stuffing ballot boxes and intimidating black
voters. A Committee of Twenty-Five was formed, and on Nov. 9 prepared resolutions called the White Declaration of Independence. They presented the demands that day to leading black political and business leaders, known as the Committee of Colored Citizens (CCC).

A pivotal demand to the CCC was that the community oust newspaper editor Alex Manly, who had published an article in the Record, the city's only African American newspaper, that challenged claims by whites regarding interracial sexual relationships. The CCC was to respond by 7:30 a.m. on Nov. 10. No response was received from the CCC at that time, and by 9 a.m. a group of men marched to the Record printing office and destroyed the newspaper building.

Before the day ended, a mob of up to 2,000 whites roamed the streets, armed with rifles and
fueled by weeks of propaganda in newspapers and rhetoric-filled meetings. Rifles and rapid fire machine guns were fired, and black men were killed or wounded throughout the day. Estimates of deaths range from six to 100, but records from the coroner's office, hospitals or churches are incomplete, so the total remains unknown. There were no white fatalities. By4p.m., the Republican mayor, board of aldermen, and chief of police were forced to resign and were replaced by men selected by the Committee of Twenty-Five. All black municipal employees subsequently were fired.

This NRP story provides a good overview of the insurrection:

Their leader, Col. Alfred Moore Waddell, had publicly threatened in a pre-election speech to "choke the current of the Cape Fear River" with black bodies, according to a 2006 report chronicling the events by the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission. After the coup, Waddell was elected mayor of Wilmington.