Panel: N.C. Should Pay for 1898 Race Riot

[Eugene]

Panel: N.C. Should Pay for 1898 Race Riot


Thursday June 1, 2006 3:01 PM

By MIKE BAKER

Associated Press Writer

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - A state-appointed commission is urging North Carolina
to provide reparations for the 1898 racial violence that sparked an exodus
of more than 2,000 black residents from Wilmington.

The 500-page report that was produced after six years of study also said
the violence, which killed as many as 60 people, was not a spontaneous riot
but rather the nation's only recorded coup d'etat.

<snip>

The 1898 violence began when white vigilantes, resentful after years of black
and Republican political rule during Reconstruction, burned the printing press
of a black newspaper publisher, Alexander Manly.

Violence spread, resulting in an exodus of 2,100 blacks, the commission concluded.
Then the largest city in the state, Wilmington flipped from a black majority
to a white majority in the months that followed.

<snip>

Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5859104,00.html

[Virginia Dare]

1. With liberty and justice for all....

NOT!

[carolinayellowdog]

2. The damage was statewide, not just in Wilmington

Hey,

I've been studying my own family history and found that 200+ miles north of Wilmington the period 1898-1900 was almost as horrendous. A terrorist organization called the Red Shirts intimated black voters and white Republicans (good guys back then) all over the state. My gg grandfather was so Republican that he named one son Ulysses and another Rutherford; all eight of his sons left the county around the turn of the century. Any white who could be labeled a n-lover was just as ostracized as blacks in the post-"Redemption" (oh what dark satire in that name) period.

CYD

[karmaqueen]

3. Cape Fear Rising...Great read

I'm reading a book about this now. It is "Cape Fear Rising" by Philip Gerard. I highly recommend it.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

8. Thanks for the tip!

:yourock:

[951-Riverside]

4. Blacks and REPUBLICANS?

I think the writer just wedged the republican part in to take away from the racial aspect, sort of like some did during hurricane Karina by calling it "class-ism" or when Kanye West made the statement that Bush doesn't care about black people some substituted it with "Bush doesn't care about all people".

[meow2u3]

5. 100+ years ago, the Dems (Dixiecrats) were the white supremacists

Repukes appealed to blacks back then because they weren't so in-your-face racist as today's repukes.

From about WWII on, the political landscape gradually switched. The racist Dixiecons switched parties from Democratic to Republican when Democratic presidents signed on to civil rights measures and gradually dismantled Jim Crow. Blacks increasingly changed the political allegience from Republican to Democratic.

See why the South is solid red? It's the Dixiecons, stupid--not the Democrats.

[nealmhughes]

6. Also, Republicans were in a tacit agreement with the Democrats

in the South to keep the South white politically by the turn of the century. One by one the civil rights decisions of Reconstruction were set aside all the way to the USSC. The kicker was the legitimitization of disfranchisement based on "Grandfather Clauses", "Literacy and Understanding Clauses" and other devices in southern state constitutions that resulted in a loss of any semblance of a two party system developing there. The USSC made ruling after ruling (if it even heard cases) based on verbatim readings of laws, not intent of the laws, thus, we had "separate but equal" endorsed in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Only a few Republicans were willing to touch the issue. Teddy Roosevelt's dinner with his family in the White House with BT Washington was the clincher: hardly anyone defended his right to dine with anyone he chose, black or white. The South was furious, and the North almost as much. At the same time, the "new" post-Reconstruction Republican Party in the South became "Lily Whites" and just as racist as the Democrats.
I just finished editing my friend Robert V. Riser, Ph.D.'s new manuscript on this topic based on his doctoral dissertation and it is at the LSU Press right now. Truly fascinating and repulsive in today's eyes.

[carolinayellowdog]

9. Eastern NC had a black Republican congressman until 1901

Republicans controlled a large number of local offices in eastern NC, (postmasters, nagistrates) many of which were held by blacks, as late as the 1890s. What is so horrible about the 1898 coup from the statewide perspective is that it destroyed the only remaining vestige of black political representation for decades.

Most of the rest of the South had long since gone the route of the "Redeemers" but eastern NC was in the late 90s a shining example of black/white Republican allegiance. But "stident appeals to white solidarity put almost unbearable pressure on the party's white minority" writes Eric Anderson in his study of the era. Terrorism played a part, and newspapers whipped up a frenzy of hatred directed mainly at whites perceived as race traitors.

[struggle4progress]

10. The Repub party changed when Nixon courted the Dixiecrats ..

.. who were furious about the civil rights movement and the end of Jim Crow. Before that, the "solid South" was predictably Democratic, largely because of lingering resentment about Lincoln, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Yes, folk down here really did used to say "Pa and Grampa never voted for a Republican, and neither will I."

LBJ's political skill allowed him to push civil rights legislation through Congress, but the long-term effect was to destroy the rather strange coalition that the Democratic party had been ...

[seriousstan]

7. There is no way to satisfy anyone in this situation...esp. monetarily.

``There is no amount of money that can repair what happened years ago and compensate for the loss of lives and the loss of property,'' said vice chairman Irving Joyner, a professor at N.C. Central School of Law.

The commission did not provide any cost estimates, although compensation advocate Larry Thomas of Chapel Hill estimated that the economic losses calculated today are ``probably in the billions of dollars.''

Along with compensation to victims' descendants, the commission also recommended incentives for minority small businesses and help for minority home ownership. It also recommended that the history of the incident be taught in public schools."

Until someone steps forward and says "pay this and do this and it is OVER!", it isn't worth even trying.

I believe the reason that someone state EXACTLY how much money is being demanded is because most people would simply point and laugh at the amount.

[ltch1898ca]

14. Compensation for 1898 victims

Our organization, ICROW, the International Organization for
the Compensation and Reparations for the Wilmington Victims of
1898, is simply interested in righting a wrong.  We know that
the people who initiated this overthrow were part of the
powerful "gentry" who used the middle class and poor
to put the "genrty"  back in power and we know that
they should compensate the people who were robbed.  We also
know that those who will make the most noise about it are not
a part of the "gentry" and that when payback time
comes, and it will, these noisemakers will end up with what
they got in 1898: Nothing!  Remember Plato's perfect
republic--Thinkers (Gentry)(.01% of the population), Warriors
(police and military whose job it is to protect the thinkers
from the workers in case they want to change
things)(34.99%)and the workers (65%).  Well, workers, and that
is most of us, we don't have a thing to worry about because
reparations or compensation will not come out of our
pockets--only the Thinker's pockets.  Why don't you join us
workers, so we can make our ancestors proud that we did the
right thing?  Incidentally, I have written two books--The True
Story Behind the Wilmington Ten and Rabbit! Rabbit!  Rabbit!: 
A Saga of the Wilmington Ten Incident of February 1971.  Read
them and you will understand why a serious crime was done and
why the only solution is atonement and compensation.   

[happyslug]

11. Direct Link to the report:

http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/1898%2Dwrrc/

[happyslug]

12. Wilmington Cite on the riot

http://www.1898wilmington.com/

[Endangered Specie]

13. I didn't do it... I ain't paying for it.