"I saw the news today, oh boy..."

As if this couldn't happen today:

December 19, 2005
Ny Times Online

North Carolina City Confronts Its Past in Report on White Vigilantes

By JOHN DeSANTIS

WILMINGTON, N.C., Dec. 18 - Beneath canopies of
moss-draped oaks, on sleepy streets graced by antebellum mansions, tour guides
here spin stories of Cape Fear pirates and Civil War blockade-runners for eager
tourists.

Only scant mention is made, however, of the bloody rioting
more than a century ago during which black residents were killed and survivors
banished by white supremacists, who seized control of the city government in
what historians say is the only successful overthrow of a local government in
United States history.

But last week, Wilmington revisited that painful
history with the release of a draft of a 500-page report ordered by the state
legislature that not only tells the story of the Nov. 10, 1898, upheaval, but
also presents an analysis of its effects on black families that persist to this
day.

Culled from newspaper clippings, government records, historical
archives and interviews, some previously unexplored, the report explodes
oft-repeated local claims that the insurrection was a frantic response to a
corrupt and ineffective post-Reconstruction government.

"The ultimate
goal was the resurgence of white rule of the city and state for a handful of men
through whatever means necessary," the historian LeRae Umfleet wrote in the
report's introduction.

The report concludes that the rioting and coup
fully ended black participation in local government until the civil rights era,
and was a catalyst for the development of Jim Crow laws in North Carolina.

"Because Wilmington rioters were able to murder blacks in daylight and
overthrow Republican government without penalty or federal intervention,
everyone in the state, regardless of race, knew that the white supremacy
campaign was victorious on all fronts," the report said.

In the period
immediately after the Civil War, the Democratic Party-ruled government in
Wilmington, which was then North Carolina's largest city, was displaced by a
coalition that was largely Republican and included many blacks. The loss of
power stirred dissatisfaction among a faction of white civic leaders and
business owners.

The tensions came to a head on Election Day, Nov. 9,
1898, when the Democrats regained power, according to historians largely by
stuffing ballot boxes and intimidating black voters to keep them from the polls.
Not waiting for an orderly transition of government, a group of white vigilantes
demanded that power be handed over immediately. When they were rebuffed, in the
words of the report, "Hell jolted loose."

The mob - which the report
said grew to as many as 2,000 - forced black leaders out of town, dismantled the
printing press of a black-owned newspaper, The Daily Record, fired into the
homes of blacks and shot down black men in the streets.

Estimates of the
number of black deaths are as high as 100, state officials said, although they
add that there is no way of truly knowing.

"No official count of dead
can be ascertained due to a paucity of records from the coroner's office,
hospital, or churches," the report said.

Black women and children fled
to swamps on the city's outskirts made frigid by November's chill. There are
accounts of pregnant women giving birth in the swamps, the babies dying soon
after.

No white deaths were verified.

Five years ago, members of
the North Carolina General Assembly commissioned a report on the incident that
they said would be made part of the state's official record. The final report is
to be presented to lawmakers next year.

The release of the draft report
- and its painful conclusions - have been politely, if uncomfortably, received
in this city.

"I spend a lot of time looking forward and not a lot of
time looking in the rearview mirror," said Mayor Spence Broadhurst. "But we can
use our history to grow on. It was a horrible situation in 1898, and this is
2005. But I think it is good for us to talk about it and to fully understand
it."
Styled after similar efforts to document racial atrocities in Rosewood,
Fla., and in Tulsa, Okla., the report begins with a thorough account of
Wilmington's status as the Confederacy's premier port, and the complex structure
of its black society, which included slaves as well as a sizable population of
free black craftsmen before Emancipation. Rifts between black tradesmen and
white Democrats in the years after Reconstruction are chronicled, along with the
growth of black society in prominence and power. In 1897, a year before the race
riot, black residents numbered 3,478 or 49 percent of Wilmington's working
population, according to a directory for that year. By 1900 that number had
fallen to 2,497, or 44 percent, according to data in the report.

According to the 2000 census, Wilmington had a population of 76,000, and
nearly 71 percent of its residents were white and 26 percent were black.

Federal and state authorities did nothing in response to the racial
rioting in Wilmington, and according to the report, the revolt became a model of
sorts when violence later erupted in other cities.

A 1906 upheaval in
Atlanta, the report said, "suggests that the lack of governmental response to
the violence in Wilmington gave Southerners implicit license to suppress the
black community under the right circumstances."

In the years after the
Wilmington rebellion, blacks and whites alike tended not to speak of it.

"I did not even know it happened until I was a grandmother," said Lottie
Clinton, 68, a lifelong resident of Wilmington who is black and a member of the
Riot Commission. "My family thought the more positive things I learned, the
better off I would be."

Another commission member, Anthony Gentile, a
Wilmington contractor who is white, said he had questions initially about
whether the report should have been done at all.

"We didn't want to keep
open wounds open," Mr. Gentile said. "There were a lot of emotions, and there
was a lot of animosity. I was not in favor of doing it."

He continued,
"Everyone made mistakes 100 years ago, let's deal with today."

But, he
said, "My opinion changed, and I was surprised to learn the depth of feeling
that existed and that it was not that long ago."