Slack Water, 1880–1920

A biracial Republican-Populist coalition gained power over state and local governments in the 1890s, and North Carolina’s Democratic Party responded with a vicious white-supremacy campaign. Meanwhile, a small group of old-time, elite, white businessmen launched what they called the “Wilmington Revolution” to end “Negro Domination” at the local level. Mulrooney contends that the 1898 Wilmington massacre and coup d’état were not aberrant events in the city’s history; rather, the instigators consciously replicated old patterns of behavior as a way to resolve mounting conflicts over race, place, and memory. Grounded in local elites’ interpretations of the 1770s and 1860s, the Wilmington revolution of 1898 occurred after lynching emerged in the 1880s as a spectacle of organized racist violence, while the mass media (newspapers, popular fiction, advertising, film) were shaping a national color line, and before southern progressives crafted their coherent vision of a modern, economically diversified, and racially segregated South.

Port in a Storm, 1840–1880

This chapter outlines the dramatic changes underway in Wilmington and in North Carolina during this period. Wilmington’s white elite actively embraced progress, becoming more and more pro-business and industry even as they maintained ties to agricultural production and plantation culture. At the same time, a white middle class emerged that included newcomers from the north and Europe as well as homegrown entrepreneurs. Industrial activity was not only integral to the port city’s development as a distinctive place, but it sparked spatial, social, economic, political, and cultural changes that helped free and enslaved blacks to resist their oppression. By 1850, the city’s most progressive, forward-thinking whites were struggling to maintain their supremacy and so they looked, ironically, to the past, especially remembrances of the colonial era as well as traditional modes of organized violence. During the stormy years of sectional crisis, southern rebellion, and Reconstruction, these efforts increased dramatically, but so did black Wilmingtonians’ use of similar methods to gain freedom and citizenship.

Introduction

Mulrooney introduces the 1998 commemoration of the Wilmington “race riot” and the three structures of human experience that materialized most clearly: racial identity (who is considered white or black); civic identity (how spaces and places shape residents’ sense of communal belonging or alienation); and collective memory (who controls a community’s shared heritage). The chapters proceed chronologically, rather than thematically, in order to emphasize how seemingly discrete activities, events, and conflicts actually connect over a long period to reveal patterns of behavior and how these patterns influenced the disputes that accompanied the 1998 commemoration. The central aim of this book is to use lessons from Wilmington to illuminate and mitigate the broader power struggle that affects so many public-history projects today.

Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990

As the twentieth century advanced, Wilmington’s old, established elites found it more difficult to retain the most salient elements of their collective past while fashioning a modern, progressive identity. The energy of the Roaring Twenties prompted renewed efforts to boost the city and its nearby beaches, and thousands of newcomers relocated to the area. During the Great Depression, when Wilmington’s leisure-based economy suffered a major blow, racial tensions flared anew. But at this point, civic leaders started to shift the local narrative. In particular, white elites began to disavow racist violence, strategically tailoring the presentation of their past to fit the emerging, statewide rhetoric of civility and racial progress—what Tar Heels later called the North Carolina Way. Still, old ways continued to ebb and flow. After the onset of World War II, the city experienced more frequent and more extensive “race riots,” the most notable ones in 1941, 1958, 1960, 1968, and 1971. These violent events resulted partly from certain white residents’ efforts to maintain traditional racial privileges and partly from certain black residents’ growing activism for equal rights.

Soundings

This chapter describes the planning of the 1998 public history commemoration of the 1898 Wilmington massacre. From the beginning, the centennial’s planners intended their project to “heal the wound” by “telling the story” of 1898 and “honoring the memory” of the tragedy with social and economic justice initiatives in the present. But despite the commemoration’s successes, key stakeholders among the white elite never even accepted its conservative goals, while public support for the more revolutionary ones never coalesced. During the commemoration, competing notions of history and long-submerged collective memories all became public, each conflict sounding differently the depth of racial inequality at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Rising Tide, 1739–1840

To understand race, place, and memory in modern Wilmington, North Carolina, we must travel back to the city’s beginning. Four of the community’s defining characteristics emerged in the colonial period and had coalesced by 1840 to produce a collectively constructed sense of place. Among them are a kind of geographical, river-based boosterism; deference to a group of elite, founding families; and pride in a localized “Revolutionary” heritage. Flowing beneath, through, over, and around these three qualities was a repressive system of race relations. This fourth trait has never been adequately acknowledged. Even now, the city’s long history of white-directed violence against blacks is still too often suppressed, considered aberrant, or blamed on deviants and outsiders. In fact, racist violence was a way of life, a tradition essential to the creation and maintenance of white supremacy. And whiteness, more than anything else, determined whether and how a resident belonged to the civic body.