The White Supremacy Campaign of 1898

The year eighteen ninety-eight was an election year in North Carolina, and the state's Democratic Party had a strategy. They called it the White Supremacy Campaign.

For four years, a coalition of Republicans and Populists known as Fusionists had governed the state and the city of Wilmington. Black men held office. Black men voted in large numbers. The Democratic Party intended to end this, and they planned it systematically, months in advance.

The campaign operated through newspapers, through cartoons depicting Black men as predators, through armed paramilitary units called Red Shirts who rode at night into Black neighborhoods and Republican precincts. The morning of November tenth, eighteen ninety-eight, the day after the election, a mob estimated at as many as two thousand white men marched to the office of the Wilmington Daily Record, the city's Black-owned newspaper, destroyed the press, and burned the building. They then forced the resignation of the city's Fusionist mayor and Black municipal officeholders at gunpoint and installed their own men. It was the only successful coup against an elected government in American history.

The consequences spread across the entire state. In the following years, the new Democratic legislature passed North Carolina's first Jim Crow legislation. A constitutional amendment added what was called a Grandfather Clause, which provided that a man could vote only if he could read and write or if his grandfather had voted. Since few enslaved grandfathers had been permitted to vote, the clause was designed to achieve one specific mathematical result. The number of Black registered voters in North Carolina fell from one hundred twenty-six thousand in eighteen ninety-six to six thousand one hundred by nineteen oh two.

Durham's Black business community on Parrish Street survived because it was economically self-contained and because Parrish Street's leaders had cultivated relationships with white business allies. But Durham's Black political power, like Black political power everywhere in the state, was extinguished.