Wilmington's Lie by David Zucchino

Author:David Zucchino [Zucchino, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802146489
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Inside the chambers, five members of the Fusionist board of aldermen were at their posts. They had just received word that rioters were headed to city hall to overthrow the government. They looked helpless. They didn’t bother to flee. They chose instead to stay on the job and await their fate. Four aldermen had been there for most of the day. The fifth, John Norwood, a seventy-three-year-old black carpenter appointed to the board by Governor Russell, had just arrived after being ordered by the city clerk to report there.

Three aldermen were absent—two black men and Benjamin Keith, a prominent white Populist who had already left Wilmington. A boycott mounted by Democrats, along with false rumors that Keith advocated sex between blacks and whites, had destroyed his wholesale grocery business. Mayor Wright had just returned to the chambers, as ordered by Waddell’s emissaries. Chief Melton was still at the police headquarters inside city hall.

The aldermen could hear rioters thundering through the corridors, shouting insults and hooting and whistling as they approached the chambers. They packed the room and leaned over the rails, heckling the Fusionists. At the head of the pack were J. Allan Taylor and Colonel Waddell. Taylor informed the aldermen that their replacements had been “elected.” Waddell ordered Mayor Wright to call a special meeting of the board to submit its resignation. It was just after 4:00 p.m.

The board convened, with Wright presiding. One by one, the five aldermen who were present resigned. They obeyed instructions to formally approve their replacements—the men selected an hour earlier by Waddell and his Committee of Twenty-Five. The approvals gave the proceedings a veneer of propriety, suggesting that the outgoing aldermen had resigned on their own. “They resigned in response to public sentiment,” a front-page New York Times article explained the next morning.

Witnessing the resignations was William Struthers, a white city clerk and treasurer who had kept the minutes of the outgoing board’s last meeting three hours earlier when it had voted to extend the election liquor ban. Struthers, a Democrat, retained his position. He dutifully kept the minutes of the coup, as if it were just another routine board of aldermen meeting. He even read aloud the minutes of the previous meeting.

As each Fusionist alderman “resigned,” Struthers wrote that the resignation “was accepted.” Then he wrote the name of each replacement, noting that each man had been “nominated and elected.” Finally, Struthers swore in the new aldermen, who vowed to “support the Constitution and Laws of the United States and the Constitution and Laws of North Carolina not inconsistent therewith.”

J. Allan Taylor and Hugh MacRae asked that their appointments as aldermen be delayed for two days because they were needed to command the gunmen still roaming the streets. They did not consider that proper work for aldermen. Their new positions were held open for them. The three absent Fusionist aldermen were then summarily fired and replaced. In a matter of minutes, the eight Fusionists on the board—including three black men—had been replaced by eight white supremacist Democrats.

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