Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Old Wine, New Bottles: White Supremacist Mobs Threatening Democracy
January 21, 2021
White supremacy terrorism has historical roots in the United States (anokarina)
By Bill Berkowitz
In Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, a white mob carried out an insurrection that killed 60 African Americans and overthrew a mixed-race government
Elected officials, historians, academics, journalists, social media commentators, and many Americans are trying to process and understand the aborted coup carried out by a Trump-stoked mob at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Shocked and horrified, we are searching for context within the arc of American history. And, while attempted coups are not standard fare in this country, there is precedence: In 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, an armed white mob, driven by racist demagogues, killed 60 black people and overthrew an elected government.
There are those warning that the recent events in Washington, D.C. – militant white supremacist groups openly marching and invading the capitol in the name of Trump, might be a prelude to fascism. The assault on the Capitol has been compared to the waning days of Germany’s Weimar Republic, before Adolph Hitler consolidated control over the country. The historian Timothy Snyder has written of the now-Impeached-for-a-second-time Trump, “His use of the phrase ‘fake news’ echoed the Nazi smear Lugenpresse (‘lying press’); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as ‘enemies of the people.’”
For decades, researchers of the radical right — and activists fighting the radical right – have warned of the growing threat from neo-Nazis, white supremacists, armed militias, and Christian nationalists. Even within the history of right-wing movements in the US, the nearly all-white MAGA movement with its mix of post-truthers, grievance mongers, entitlement promoters, and angerists, is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps dating back to Donald Trump’s anti-Obama Birtherism.
Back to the Future: the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898
The history of the Wilmington insurrection is so striking, that I am including lengthy excerpts from a recent story posted at Lit Hub titled, “American Legacy: When White Supremacist Mobs Threaten Democracy,” by David Zucchino. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Zucchino, author of Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, compared the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 to the Capitol Insurrection of 2021.
Zucchino wrote that “the mob that invaded the Capitol included white supremacists stoked in part by Trump’s depiction of majority Black districts of Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit as cesspools of voter fraud and ballot-stuffing. It was a coda to Trump’s four years of dog whistles to white nationalists that the very face of ‘their’ America was becoming Black, brown and immigrant—the very outsiders who had now helped steal an election.”
In 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, a ginned-up mob of armed white people, called Red Shirts, in part motivated by claims that an election had been stolen from them by African Americans, slaughtered at least 60 Black men. While the current day Capitol insurrectionists failed to overturn the 2020 election, the 1898 “mob,” Zucchino wrote, “mounted America’s only lasting, violent overthrow of an elected government. After removing the mayor, city council and police chief at gunpoint, the rioters appointed mob leaders in their place”
“They were incited by white demagogues determined to eliminate ‘Negro rule’ and ‘Negro domination’ and restore white supremacy,” Zucchino pointed out. Fanned by lies and a demagogic media, “The white supremacists of 1898 mounted a call and response as they coursed through the streets searching for Black men to kill: shouts of ‘White men!’ followed by cries of ‘Victory!’”
At the time, Wilmington was a city where there was “a rare post-Reconstruction model of multiracial cooperation,” and “[was] perhaps the most racially inclusive city in the South.” Race baiting was standard operating procedure for Josephus Daniels, who was an executive of the state’s Democratic Party and the publisher of the most powerful newspaper in the state, the News and Observer in Raleigh. And, the coup was “led by a truly Trumpian figure—Col. Alfred Moore Waddell, a grandiloquent former Confederate officer… [an] often mesmerizing speaker who excelled at stoking white rage and grievances.”
According to Zucchino, “White supremacist newspapers and politicians launched a sophisticated White Supremacy Campaign designed to prevent Black men from voting or holding public office. White men were told that Black voters and Black public officials had stolen their birthright—the unassailable right to rule over subservient Blacks. White men were further inflamed by false claims, spread by white supremacist newspapers, that Black men were stalking and raping white women.”
“The coup re-established white supremacy as official city and state policy until the 1960s and ushered in Jim Crow laws that prevented North Carolina’s Black citizens from holding public office or voting in significant numbers for the next 60 years. Two years before the coup, 126,000 Black men registered to vote in North Carolina. By 1902, the coup had whittled the number down to just 6,100.”
Americans have now witnessed what a mob pursuing the violent overthrow of a democratic election looks like. Thus far the 2021 attempted coup has resulted in the launching of a huge investigation, multiple arrests, participants losing their jobs, the shutdown of social media platforms to white supremacist/neo-Nazi groups, the withdrawal of financial support for some Republican Party candidates, nearly universal condemnation, and a growing recognition that far-right white extremists represent the greatest terrorist threat to American democracy.
Whatever else the attempted right-wing coup in Washington may have achieved, “It has convinced the far-right of their own capacity and convinced a lot of the rest of the world to take them seriously,” author Rebecca Solnit, whose most recent book is the memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence, recently wrote. “It also made the case to everyone else of the real dangers they have long posed and the necessity of responding more strongly than we have. Warnings that far-right white extremists are the greatest terrorist threat in this country have been ignored for decades, and perhaps that denial has come to an end.”
The attempted coup of January 6th also served to further mobilize and inflame far right groups and militia that have vowed to continue their recruiting and organizing; understanding that they are in it for the long haul. The perpetrators and their potential co-conspirators – whether within the Capitol Police and other Executive branch departments or Congress itself,
The attempted coup of January 6 also served to further mobilize and inflame far-right groups and militia that have vowed to continue their recruiting and organizing; understanding that they are in it for the long haul. The perpetrators and their potential co-conspirators, whether within the capital police and executive branch departments (including the White House) and Congress itself, must be identified and held to account. But, there must also be an ongoing and concerted effort to search out and bring to justice ultra-right individuals and organizations advocating violent insurrection that are seeded across the nation whether in police, national guard and the military or militia/militia-lite organizations. It is true that the nation needs healing but, healing only comes after the wound is cleaned out.
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