News-Record.com

From the Associated Press today:

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina should provide economic and social compensation to victims of Wilmington's 1898 racial violence, said a panel that also concluded the attack was not a riot, but this country's only recorded coup d'etat.

The report from the state-appointed commission urged lawmakers to consider economic reparations in Wilmington, including incentives for minority small businesses, compensation to heirs of victims and help for minority home ownership.

"There is no amount of money that can repair what happened years ago and compensate for the loss of lives and the loss of property," said vice chairman Irving Joyner, a professor at N.C. Central School of Law.

The commission did not provide any cost estimates.

By murdering and terrorizing blacks in Wilmington on Nov. 10, 1898, white supremacists were able to overthrow government officials in New Hanover County at gunpoint — the only recorded government overthrow in U.S. history, according to the 500-page report produced after six years of study. The plot ushered in a new anti-black political era for the Jim Crow South and ultimately slashed black voting rights.

Some previous historical accounts had portrayed the incident as spontaneous, although more recently, historians have described it as a coup d'etat.

"This sets the record straight," said Rep. Thomas Wright, D-New

Hanover, who helped establish and chair the panel. "Now there is an official document confirming this part of North Carolina's — and America's — history. Nowhere in the United States has a legitimate government ever been overthrown."

While the committee was unable to confirm the number killed in the armed intimidation, estimates place the number as high as 60, and an exodus of 2,100 blacks fled the turmoil. Then the largest city in the state, Wilmington flipped from a black majority to a white majority in the months following the riot.

Wilmington likely became a "catalyst" for the violent white supremacist movement around the country, with other states taking note, lead researcher Lerae Umfleet said.

Later violence — Atlanta in 1806, Tulsa, Okla., in 1921 and Rosewood, Fla., in 1923 — mimicked Wilmington, and some white leaders called on the North Carolina violence as an example to incite fear in blacks.

"Jim Crow had passed in a few other states," Umfleet said. "But the whole white supremacy campaign in North Carolina was watched around the country. People built on what happened in Wilmington."

Yale University professor Glenda Gilmore, who wrote about that turn-of-the-century strife in her 1996 book "Gender and Jim Crow," said North Carolinians must understand their true heritage.

"The facts have been there for all to see, it's the interpretation that's been a point of contention," Gilmore said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "Even the most well-intentioned white people think there was a sort of riot, when indeed it had been a racial massacre."

Before the violence, which led to a Democratic takeover from Republicans and Populists, black men in North Carolina had been able to vote for about three decades. But Democrats quickly passed voter literacy tests and a grandfather clause, which disenfranchised black voters until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Committee members requested that parties involved — even more than 100 years later — atone for their own involvement. They also asked that the true story of the incident be taught in North Carolina schools.

"The growth of Wilmington was stunted as a result of what happened in 1898," Joyner said. "Wilmington has never recovered economically, socially or politically."

Lawmakers established the Wilmington Riots commission in 2000 under a bill sponsored by Wright and late Sen. Luther Jordan.