- Title
- 1898 Wilmington race riot report
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-
- Date
- May 31 2006
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-
- Creator
- ["Umfleet, LeRae."]
-
- Place
- ["Wilmington, New Hanover County, North Carolina, United States"]
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1898 Wilmington race riot report
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in the economy.18 Wilmington’s immigrant
population was the highest in the state
throughout the nineteenth century due to a
constant influx of foreign immigrants. With
a relatively large immigrant population,
many who arrived in Wilmington formed
their own social frameworks for sharing and
maintaining their European cultural roots.14
In descending order, the next class to
be found in the city was the white working
class. This level of white society was
multifaceted but shared a common bond of
being excluded from the highest levels of
society because they lacked wealth or status.
Some working-class whites in Wilmington
could earn a comfortable living for their
families whereas others lived at the poverty
level. Before the war, white laborers
competed with African Americans, both
slave and free.20 Because of limited options
in town, men supplemented their incomes
through rural hunting, fishing, and tapping
pine trees to send tar, pitch, and tuipentine
into the city for shipment. The working
class formed the largest group of whites in
the city, and the category included all types
of workers, from skilled artisans to unskilled
day laborers. These men reflected the larger
view of the South in that they harbored
contempt towards blacks, slave and free,
based on the economics of the labor system
in which they lived.21 It was reported in
ls Elizabeth B. McKoy, Wilmington Block by Block,
134-135.
14 Primary among social organizations for German
immigrants were local churches. For example
because of the large number of German immigrants
who arrived in Wilmington in the 1840s and 50s, the
North Carolina Lutheran Synod established a mission
there in 1858. A significant number of Jewish
residents of German origin also lived in the city and
helped to organize the state’s first synagogue.
Wrenn, Wilmington, NC, 1 17-1 19, 217-218; Evans,
Ballots and Fence Rails, 1 23.
2,1 Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 2 1 .
21 One facet of racial disgust came to the fore when,
during the early phases of Reconstruction, blacks
made use of agricultural farmland or timber
September 1865 by a northern journalist that
white North Carolinians, regardless of class
or political slant, “unaffectedly and heartily
do despise the negro.” 22 It was observed by
the upper class elites that some whites
refused to work as carpenters and masons,
professions traditionally dominated by
enslaved and free black artisans in
Wilmington, because they believed the work
to be beneath them.23
properties that they did not own. Upper- and lower-
class whites, whose traditions were grounded in
respect of each other’s property rights, disliked what
they perceived as disrespect for white property.
However, most blacks emerging from slavery were
propertyless and did not possess the same concepts of
ownership. Since slaves had no such property-owning
traditions, they were simply practicing the same sort
of agricultural dependence known to them before
slavery’s end, and some even harbored ideas that the
property they worked on their old masters' farms
belonged to them. Furthermore, John Hope Franklin
points out that free artisans and skilled workers were
often targets of organized action, to the point of using
the courts to prevent other whites from hiring free
black artisans. Railroads were among the larger
slaveholding entities in North Carolina prior to the
war. Most of the North Carolina Railroad's
employees were enslaved, removing potentially
lucrative and stable jobs from the white workers'
market. White railroad laborers were paid low
wages, had little job security and were the first
employees to be laid off. Further, historian John
Haley concluded that "the contempt whites had for
blacks manifested itself in negative attitudes’’
regarding black “efficiency, character, and
intelligence.’’ Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 53-54,
74; Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk:
African American Property and Community in the
Nineteenth Century South (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2003), 130-161; Franklin, Free
Negro in North Carolina, 136-141; Allen Trealease,
The North Carolina Railroad, 1849-1871, and the
Modernization of North Carolina (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 62-69;
John Haley, Charles N. Hunter and Race Relations in
North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1987), 4.
22 Haley, Charles N. Hunter, 4, 12.
23 Bellamy, Memoirs of an Octogenarian, 8.
Bellamy’s view of white artisans is somewhat
skewed since modem research has shown that many
whites in the city were working in building trades.
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