Wiley Cash’s Discussion Guide for WILMINGTON’S LIE

In the months after the Civil War, Wilmington was a city in chaos, a vast refugee camp for former Confederate soldiers who were guarded by nearly fifteen thousand Union troops. It was also a destination for recently enslaved Black families who arrived looking for jobs. Disease was rampant, resulting in forty to fifty deaths per day. Union commanders struggled to maintain order, and they resorted to calling upon the assistance of local leaders, many of whom were virulent white supremacists who easily stepped back into their antebellum roles. With history behind us and with our awareness of the results of these decisions, were their other options to create order in the city aside from putting the “old guard” back in charge?

According to Zucchino, Colonel Roger Moore’s Ku Klux Klan in Wilmington reached its nineteenth century nadir after not confronting Abraham Galloway’s informal Black militia in 1868. But thirty years later, under a well-organized white supremacy campaign, Colonel Moore was once again commanding an armed patrol, this time known as the Red Shirts, the group that would eventually perpetrate the massacre. How did the evolution of the Klan into the Red Shirts predict current para-military groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two groups who were part of the January 6 insurrection in 2021?

By 1897, the Manly brothers had a large enough readership to begin publishing The Record as a daily newspaper, and Alexander Manly immediately set about rattling Wilmington’s Black and White citizens with editorials on race, sex, and lynching, going so far as to accuse Black pastors in Wilmington of attempting to curry favor with Whites by not speaking up about White men raping Black women. As you read this book, explore the dichotomy between Black leaders like Manly and others who either spoke the truth or chose compliance.

With the 1896 decision Plessy vs. Ferguson, which made the case for “separate but equal,” Zucchino argues that “[i]n the eyes of the nation’s highest court, blacks had attained political equality but not social equality.” What does this mean? Can you give examples from the time of Jim Crow laws?

One of the arguments to politically sideline Blacks in Wilmington in the late nineteenth century was that White citizens paid the most taxes. At the time, Wilmington was 60% Black and possessed a thriving Black middle class, many members of which paid taxes on as much as $2,000 in real estate. Despite this, tax money was used unequally to benefit majority White neighborhoods and parts of the city. How is the unequal distribution of tax revenue still affecting parts of America, especially when supporting public schools? How are taxes still used as a divisive political issue?

In the early 1890s, populist Whites aligned themselves with Republicans and Black voters against the moneyed interests of Democrats, creating the powerful Fusion Party that swept elections. How was this party destroyed? What myths and made-up controversies did Democrats use to drive wedges between Black and White voters?

In March 1898, Josephus Daniels, editor and publisher of Raleigh’s News and Observer, and Furnifold Simmons, state chairman of the Democratic Party who would later become a senator, met in New Bern to discuss a plan to advance white supremacy in North Carolina, beginning in Wilmington. According to Zucchino, Daniels understood that “publishing was politics.” Can you find examples of “publishing as politics” in today’s media landscape, whether on television, in print, or online?

Anti-Black political cartoons in the 1890s accomplished for illiterate Whites what editorials accomplished for those who could read. It’s easy to think of nineteenth century political cartoons as the memes of their day. Consider how political memes on Facebook and other social media sites, many of which misrepresent facts and stoke conspiracies, play a role in our current political landscape.

In the months leading up to the November 10 massacre in Wilmington, unfounded rumors abounded of armed Black men who were on the verge of attacking the city. Zucchino argues that these rumors played on memories of the slave uprising led by Nat Turner in 1831 in Virginia, where as many as 57 White citizens were murdered by Turner and his followers. How are memories of real events often manipulated to political and cultural ends?

Alfred Waddell, who became the local face and voice of the campaign in Wilmington and eventually its mayor after the coup, was a political opportunist who, according to Zucchino, “knew how to fill a political vacuum” and “who often waited to act until he determined circumstances were fully in his favor.” How do you see vacuums being filled in today’s political environment by the right and left around issues like immigration, vaccines, and democracy?

On the day of the massacre on November 10, 1898, Zucchino makes clear that the “telegraph system proved crucial to the city’s white leaders that day,” arguing that telegraph operators were “the gatekeepers of the internet of the day.” There have been recent discussions about internet gatekeeping from cancel culture to skewing search results to banning individuals from sites like Twitter and Facebook for encouraging violence or posting false or misleading statements. Considering the power of misinformation as well as the ways communication technology has been used for ill gains going back to 1898 (and before), what can now be done to curb its most insidious uses and effects?

The day after the massacre, white supremacists, led by Alfred Waddell, overthrew the elected city government under threat of violence, installing coup leaders in positions of power. This is reputed to be the only successful coup d’etat in American history, but can it be argued that American democracy is as fragile now as it was in Wilmington in 1898?

Considers the ways in which the race massacre of 1898 was recast as a race riot during which armed White leaders purportedly put down a mob of armed Black men bent on destroying the city. This myth lasted for over a century. How can the story of history change over time? What is the best way to keep this from happening?

One of the Black leaders who was forever banished from Wilmington under threat of death was Thomas C. Miller, a pawnbroker and auctioneer who’d built a small real estate empire and was thought to have been one of the wealthiest men in town before being forced to flee. In the book’s epilogue, Miller’s great-granddaughter Faye Chaplin speaks of Miller, saying, “He was this great businessman and he had all this wealth, but where is it and what happened to it?” Chaplin’s question speaks to generational wealth and what happens when it is influenced, interrupted, or liquidated by redlining, issues concerning heirs property or, in the case of Miller, violence and the threat of death. When this happens, when someone like Faye Chaplin does not receive the benefit of her ancestor’s wealth the way so many other American families have, what can be done to balance the scales of justice?