We have elected scoundrels in America because because the people have said, well, at least there are scoundrel, but then it comes back in the end to correct. I think so.

I think so. In 1987, David Frost sat down with then Senator Joe Biden for an over two hour interview at age 44. Biden was making his first bid for the presidency just as the Reagan years were coming to an end.

This president, the thing that I disagree with him most about is the way he has divided this nation.

Biden would end his campaign just weeks after the interview was recorded and the tapes were never made public until now. But the harder test is it's not the one. Can I do it better than my opponent? The harder test, when everyone goes to bed and you're sitting in this library by yourself and you ask yourself, how can I be the kind of president that I think America should have? Can I be the kind of president that Abraham Lincoln was? Can I be the kind of president Franklin Roosevelt was?

Can I can I be a great president? Listen to this, never before had Joe Biden interview only on the Frost Tapes podcast. Well, I'm not sure I'd like to talk about that. Hi, it's Heidi from the What to Expect podcast this week on What to expect. I'm so excited to welcome Leslie Odom Jr. and Nicolette Robinson. They have a three year old daughter and a baby on the way. They're opening up about their pregnancy. There is no equivalent for me.

We do not have to face our death to bring life into the world and parenting issues to say hi, mom forth and their relationship. I don't know if there's a sexual clock or whatever it is, but we usually sync up pretty well. Check out Leslie and Nicollet on what to expect podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Happy Saturday after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. We started getting requests for an episode on the 1898 Wilmington Q So we got requests for us to cover this topic from folks who had not heard this episode yet.

And we got requests from other folks for us to reissue this as a Saturday classic, folks who had heard it before. Either way, that means that we are going to now rerelease our two parter on the Wilmington Q This is a two part episode that originally came out on January 15th and 17th. Twenty eighteen, so almost exactly three years ago.

And we are going to be sharing the second part next Saturday.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. And I'm Holly. Today we are talking about something. We're actually going to talk about it for the next two episodes. And it is sometimes called the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898. But we've mentioned on the show before that the term race riot tends to be pretty misleading. Race riot really suggests an incident in which people of two or more races are equal aggressors and some kind of mass violence.

But that is not usually what happened in the United States. The incidents that are described as race riots usually involve violence against a racial or ethnic minority carried out by a white mob. The incident we're talking about today in this two parter follows that pattern. It is an appalling example of violence against Wilmington, North Carolina's black community. And it was carried out by a mob of armed white men. In addition to that, it was a coup. It was the only known successful coup d'etat in the United States history.

This white mob overthrew the duly elected government of Wilmington and replaced it with one of their own using this whole incident is directly tied to the end of reconstruction and how that affected North Carolina electoral politics. So we're going to start with a little bit of scene setting related to all of that. Then we are going to talk about an immediate and pretty dramatic precursor to the whole coup and riot. Next time, we will talk about the coup itself and its aftermath.

And as a heads up, the last section of today's episode includes a discussion of rape. So for background, after the US civil war, the federal government, community leaders, religious organizations and activists all took steps to try to rebuild the nation and correct the social, economic and political problems that had grown out of the institution of slavery. These efforts came to be known as reconstruction, and they included things like amendments to the Constitution, civil rights legislation and the establishment of the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen's Bureau.

As part of reconstruction, the nation had to figure out how the states that had seceded from the union could be readmitted into it, and until that could happen, the former Confederate states were placed under martial law. The idea was that troops would occupy each state until it established a, quote, loyal Republican government. The occupying troops are meant to protect the progress of reconstruction, as well as protecting the freed people and their allies. The federal government went through a lengthy back and forth, interrupted by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln about exactly what the requirements for readmission into the union would be and how to carry those out.

In the end, the states in question had to ratify the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, as well as hold a new constitutional convention at the state level. The new state constitutions had to include voting rights for black men, and states were readmitted into the union. They were generally, at least temporarily, under the control of the Republican Party. And for a time, the Republican Party was also highly focused on civil rights and equality for both the freed people and for white citizens.

Black voters overwhelmingly voted for Republicans, and Republicans proposed sweeping changes that they believed would reshape the nation into one in which all men really were created equal. If said man on purpose here, because although there were activists for women's suffrage, the focus was really on men. But this had started to shift by the 1876 Southern Democrats vehemently objected to what the Republicans were doing. Many Democratic Party leaders were former confederates and slave owners, and they pushed back against both new economic policies and the idea that black people should be equal citizens.

The Ku Klux Klan was established in 1866 and worked both within and outside the Democratic Party to undermine reconstruction era policies and terrorize the black community. As the reconstruction went on, Democrats started alleging that the Republican governments were corrupt. And while there certainly were incidents of corruption that almost goes without saying, some of this criticism really boiled down to the Republican government spending money on things that the Democrats didn't agree with, along with a sort of chicken and egg assumption, which was also racist, that any government that allowed the full participation of black people was automatically corrupt.

Many in the Republican Party also started to pull back from making really sweeping civil rights changes and instead started proposing more moderate incremental steps. By the mid 1970s, radical Republican power was waning and state governments in the South were returning to the Democratic Party's control. By 1876, the only southern states still governed by the Republican Party where South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. This brings us to the presidential election of 1876. This was a highly disputed and deeply divisive election between Republican Rutherford B.

Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden on Election Day, Tilden had a lead of 260000 of the popular vote, but he was one vote shy of an Electoral College victory. So for our listeners living outside of the US, you may not be as familiar with this. Every state has a number of electors that's based on its population and technically people are voting for those electors who then vote for president. Meanwhile, the electoral votes for South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana were all in dispute due to allegations of fraud and voter intimidation and vote counts that did not match up.

One Oregon elector was also in dispute. Hayes had clearly won the state of Oregon, but the Democratic governor had tried to replace one Republican elector with a Democrat on the grounds that the Republican was postmaster and therefore not eligible to serve.

After weeks of bitter infighting and increasing fears that the country was headed for a second civil war, Congress created an electoral commission to try to sort this whole thing out after still more secret negotiations and political maneuvering on March 2nd. The commission voted seven to eight to award the disputed electoral votes to. The commission's final vote was strictly along party lines. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people, especially Democrats, didn't see Hayes as the legitimate president after all of this. But at the same time, all that political maneuvering which came to be known as the compromise of 1877, had included several appeasements for Democrats in the South.

One of these was that if Democrats accepted Hayes as president, the federal government would stop using federal troops to bolster reconstruction efforts in the South. So this is really the thinnest of overviews, reconstruction was a really turbulent time, there was a lot going on and a lot of it was happening simultaneously. We're really just trying to give a general sense of what the nation had gone through by the late 1970s. It was even more chaotic and violent than we can really do justice to in one episode, even if that one episode was only about reconstruction and nothing else.

Slate has been doing an academy on reconstruction and they literally have an episode zero. That is essentially a basic timeline of stuff that happened that was important during reconstruction, which gives you a sense of those important things, but not so much of like how that the flavor of the time. As reconstruction ended, the former Confederate leaders once again rose to power in many southern states in a return to white supremacy that white supremacists framed as, quote, redemption, discriminatory legislation known as Jim Crow laws followed in some places.

The shift, which had really been going on before the end of reconstruction, seemed both immediate and uninterrupted. But what happened in North Carolina shows how it wasn't really a continual linear progression from reconstruction to Jim Crow, which is how it's often imagined or framed. So historians mark a number of different spots as the end of reconstruction, and the compromise of 1877 is one of them. And we will talk about how that wound up playing out in North Carolina after a quick response, a break.

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We have elected scoundrels in America because because the people have said, well, at least there are scoundrel, but it comes back in the end to correct. I think so.

I think so. In 1987, David Frost sat down with then Senator Joe Biden for an over two hour interview at age 44. Biden was making his first bid for the presidency just as the Reagan years were coming to an end.

This president, the thing that I disagree with him most about is the way he has divided this nation.

Biden would end his campaign just weeks after the interview was recorded and the tapes were never made public until now.

But the harder test, if it's not the one, can I do it better than my opponent? The harder test, when everyone goes to bed and you're sitting in this library by yourself and you ask yourself, how can I be the kind of president that I think America should have? Can I be the kind of president that Abraham Lincoln was? Can I be the kind of president Franklin Roosevelt was? Can I can I be a great president?

Listen to this. Never before had Joe Biden interview only on the Frost Tapes podcast.

Well, I'm not sure I'd like to talk about that. Once reconstruction ended, the United States, the Democratic Party regained control of North Carolina, and at that time the party was primarily run by wealthy landowners and businessmen, it take a really laissez faire approach to the economic needs of less affluent people. So their party really started to suffer during an economic downturn in the 80s. North Carolina was a very rural state. I mean, there's still big stretches of North Carolina that are really rural, but it's even more true.

Small farmers felt like the Democrats weren't doing enough to help them in this rocky economy. And instead, railroads, banks and big businesses were getting lots of perks while small farmers got nothing. At first, the Democrats tried to adjust their platform to address these concerns, but nothing really got done. So people started abandoning the Democrats for a third party, the populists. At first, the populists tried to work with Democrats to advance their own economic agenda. When this failed, they turned to another ally, the Republican Party.

The populists, also known as the People's Party, formed a coalition with Republicans and what came to be known as fusion politics on their own. The populists and the Republicans didn't have enough power to unseat the Democrats. Not only that, the Democrats have solid control of the state legislature. They're also using a number of tactics to stay in power throughout the state. These tactics included gerrymandering and laws that allowed the state government in Raleigh to appoint people at the local level, regardless of what the local voter voters actually wanted.

So it didn't matter, for example, if a local population was overwhelmingly Republican, legislators in Raleigh would still appoint Democrats to those positions. But together, Republicans and populists did have enough support to challenge the Democrats. Although race had long been used as a political wedge in the South, white populists set aside their racial differences with the Republican Party to try to advance the issues that both parties agreed on. These issues included education, jobs and voting rights. Republicans and populists still maintained their own platforms on issues that they disagreed on, such as the gold standard.

So I should point out that the race has been used it as a political wedge everywhere. It was just most explicitly used as the wedge and the south, which is one of the things we're going to talk about later. So the idea of political parties working together to achieve a common goal was not unique to North Carolina, wasn't unique to these particular parties. But the way the fusion movement played out in North Carolina was unique, had a dramatic effect on the political landscape of the state.

In 1894, roughly 17 years after the end of reconstruction, the People's Party and the Republican Party in North Carolina agreed on a slate of candidates that included members of both parties. They endorsed these common candidates rather than running against one another.

This strategy was extremely successful. The Fusion Alliance of populists and Republicans won races all over the state. They took control of the state legislature and several statewide offices and several fusion politicians were elected to Congress. This new fusion government started making changes as soon as they were sworn in. They repealed the County Government Act of 1877, which was one of the laws that had allowed state lawmakers to appoint people to local offices rather than leaving those offices in control of the local voters.

The Fusion Coalition increased funding for schools, prisons and charitable institutions by raising taxes. And they required that political parties use standard colors and symbols so that people who were not literate could still exercise their right to vote in future elections. Some of the Fusion government's efforts also targeted the economic issues that had led white voters to leave the Democratic Party in the first place. They cut back on the privileges offered to railroads, which had been seen as favoring big business over working people.

They set a cap on interest rates, which angered banks and their investors, thanks in part to this increased access to voting. The Fusion Alliance had an even greater success. Two years later, in 1896, fueling candidates won every statewide election and they completely supplanted the Democrats. After this election, the state House included thirty nine populists, 54 Republicans and 24 Democrats. The state Senate included twenty five populists, eight Republicans and seven Democrats. So this gave Democrats who previously had had total control of the entire state government, about 20 percent of the state House and less than 15 percent of the state Senate.

Republican Daniel L. Russell became North Carolina's governor following this election. North Carolina's black population also had more representation in the government. More than 1000 black citizens held, elected and appointed offices across the state. This still wasn't even close to proportional to how many black citizens lived in the state, but it was a lot more than it had been.

The Fusion coalition and these two elections also had a huge impact on the city of Wilmington. Specifically, Wilmington is on the coast of North Carolina along the Cape Fear River and separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the by a chain of barrier islands. It was also an important port during the Civil War. And after the union took Wilmington in 1865, it had become home to an increasing number of black refugees. By 1870, the city was majority black. That meant that after the end of reconstruction, the state government had to pull a lot of tricks to keep white Democrats in power in Wilmington in defiance of the city's majority black Republican voters.

In addition to the gerrymandering and the county government act that we talked about before, there was also a lot of voter intimidation and a habit of just not holding elections. Once a Democrat was in office. In addition to the other reforms that we already discussed, the Fusion government revised the Wilmington City Charter to require municipal elections every two years so that people could actually vote candidates out of office if they wanted. The new city charter also allowed the governor to appoint five people to the Wilmington Board of Aldermen, with Wilmington voters electing one aldermen per ward to fill the rest of the positions.

In this case, the U.S. government was doing something similar to what Democrats had been doing before they were trying to limit black voters power in the Wilmington government. The fusion coalitions justification for this was a fear that if Wilmington elected a majority black board of aldermen, the Democrats would then use that as fuel for their campaigns. And while I mean this might have been a justified fear, it was definitely justified based on what happened next. That rationale was still discriminatory and it did nothing to prevent violence like that.

Their their rationale for doing this did not prevent the violence that they said they were trying to prevent. Governor Russel's five appointments to the Wilmington Board of Aldermen, where all Republicans for white men and one black man. Then on March 25th, 1897, the city of Wilmington held its first municipal election in four years. The result was a majority Republican Board of aldermen that included three black men. This new Board of Aldermen then elected Silas P. Wright, a white Republican, as mayor.

The incumbent Democrats didn't take this well at all. They refused to vacate their seats on the Board of Aldermen. The three Democrats, who were newly elected to the Board of Aldermen also teamed up with the Democrats who had been defeated. And together they claimed that the new election rules were unconstitutional and that they would have been elected under the old rules, meaning that they therefore they were the real Board of Aldermen.

So for a time, Wilmington had three competing boards of aldermen, each claiming to be the legitimate one. This sounds a little bit like, you know, European royalty disputes over who actually is running any given country at any time. This dispute went all the way to the state Supreme Court. Months later, the court ruled in favor of the Fusion Board of Aldermen that had been appointed and elected under the revised Wilmington City Charter. The Democratic Party was outraged at the success of the Fusion coalition, both in North Carolina in general and in Wilmington specifically, not only had Democrats essentially lost all political power in North Carolina, as we talked about before, a lot of people in the party were white supremacists.

They objected to the very idea of black people holding office at all.

Infuriated by their losses in North Carolina and Wilmington, Democrats embarked on a campaign to take back political power in the state. And we're going to talk about how they did that after we first pause for a little sponsor break.

Hi, it's Heidi from the What to Expect podcast this week on What to expect. I'm so excited to welcome Leslie Odom Jr. and Nicolette Robinson. They have a three year old daughter and a baby on the way. They're opening up about their pregnancy. There is no equivalent for me. We do not have to face our death to bring life into the world and parenting issues to say hi and their relationship.

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After the widespread success of the Republican and populist fusing cooperation in North Carolina's statewide election in 1896, Democrats in North Carolina started preparing for a bitter election. In 1898, Democratic Party leader Daniel Sneck said, quote, It will be the meanest, vilest, dirtiest campaign since 1876. That was in reference to the presidential election that we talked about in part one of this episode as part of this campaign. Democrats started accusing the fusion government of corruption and mismanagement. But as had been the case during reconstruction, many of these charges of corruption boil down to the fact that the fusion host government was spending tax money on things the Democratic Party didn't want it to be spent on, like the school and prison funding that we mentioned before the break, as was the case with some of the criticism of Republican governments during Reconstruction.

Democrats also made the racist assertion that black people were inherently untrustworthy. So a government that had the participation and support of black people must be inherently corrupt. But these claims of corruption and overspending were really a small part of the Democrats strategy to undermine the fictionist government and to take back political power. A much bigger piece of the strategy was an explicit statewide white supremacy campaign. Democrats actively stoked racism and racial resentment, hyping up terrors of the so-called, quote, Negro rule and framing black citizens and leaders as an active threat to white virtue and the white way of life.

They spread horror stories of brutality at the hands of black police officers and painted black civic leaders as threatening white womanhood. And they condemned white men who allied with black Republicans as race traitors and unscrupulous devils. Again and again, white Democrats brought up the idea of home protection against the widespread threat of black people and the need to return to the safety and security that had supposedly existed under white democratic rule. Although a lot of our focus and these two episodes is on black men, black women were targets of this as well.

They were portrayed in the white media and in propaganda as shrieking disrespectful harridans who were lewd and promiscuous. For example, there was a group of black women who started a campaign to get the same courteous treatment that white women received on public transportation, like the streetcar driver offering them a hand as they got on and off the car. Democrats propaganda portrayed this effort as a belligerent tantrum and, quote, trying to rise above their station. North Carolina Democrats got some fuel for their white supremacy campaign from outside the state, thanks in part to a speech given by Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia.

Felton had played a big part in the political career of her husband, William Harold Felton. She was such an influence on his work that an editorial about them ran under the headline quote, which Felton is the congressman and which the wife. She also had a political life of her own as a suffragist prohibitionist and reformer, and she would eventually become the first female U.S. senator. She was appointed following the death of Senator Thomas E. Watson.

If you've ever walked through that tunnel in Hartsfield Jackson International Airport with the section on Atlanta history, there is a picture of Rebecca Latimer Felton in August of 1897. She gave a speech called Woman on the Farm before the Georgia Agricultural Society, which was later reprinted in the Wilmington Morning Star. This is a speech she had given in various forms before outlining the issues that we're facing farm wives. She argued that the biggest threat to a white farmer's wife was the risk of being raped by a black man while her husband was away in the fields.

She criticized white men for failing to protect their women. And she explicitly advocated lynching black men in order to prevent rape in this speech. She said, quote, If it needs lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts, then I say lynched a thousand times a week, if necessary, for some context on this statement. Lynching was one of the primary ways that white supremacists tried to incite terror and submission among the black community following the end of slavery, victims of lynching were frequently accused of having raped, groped or otherwise assaulted a white woman.

These kinds of allegations could also lead to mass violence, which is what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 and in Rosewood, Florida in 1923. Those are two massacres that we have talked about on previous episodes.

Exact numbers are really hard to pinpoint, but today it is estimated that only two percent to 10 percent of rape allegations in the United States are false. But during the period that we are talking about here, the rape allegations that were used to justify lynchings and massacres were overwhelmingly false. The idea of a threat to white women, particularly a white woman's virtue, was basically being used as an excuse to torture and murder black men. The murders themselves also tended to be horrifying, gruesome and carried out in public with the victim's bodies desecrated after their deaths.

On top of that, the idea that black men were rapists who were in active and ongoing threat to white women was widespread. It was actively used by white supremacists as part of their efforts to retake control of the government. So a week after Felton's address, Wilmington's black newspaper, The Wilmington Daily Record, which may actually have been the only daily black run newspaper in the United States at the time published a response. My response was most likely written by its editor and co-owner, Alex Manley.

This editorial framed these rape allegations as starting with consensual relationships between black men and white women, and it compared these relationships to those between white men and black women. The editorial went on to say, meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman's infatuation or the man's boldness bring attention to them. And the man is lynched for rape. Every Negro lynched is called a big, burly black brute, when in fact, many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers.

And we're not only not black and burly, but we're sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them. As is very well known to all, this piece recommended that the white community, quote, teach your men purity.

And it concluded you set yourselves down as a lot of carping hypocrites. In fact, you cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you seek to destroy the morality of ours. Don't ever think that your women will remain pure while you are debauching hours. You sow the seed. The harvest will come in due time. There is a lot to unpack with this editorial in white society relationships between white men and black women. Sort of an open secret, Alex Manly himself was descended from former North Carolina Governor Charles Manly and a woman who was enslaved in the governor's household.

But it's not accurate to suggest that relationships between white men and black women were all consensual, especially those that had taken place during slavery and were between a free white man and an enslaved black woman. Even after the end of slavery, there were still substantial innate power differences to consider, especially between white men and black women.

So regardless of all that, this editorial spread well beyond the daily records readership. Its suggestion that a white woman would have a consensual relationship with a black man sparked outrage among the white community. The newspaper was evicted from its downtown Wilmington offices and had to relocate to the black owned Love and Hall.

Democratic newspapers across the state, including the Raleigh News and Observer and the Wilmington Messenger, reported on the Daily Records editorial under headlines that focused on the pieces purported slander and defamation of white women. The coverage also suggested that Manly himself must have been involved with some poor white man's wife and was writing from his own experience.

The Daily Record editorial then became a huge part of the Democratic Party line on, quote, home protection. According to propaganda here in print was evidence of just how depraved and dangerous black men were and how great a threat to white womanhood as they focus their campaign efforts on the urgent need to return North Carolina to a state of white supremacy. Democrats started using the Daily Record editorial as a talking point in their political pamphlets and speeches. They made explicit efforts to encourage racist violence, in the words of Alfred Moore Waddell, who would be a major part of the KU we're talking about next time, quote, We will not live under these intolerable conditions.

We will never surrender to a ragged Rafil of Negroes.

Even if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses and with that threat, we are going to be part of the story and leave the rest of it for next time. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook URL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now, our current email address is History podcast at I Heart radio dot com.

Our old HowStuffWorks email address no longer works and you can find us all over social media at MTT in history. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

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We have elected scoundrels in America because because the people have said, well, at least there are scoundrel, but then it comes back in the end to. I think so.

I think so. In 1987, David Frost sat down with then Senator Joe Biden for an over two hour interview at age 44. Biden was making his first bid for the presidency just as the Reagan years were coming to an end.

This president, the thing that I disagree with him most about is the way he has divided this nation.

Biden would end his campaign just weeks after the interview was recorded and the tapes were never made public until now. But the harder test is it's not the one. Can I do it better than my opponent? The harder test, when everyone goes to bed and you're sitting in this library by yourself and you ask yourself, how can I be the kind of president that I think America should have? Can I be the kind of president that Abraham Lincoln was? Can I be the kind of president Franklin Roosevelt was?

Can I can I be a great president?

Listen to this. Never before had Joe Biden interview only on the Frost Tapes podcast.

Well, I'm not sure I'd like to talk about that.