In the late 1800s, Wilmington, North Carolina, was a city where African Americans thrived economically and held elected office. This did not sit well with White supremacists, who during the election of 1898 used violence to intimidate voters and overthrow the elected government. It’s considered the only successful coup d’etat in US history.
The leader of the coup, a former Confederate colonel named Alfred Moore Waddell, gave a speech in which he told White people: “If you see the Negro out voting tomorrow, tell him to stop. If he doesn’t, shoot him down. Shoot him down in his tracks.”
This week on Reveal, we look back at that coup and its consequences. After the overthrow, North Carolina legislators passed laws segregating White and Black people in housing, trains, schools, libraries, and other public spaces. Those laws were copied in states across the South, sowing the seeds of the Jim Crow era and much of the structural racism that continues today.
We then go further back in history, to just after the Civil War, when the US government made its famous “40 acres and a mule” promise to formerly enslaved people. Most Americans assume the promise of land was never kept, but over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed records that prove freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts of land that once were part of plantations.
This is an update of episodes that originally aired in October 2020 and June 2024.
Dig Deeper
Listen: Monumental Lies (Reveal)
Read: Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, by David Zucchino
Listen: 40 Acres and a Lie series (Reveal)
Learn more: 40 Acres and a Lie (A collaboration between Mother Jones, the Center for Public Integrity, and Reveal)
Credits
Reporters: Alexia Fernández Campbell and Pratheek Rebala | Producers: Pamela Kirkland and Nadia Hamdan | Editors: Taki Telonidis and Cynthia Rodriguez | Legal counsel: Victoria Baranetsky | Production managers: Zulema Cobb and Steven Rascón | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks for the Wilmington story: Hannah Breisinger, Rachel Keith, and Katelyn Freund from WHQR; the Cape Fear Museum of History and Science; and the Southern Oral History Program at UNC Chapel Hill | Special thanks for the Freedmen’s Bureau story: April Simpson, Jennifer LaFleur, McNelly Torres, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Freeman, Peter Newbatt Smith, and Wesley Lowery from the Center for Public Integrity
The 40 Acres and a Lie project was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Wyncote Foundation.
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, The Hellman Foundation, and Reveal listeners.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. This week, with the election on everyone’s mind, we want to take you back to an election from the past, a notorious one. Maybe you’re thinking 2020. Nope, not that election. This one took place more than 120 years ago, and it does involve a violent attempt to overturn the results. It happened in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, and we first brought you this story a few years back. The election of 1898 left a deep scar in Wilmington, one the Black community still feels today. | |
| Speaker 2: | Even though it may not live consciously in your mind, that your body remembers it and that the trauma of knowing that there were people hiding in swamps because there were White mobs that were looking to kill them for no other reason but the color of their skin. That lives in somewhere deep inside of you. | |
| Al Letson: | It’s a dark, nearly forgotten chapter of America’s voting history that people tried to suppress for more than a century. | |
| Speaker 3: | They were just going to kill all the Black men. | |
| Al Letson: | It was an event that totally changed this place. | |
| Speaker 4: | This is not a race riot. It has to be deemed a massacre. | |
| Al Letson: | And it also created a blueprint for embedding structural racism and inequity in American life even after slavery was outlawed. | |
| Speaker 5: | The White supremacists who carried out the coup created a false narrative that lasted almost a hundred years. | |
| Al Letson: | When I learned about what happened here, I realized that Wilmington has so much to say about why things are the way they are. And before we get started, I should say this story contains some offensive language and violence. It begins with the ancestors of this man. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | Ready. [inaudible 00:02:02] on the porch, round the corner. | |
| Al Letson: | Dr. Lewin Manley Jr. He’s out on his back porch in Atlanta. It’s summertime and the crickets and locusts are chirping in his yard. Lewin is a retired dentist who keeps active in his garden. He was 87 when we visited him and the keeper of his family’s history. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | Here I have a series of letters that my grandmother wrote to her sons. | |
| Al Letson: | Lewin’s grandparents met in Wilmington in the 1890s. The story goes that his granddad, Alexander Manley, was working with a contractor painting a house. A young pretty woman walked by. It happened to be the contractor’s daughter. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | And he saw my grandmother and she’s walking and he said, “Who is that?” And my grandpa said, “Don’t you worry about that. Just do your painting up here.” And says, “If you ever get to be a great entrepreneur, whatever, you might get a chance to meet her.” | |
| Al Letson: | Alexander had gone to Hampton University and studied printing. He eventually became that entrepreneur. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | He decided he would start a paper because there was not a Black paper in Wilmington so he became a recorder of deeds. He had a newspaper and he had friends among Whites, Blacks, everybody. | |
| Al Letson: | Going to college and starting a newspaper only thirty-some years after slavery ended was remarkable. And Alexander, who eventually married the contractor’s daughter, was just one of many prominent professional Black men in Wilmington. There were ministers, doctors, lawyers. | |
| David Zucchino: | It was really an outlier. First of all, it was the biggest city in North Carolina then, and it was a very important port. It was a city of some 20,000. | |
| Al Letson: | David Zucchino is a journalist and author of Wilmington’s Lie. He spent years researching the city’s history. | |
| David Zucchino: | And because of the port and because it was a railroad terminus, there were just a proliferation of new jobs that opened up after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. | |
| Al Letson: | A lot of formerly enslaved people took those jobs, and some of them were really good jobs. As far as we know there are no recordings of those Black leaders in Wilmington. But here’s one of their daughters, Carrie Taylor Wright, talking about her dad in 1981. | |
| Carrie Taylor W…: | My father was deputy collector of the United States Custom post. He and Mr. Dancy, John Dancy, a Negro, was collector. He was deputy collector during a Republican area. He was city treasurer of the city of Wilmington for many years. | |
| Al Letson: | Back in the 1890s, the Republican Party was still the party of Abraham Lincoln Democrats opposed civil rights and voting rights for Blacks. Of course, at this time, only men could vote. In the years right after the Civil War, Democrats dominated politics in the South. But after a while, White farmers became frustrated with the party. | |
| David Zucchino: | There was a terrible recession and crop prices failed, and White farmers were disillusioned with the Democrats. So they made this unusual alignment called fusion with Republicans, which meant that they aligned themselves with Black Republicans as well as White Republicans. | |
| Al Letson: | This fusion movement was very progressive for its time, and it believed in giving African Americans not just economic opportunity, but political power too. And sometimes White people found themselves on the other side of it. | |
| David Zucchino: | White people were coming before the courts and facing a Black magistrate, sometimes would be arrested by a Black police officer. And this was just intolerable to the White supremacists who had been used to running Wilmington. | |
| Al Letson: | In fact, the more that Black people flourished in Wilmington, the more intolerable it became for White supremacists. By 1898, they were scheming to run Wilmington again. And Alexander’s newspaper, The Daily Record would be at the center of their campaign. Lewin picks up and reads one of the letters his grandmother Caroline wrote in the 1950s. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | “I’ll tell you about the record. Sometimes I’m too tired and how it will bring heartaches to think about it even to this day.” She said, ‘I’d like to write cheerful letters, and there’s too much sadness about that newspaper for me to tell you now. So I will wait until I can find courage to tell you. I wish I could forget it.” | |
| Al Letson: | There was an election in 1898 and White supremacists saw it as an opportunity to retake control of the city and strip away the gains Black people had made. | |
| David Zucchino: | They said they were not going to tolerate what they called Negro rule. That was the term they used for it. They said, “We’re not going to tolerate it.” And they announced that they were going to remove the multiracial government and keep Black men from voting and from holding public office. | |
| Al Letson: | During the summer before the election, the White elite in Wilmington came up with a plan. It started with what today we call fake news, stories in the press that stoked fears about Black men. | |
| David Zucchino: | There were accusations from the White supremacist newspapers across the state that there was an epidemic of rapes of White women by Black men. And I looked into the crime figures. And of course there was no such thing. But the newspapers fanned this fear of what they called in print, the Black beast rapists. They use that term quite a bit. | |
| Al Letson: | The biggest newspaper in North Carolina was The News & Observer, owned by Josephus Daniels. Here’s just a few of the outrageous headlines they ran. More Negro scoundrelism, two Negro rape fiends, Black beasts continued to outrage. The young daughter of a respectable farmer roped for rape. The message to White readers of The News & Observer and other papers was relentless. And for people who couldn’t read, the papers used racist cartoons. | |
| David Zucchino: | They got this steady diet of Black men as criminals, Black men as rapists, Black men as incompetent, who had no right to vote. And at the same time, White voters were told that Whites will rule North Carolina. Whites will rural Wilmington. It is their God-given right. We are the superior race and the African Americans are here for our purposes to work for us and that’s the way it has to be. | |
| Al Letson: | Then in August, the paper published an editorial written by an influential woman from Georgia. That editorial caught the attention of Lewin’s grandfather, Alexander. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | My grandfather responded to an editorial by lady named Rebecca Latimer Felton, who made a speech called Women on the Farm, discussing how White men did not protect the White women on the farms, and they had to work with the Blacks out there and these Black brutes were raping them at leisure. | |
| Al Letson: | She said Black brutes were raping White women on farms. Her editorial called for Black men to be lynched to better protect White women. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | And she said, “If they lynched a thousand a week, it wouldn’t be enough.” Just a horrible thing. So my grandfather responded to that lecture, and he’s irate by what she was saying. And actually he placed Black women on the same level as White women and said Black women were more prone to be raped than White women were. | |
| Al Letson: | Alexander published his own editorial arguing that Black men and White women were having consensual relationships and that there was a long history of White men raping Black women. While true, these points were so scandalous that Alexander’s editorial ended up playing right into the White supremacist campaign. The News & Observer even republished his editorial several times. | |
| So that one editorial kind of gave them the fuel that they need to push forward this agenda. | ||
| David Zucchino: | Yes. And what’s interesting, just to show you how calculated this whole coup was, the vigilantes known as Red Shirts, and they were basically the KKK and that was the vigilante and the gunman of the White supremacy movement, wanted to lynch Alex Manley that day, the day the editorial came out. And the White leadership said, “No, let’s wait. We can have a much greater political effect. If we wait till November closer to the election, then I promise you, you can burn his newspaper down and you can lynch him.” | |
| Al Letson: | It looked like Alexander Manley’s editorial could cost him his life. Even today, his grandson is shocked he dared write it. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | There’s no way I could figure out why in the world would he write something like that and not expect the world to come tumbling down on him. | |
| Al Letson: | As the election got closer, the conflict was moving from the newspapers into the streets. In addition to the terrorists called the Red Shirts, the White supremacists had two state militias at their command. Some of their members were former Confederates. These groups were heavily armed, and the night before election, they were ready for a fight. | |
| David Zucchino: | The leader of the coup, former Confederate colonel named Alfred Moore Waddell, gave a speech in which he told Whites that, “If you see the Negro out voting tomorrow, tell him to stop. If he doesn’t, shoot him down, shoot him down in his tracks.” And those were his exact words. | |
| Al Letson: | So what happened on election day, November 8th, 1898? | |
| David Zucchino: | They would break in to voting precincts, to counting offices in the Black wards and take the lanterns, throw them on the ground, start a fire, and then while everyone was distracted, would pull out all the Republican votes and stuff the ballot boxes with Democratic votes. | |
| Al Letson: | The White supremacists had started fires to create a distraction and stuffed the ballot boxes. The Black vote was stolen. But the conspirators still had a problem. It was a midterm election and the local government, where most of the Black politicians held office, was not up for re-election. So the White supremacists decided they would overthrow that government by force. | |
| David Zucchino: | They made a list of what they considered the leading Black men in Wilmington. It was almost 30 men. And they sent the Red Shirts out to gather these people up and they brought them into a meeting and they laid down the law and they said, “First of all, we demand that you bring us Alex Manley, the editor, that you close down the Black newspaper and then you renounce all positions of power. Or if you don’t do this by tomorrow, then we’ll take matters into our own hands.” | |
| Al Letson: | Members of the city government and prominent men from the Black community had until the next morning to give up everything they had. | |
| When we come back, hat happened when the sun came up. You’re listening to Reveal. | ||
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative reporting in PRX, this is Revealed. I’m Al Letson. The election of 1898 was officially over and the White supremacists in Wilmington had succeeded in suppressing the vote. They’d stuffed ballot boxes and terrorized Black men to keep them from voting. White Democrats took back some seats in the North Carolina State House and they did well in county elections, but the local government in Wilmington, which included several Black aldermen, was not up for re-election. The day after the election, the White supremacists sent their ultimatum to Black officials. It said, “Leave office and give us Alexander Manley, the Black newspaper publisher or there will be bloodshed.” The officials wrote a response in which they distanced themselves from Alexander and offered to “use our influence to have your wishes carried out.” But that message never reached the White supremacists. On November 10th, these terrorists held a rally at the Armory, then headed for the neighborhoods, some hopping on streetcars. | |
| Margaret Williams Neal: | Oh, she used to talk to me about old times. | |
| Al Letson: | That’s Margaret Williams Neal. She’s talking about her grandmother, Della Wright. | |
| Margaret Williams Neal: | She talked about the riot here in Wilmington. She was 12 years old she said when that happened. | |
| Al Letson: | Della was working at a White man’s house. He came up to her and gave her a warning, which we need to let you know, contains the N-word. | |
| Margaret Williams Neal: | And this man came home, the man she was working for, and he told her, he said, “Della, you stay here in this house.” So he came in and said he had a room with a lot of guns and came to get his gun. He said, “You stay here, you’ll be safe because we going to kill some niggers.” | |
| Al Letson: | But Della didn’t listen to him. She was afraid for her nephew, so she went to sound the alarm. | |
| Margaret Williams Neal: | So she say that when he left home, she ran out of the house to warn her sister so she could find her son, and she said she ran on home and she got home. They were living on Front Street during that time. She said when she got home, she told her sister and her son happened to be there at the time, that they were so glad because she said he knew he was been one of them that was killed. So they put him up under the house up in the chimney. | |
| Al Letson: | Della’s nephew was a good-looking single guy who was popular with White women. He was right to hide. | |
| Margaret Williams Neal: | And she said when they came looking for him, said they searched that house because they knew where he lived, but he’d been in so much trouble and she said that they ran all up underneath the house and everywhere, but he was still up in that chimney, and didn’t go up in there to look. | |
| Al Letson: | Della’s nephew was safe, but around town, the violence was building. First at Alexander’s newspaper, The Daily Record, the Red Shirts went there and they didn’t find Alexander, but they burned the building down, printing press and all. Then they moved on. | |
| Glenn Anthony Harris: | When they cross over Market Street and go onto the north side, these are where the first three murders take place. | |
| Al Letson: | Glenn Anthony Harris lives in Wilmington and teaches history at the UNC campus there. | |
| Glenn Anthony Harris: | This is where the first intimidation is taking place. This is where the shots take place. This is where the fights take place. | |
| Al Letson: | Glenn says, the terrorists even mounted a machine gun on a wagon. That gun was cutting edge technology at the time and they turned it on Black residents. | |
| Glenn Anthony Harris: | And it is a violent period. It is a very violent time. It gets to the point where it is so deadly that Blacks are fleeing for their lives. They’re leaving their homes. A word is already out that this overthrow of Wilmington city government is taking place and it’s a violent… You have Whites that are armed with already laws in Wilmington where Blacks cannot arm themselves. So they’re either packing up, taking what they can, leaving and going into the swamps, going into the woods to conceal themselves, to hide themselves. | |
| Al Letson: | Some families fled to the Black cemetery to hide, the one place in town they hoped the White supremacists wouldn’t look. The coup leaders tracked down prominent Black men and their White allies and at gunpoint gave them a choice. Here’s journalist David Zucchino again. | |
| David Zucchino: | Any Black leaders who counseled accommodation and did not stand up to the White supremacists were allowed to say all others were banished from the town. And there was a formal banishment campaign in which 50 or 60 of the top leaders in the city, Black and White, were marched to the train station at gunpoint on the day of the coup and put on the trains and said, leave Wilmington, never come back. And not one of them ever did. | |
| Al Letson: | In a matter of days, the political power and much of the wealth of the Black community was stolen. After the coup was over, 2,100 Black residents had fled town. As many as 60 Black men were dead. But the one man that the coup leaders wanted to punish more than anyone else, Alexander, the newspaper publisher, was nowhere to be found. His grandson, Lewin, reads his grandmother’s account of what happened. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | In this letter she wrote to her sons, and here she’s telling them how their father was involved in the coup and the effect it had upon her. | |
| Al Letson: | She writes that Alexander had gotten a tip from a White friend. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | A White man who was a friend of your father, sent for him and told him they’re going to lynch him that very night, and he must get out of Wilmington. | |
| Al Letson: | The Red Shirts were patrolling the roads, steamboats and railroads, and no one could leave town unless they knew a secret password. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | This friend gave him $25 and said, “This is the password, and may God be with you my boy. You are too fine to be swung up to a tree.” | |
| Al Letson: | With the $25 and that password, Alexander made his way to the edge of town. He was light-skinned that could pass for a White man. He came to a roadblock. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | He used the password and escaped in the woods and over Fulton Bridge. The guards at the bridge said, “Halt.” He used the password again and they said, “We are having a necktie party in Wilmington. Where are you gentlemen going?” “We are going after that scoundrel manly and the guards loaded their buggies with Winchester rifles.” | |
| Al Letson: | The guards had no idea the man they were talking to was the man they were hunting. Not only did they let him get away, they gave him weapons. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | That is how your father life was saved. | |
| Al Letson: | Alexander escaped with his life, but the coup had been a success. What historians say was the only successful one in American history, and the coup wouldn’t just reshape the government in Wilmington, it wrote some of the first lines of Jim Crow history in America. Wilmington was about to have a big effect on the rest of the country. After the coup, Josephus Daniels, the White owner of The News and Observer, went on a mission. His paper had stirred up the mob violence with racist stories, and now he wanted to figure out how to suppress the Black vote permanently. His son, Jonathan Worth Daniels, talked about his father’s plan in an oral history in the ’70s. | |
| Jonathan Worth Daniels: | My father had been the man chosen by the Democratic Party in North Carolina to go all over the South and devise the best and hopefully the most constitutional system to disenfranchise the illiterate Blacks while not disenfranchising the illiterate Whites. Well, he went down to Louisiana, a number of places and came back with the legislation which was adopted. | |
| Al Letson: | Josephus Daniels came back with an idea the Democrats wrote into the state constitution in 1899. It required that anyone who wanted to vote had to show they could read, but to make sure illiterate White people could still vote, the law exempted any citizen whose ancestor voted before 1868, the first year Black men could vote. After Democrats took over the North Carolina state legislature, they started passing laws separating White and Black people from which train car they could ride on to the Bible they swore on in court. More laws followed for schools, housing, libraries, and parks. And soon Jim Crow laws modeled after North Carolina’s swept the south. By 1914, every southern state had passed laws mandating segregation. During the civil rights era in the sixties, the country tried to undo the legacy of those Jim Crow laws, but changing the laws didn’t erase the damage they’d done and the violent coup. Even in Wilmington, the history of that coup and massacre had largely been ignored for a hundred years. | |
| Bertha Todd: | I came here 54 years after the 1898 incident. | |
| Al Letson: | Bertha Todd was the driving force behind a centennial held in 1998 to remember the coup. It was a watershed moment for Wilmington. The centennial explored the impact the coup had on the city, the state, and the nation, and it encouraged people from the Black and White communities to talk about its legacy. | |
| Bertha Todd: | And I can’t begin to tell you what I really felt inside. People were not talking with each other. Whites were not talking with Blacks except those who worked for them. And I continued to wonder what is wrong with Wilmington. | |
| Al Letson: | The centennial came and went, but the conversation it started continues in the present with Glenn Harris who teaches history at UNC Wilmington. Do you see what happened in Wilmington connecting outside of Wilmington? I’m thinking about the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others at the hands of police. Do you see a connection between the two? | |
| Glenn Anthony Harris: | I see a direct line, a direct connection between those events. What happened with George Floyd, and you and I know and society knows that’s not a one-off incident. We have always had these conversations. We have always put forward an argument that how Blacks are treated in American society is not a one-off event. Part of the problem is that to suppress it, you look at these as one-off events. | |
| Al Letson: | Glenn says, being Black means being racially profiled in his hometown and on his own campus. And that makes him constantly aware, even hyper-aware of how he’s perceived by people around him. | |
| Glenn Anthony Harris: | It’s at 5:30, a quarter to six in the morning and I’m walking in the street after running and I see this White lady walking up the sidewalk with her dog. My immediate reaction is to move from the side of the street that she’s on to the full opposite side of the street. My instincts tell me to do that. And I’m not saying that she felt threatened. I was going to make sure that that thought didn’t even have to enter her mind. But who has to think like that? | |
| Al Letson: | It’s so interesting to me because that happens to me numerous times in a month, and I think that my White friends never have to think about it at all. | |
| Glenn Anthony Harris: | Imagine for a moment what that feeling of emotion and the feeling of threat is in 1898 when before November 10th, in the Black community, everything seems to be going smoothly where you don’t understand that behind closed doors on the opposite side of town, there are people that are conspiring to upset your livelihood, that are conspiring to upset your life. Not only that, are conspiring to make sure that you leave the city in which you live. Something as simple as walking down the street and having to move over is a small way of saying, hey, something’s not right here. | |
| Al Letson: | It’s the protection mechanism. It’s the understanding of when you’re Black in America, you have to think about things that other people just take for granted. | |
| Glenn Anthony Harris: | And that is the linchpin of how something that happened in 1898 can still reverberate. That story that is being told not within White society, but that is told over and over within Black society, know your place. Because if you step out of line, well, what’s the worst that can happen? Well, let me tell you the story about 1898. | |
| Al Letson: | Even today, 1898 shapes the lives of Black and White people in Wilmington. We’re at one of Wilmington’s oldest parks on a fall day in September. There’s a group of kids on the playground. There’s a baseball game going on. This is a place that’s become significant for two women who are meeting up at the park. Meg MacRae is the great-granddaughter of one of the coup leaders, Hugh MacRae. The park was named after him. | |
| Meg MacRae: | I actually, to be perfectly honest, haven’t been in this park in probably over 20 years. | |
| Al Letson: | For Sonya Patrick, this park was always a place to avoid. | |
| Sonya Patrick: | Growing up here in Wilmington. Black people did not come to Hugh MacRae Park. We didn’t know anything about 1898. We just didn’t come to Hugh MacRae Park. | |
| Al Letson: | When Hugh MacRae donated the land, he said it was to be a Whites-only park. That rule was changed decades ago, but the reputation stuck. In 2020 with monuments all over the country coming down, there was a movement to change the name. Sonya was the head of Black Lives Matter in Wilmington. | |
| Sonya Patrick: | To me, it was just emotional, just a drive by and say, gosh, Wilmington, it’s still glorifying this legacy of the 1898 massacre and the descendants still have not gotten any reparations. It’s been 120 years. | |
| Al Letson: | Meg came out in support of changing the name. | |
| Meg MacRae: | It was time for people to pay attention to what these voices are saying, not my voice. Not just your voice, but everybody’s voice. And try to do something that might make a lasting change or plant a seed anyway. | |
| Al Letson: | In the summer of 2020, they debated it at a county commission, and the name change passed. | |
| Sonya Patrick: | I was surprised it happened so fast. It was emotional for me. | |
| Meg MacRae: | Me too. | |
| Sonya Patrick: | Because I drove by. The bus would come by this way when I would go to the [inaudible 00:15:20], and you would see Hugh MacRae from the street, that big arch [inaudible 00:15:24]. So when they took that big arch down, it was emotional for me because I could not believe it. And they wasted no time. | |
| Meg MacRae: | They didn’t. | |
| Al Letson: | This park is now called Longleaf Park. | |
| Sonya Patrick: | When I come to this park now and after talking to Meg, it’s a certain peace there. She can’t change the past, but it touches me to know, okay, we going to have a better future together because we’re stronger as a nation when we’re together. | |
| Al Letson: | And it’s not just this park. That summer, a school named after one of the coup leaders was stripped of its name. And in Raleigh, a statue of the newspaper publisher, Josephus Daniels, was taken down. As for Lewin Manley, whose grandfather lost his newspaper, he’s glad the park’s been renamed. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | They should get his name off of everything his own, because these are just evil people. You are perpetuating and saluting evil people. | |
| Al Letson: | The coup shifted the trajectory of Lewin’s family. After Alexander wrote that editorial, he lost everything. That history was so painful. Lewin’s grandfather never told his family what happened. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | When they had the [inaudible 00:16:36] in Wilmington and the Manleys left. Unfortunately, my grandfather never discussed that anymore what really happened. He probably went to his grave thinking that he was a perpetuator of what happened there, which he wasn’t. | |
| Al Letson: | It wasn’t until decades later, the Lewin’s grandmother wrote letters to her sons explaining the violence in Wilmington, the plot to lynch their father and his escape. Lewin didn’t find out until he was an adult. So how did you talk to your children about what happened in Wilmington? | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | Well, the same as I’m talking to you, it’s just a matter of history. Know your history and be on the alert at all times because you never know who is your friend and who’s not your friend. | |
| Al Letson: | For everything the Manleys lost the property, the newspaper, Lewin Fields, his family was fortunate to just survive. | |
| Dr. Lewin Manle…: | So after looking at it more or less from an academic standpoint at this time, is that is just so many families have gone through situations worse than us. I mean, people lynched for no reason. If you let it get too much into your soul, you’re through. So you just do the best you can and hopefully tell the story when you get a chance like now. | |
| Al Letson: | And we have to keep telling these stories, not just because it’s our past, but it’s very much our present. The coup in Wilmington was overt, but the horrific violence and families losing everything wasn’t the end. The leaders of the coup planted a seed that grew and cracked through the new foundation laid down by reconstruction. Many of the advances Black people achieved or dissolved, and Jim Crow laws spread through the south like kudzu vines. And that might seem like ancient history. That’s what the civil rights movement was supposed to take care of. Right? But kudzu vines are hard to kill and you can still see them today. Our story was produced by Pamela Kirkland. Decades before the coup in Wilmington, the US government made a promise to formally enslave people that would’ve transformed lives for generations to come. It kept its word then broke it. That story next on Reveal. | |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Looking back on what happened in Wilmington, it’s easy to focus on the violence, the overthrow of the local government and all that was taken away from the Black community. But Wilmington is also a window into all that Black Americans had achieved in the decades after slavery ended. This next story takes us back to just after the Civil War, when the US government made a promise to Black people that gave them hope for the future. Breaking that promise still stings today. | |
| Speaker 6: | Well, me, I’m being rowdy, hot and Black. I want my 40 acres and my mule. | |
| Al Letson: | In 1865, the government promised it would give land to formerly enslaved people, a foundation for building wealth they could later pass on to their descendants. Their promise came to be known as 40 acres and a mule. I thought I understood the history of 40 acres. Basically, it never happened, but it was more than just a promise. Black people were given land titles, ink on paper. They took possession of the property until the government changed its mind, kicked them off and gave the land back to the original owners who were White former slave owners. This past summer, Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity collaborated on a three-part series about the rediscovery of this lost history. It’s called 40 Acres and a Lie, and if you missed it, I highly recommend you check it out. | |
| It all started when Public Integrity reporter Alexia Fernández Campbell found herself clicking through a folder of documents she found on a Smithsonian website. It was labeled miscellaneous and the folder was full of hard-to-read records. Among them was something that looked like a certificate. She took a closer look and could see it was from 1865, a man named Fergus Wilson was being given permission to hold and occupy a tract of land 40 acres on Sapelo Island, Georgia, and it, “Prohibited people from interfering with the man’s possession of this land.” The document bears the stamp of a major general in the military. | ||
| Alexia would eventually learn that this land title was a part of a trove of nearly 2 million records from the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency created just after the Civil War to help formerly enslaved people transition into freedom. The Freedmen’s Bureau records are crucial to understanding this pivotal moment in our history. So are those land titles and yet most of us have never seen them. | ||
| Kate Masur: | I’ve never looked at the possessory land titles. | |
| Al Letson: | Including historian Kate Masur, an expert on the history of Reconstruction. | |
| Kate Masur: | There are certain documents associated with this history that have in, hidden away in the National Archives. They’re hard to find. It’s hard to know how to ask for them. Literally, if you were to go to the National Archives, like what would be the form that you would fill out. | |
| Al Letson: | For years, the only way you could see the Freedmen’s Bureau records was to travel to the National Archives in Washington DC. Then you’d have to know the exact needle you were looking for just to be directed to the right haystack. The only reason Alexia was able to find that document at all is because hundreds of thousands of these records have been making their way online for the first time. And the story of how they got there involves the Mormon church, a worldwide pandemic and artificial intelligence all colliding to bring this history out of the cold, dusty shelves of the National Archives and into the 21st century. Here’s Alexia. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | There are few people who are as familiar with the Freedmen’s Bureau records as Damani Davis. He’s an archivist with the National Archives. | |
| Damani Davis: | These are the first records to formally document this mass population that prior to the Civil War was not officially documented outside of property records. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | In other words, this was the first time the formerly enslaved were seen and documented as people, not property. | |
| Damani Davis: | The particular records that stood out to me or grasped my feelings or emotions or whatever you want to call it the most would be the transportation records. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Transportation records are exactly what they sound like. They show Freedmen’s Bureau agents trying to find transportation to reunite husbands and wives, children and parents after slavery tore families apart. | |
| Damani Davis: | One case I remember it was the father was based in Augusta, Georgia, and he had two daughters who were in, I think Corpus Christi, Texas or somewhere in Texas, and he was seeking help to have them sent back to them. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | This man’s children had ended up roughly a thousand miles away. Damani says finding stories like this was a sobering reminder of just how cruelly enslaved people were treated. | |
| Damani Davis: | Their status as a father or a mother or children was not legally recognized within slavery. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | On top of reuniting families, the Freedmen’s Bureau distributed rations, opened hospitals, helped establish schools. It legalized informal marriages entered into during slavery. The agency not only tracked incidents of racist violence, it pushed for prosecutions. The Freedmen’s Bureau touched so many aspects of Black life at the time, and its records are the best window we have into what was and wasn’t done for Black people at this turning point in American history. But Damani admits that for a long time… | |
| Damani Davis: | They were extremely difficult for the everyday American citizen to research. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | One big reason, the agency’s records were in really bad shape. | |
| Damani Davis: | These are very old bound volumes in various states of deterioration. Sometimes you could see that some of them are actually falling apart. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | It took an act of Congress to protect them. | |
| Earl Hilliard: | I’m Earl Hilliard, former member United States Congress. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Earl served in Congress from 1993 to 2003. At the time, he was the first Black congressman from Alabama since reconstruction, part of an influx of Black legislators that were elected in the nineties. | |
| Earl Hilliard: | They realized that records had not been preserved. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | And he says the reason they all learned that the records were not being preserved was in large part because of legislation called H.R 40. It was a reparations bill named after 40 acres and a mule. Many Black lawmakers at the time were supporters of the bill and they knew if they ever wanted to make a case… | |
| Earl Hilliard: | You have to have records. You need to know what has taken place or who was involved, what need to be done or what was done or what action was taken to either give or to deter. All of this is so important when you get ready to move forward with any action. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | So Earl was part of a group of legislators who introduced the Freedmen’s Bureau Preservation Act of 2000. The bill required that a majority of the records be indexed and scanned so instead of touching them, they could be viewed on rolls of microfilm. And because microfilming a bunch of old historical documents isn’t necessarily the flashiest of bills, no one really connected it to the political hot potato that was H.R 40 so it passed with bipartisan support. | |
| Earl Hilliard: | We slipped it in so to speak. Congress, they knew about it. It was not really contentious. We didn’t go out and beat our drums on it before nor afterwards. Nobody really thought about the application of it. They didn’t think about what the consequences would be in the future. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | It was a monumental preservation effort. The project cost just $3 million, but took half a decade to finish and it was just one step in a very long game towards reparations. | |
| Earl Hilliard: | But it was something we really wanted and we really needed. I mean, you wouldn’t be interviewing me now if the bill had not passed. The research you’re doing was made easier by that bill. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Earl is right. It did make researching the records so much easier, but it didn’t make them all that more accessible because they still weren’t on the internet where the rest of the world was. And it would’ve been a daunting task to get them there, if not for two unlikely developments. The first involved the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yes, the Mormon church. | |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | They had thousands of reels of microfilm already in their collections. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | That’s Hollis Gentry Brown. She’s with the Libraries and Archives branch of the Smithsonian. Hollis had been working to get more than 1 million Freedmen’s Bureau records online when she heard that the Mormon church was already way ahead of her. | |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | They had hundreds of thousands of published genealogies and anything that had been published related to local history, family history, that’s what they were collecting in Utah. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | And when Hollis says in Utah, she’s referring to a pretty one-of-a-kind place. | |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | They have a mountain in which they preserve these records. I’ve been to the facility. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Literal mountain? | |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | In the mountain. It’s a [inaudible 00:09:39]. It’s amazing. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Billions of records are kept there. It’s the largest genealogical collection in the world, and among all the reels of microfilm were copies purchased from the National Archives, including the Freedmen’s Bureau records. We tried to speak to the Mormon church about all this, and while officials didn’t want to talk, they confirmed what Hollis told us. The church digitized more than a million Freedmen’s Bureau records and in 2015 they went online. | |
| But we’re not done yet because there was still one huge problem. Have you ever tried to read 19 century cursive and faded ink? It’s hard, like really hard. So the documents needed to be transcribed, something Hollis and the Smithsonian were prepared for. They began organizing transcribathons with the hope that everyday people would sit down at their computers and decipher each word. Hollis and her team had it all set up. | ||
| Hollis Gentry B…: | What we didn’t have was the large numbers of volunteers. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Maybe because it’s pretty tedious work squinting at hundreds of old documents for hours on end trying to make out, is that a J or is that an F? It isn’t exactly going to entice a ton of people, that is until another very unlikely development. | |
| Speaker 7: | More than 84 million Americans are now under state directives to stay home. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | A worldwide pandemic. | |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | We had a lot of people who had an interest in doing something while they were sequestered, and so they turned to the Smithsonian. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Pre-pandemic, only about 3000 volunteers signed up to transcribe records. After the pandemic, that number ballooned to more than 50,000. An act of Congress, a mountain in Utah and a COVID lockdown, all that paved the way for me to stumble upon that miscellaneous folder of possessory land titles. And the story of the documents could have ended here, but we at Public Integrity are adding our own chapter. | |
| Pratheek Rebala: | I like to joke that the distribution of good versus bad handwriting has been the same over centuries. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | This is my colleague Pratheek Rebala. He’s a data reporter. Pratheek and I have spent the last two years trying to figure out how to search through all of the Freedmen’s Bureau records, including more than a million documents that still haven’t been transcribed. | |
| Pratheek Rebala: | This collection is so massive that I just don’t know where to start. And for context, I’m new to this. I mean, this is the first time that I’ve ever worked with documents that are this old. The language is different. Keywords are different. I mean, so I had a big problem because I didn’t know what to search. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Let’s stop and zoom out for a minute to remember the world before computers. It was a world that revolved around paper, those loose pieces of biodegradable fibers. The government, the military, the banks, everything ran on paper. It seems so precarious now. And Pratheek and I are hunting for some very specific papers, 40 acre land titles. But to find them, we need to bring these records into the future, and that’s exactly what Pratheek does using artificial intelligence. | |
| Pratheek Rebala: | I feel a little weird about saying AI. I’ve been getting (beep) for calling this AI. Is machine learning okay to use? | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Okay, let’s call it machine learning. You’ll hear Pratheek refer to it as the model. Basically, he teaches the model to search through all the documents that haven’t been transcribed yet. | |
| Pratheek Rebala: | What you can do is have the model look at a land title and find other documents that look like it. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Without text transcriptions, Pratheek’s model can’t search words, so it functions more like an image search. So isn’t it kind of like facial recognition? | |
| Pratheek Rebala: | Yes. It is almost exactly like facial recognition. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | So you can think of that first possessory land title as the face we want the model to recognize. Lucky for us, it has some pretty unique characteristics. | |
| Pratheek Rebala: | The land titles are much smaller. They’re almost like the size of a three by five photo, and they have a signature in the bottom, and then they have big, bold text title at the top. | |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | By using this model, we were able to identify the names of hundreds more people who received land titles, and we expect to find more because the model is still learning. Before Pratheek’s tool, I was searching the old fashion way, opening up each century’s old document, click by click. It was slow, but still effective. Together, Pratheek and I collected more than 1,200 names. It’s the largest collection of 40 acre land title holders ever put together. They were always there. They just needed to be found. And these documents are not just Black history, they’re American history. Lost narratives of individual men and women as they tried to build lives from nothing. The land titles, they’re just one piece. | |
| Pratheek Rebala: | We’re just six eight people that were looking through these documents and our lens was always 40 acres. So everything we were looking for is so closely tied to property and land, and we were interesting other things, but that was our focus. We’re hoping that by making these tool available, more people of course can learn about their ancestors, but also just understand what life was like in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The significance of this collection can’t be overstated. | |
| Al Letson: | And that’s why Public Integrity is making their tool available online. To see that database go to our website Revealnews.org and scroll down to 40 Acres and a Lie. This story was reported by Alexia Fernández Campbell and Pratheek Rebala. It was produced by Nadia Hamdan. Our show was edited by Taki Telonidis and Cynthia Rodriguez. Thanks to our partners at the Center for Public Integrity, including April Simpson, Jennifer LaFleur, Mc Nelly Torres, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Freeman, Peter Newbatt Smith, and Wesley Lowery. | |
| The 40 Acres and a Lie project was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Wyncote Foundation. For our story about Wilmington, thanks to Hannah Breisinger, Rachel Keith, and Katelyn Freund from WHQR. Also to the Cape Fear Museum of History and Science and the Southern Oral History Program at UNC Chapel Hill for archival audio. | ||
| Victoria Baranetsky is Reveal’s general counsel. Our production managers are the wonder twins, Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb. Score and sound design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, My Man, Yo, Arruda. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Support for Reveal comes from the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Support also comes from you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. | ||
| I’m Al Letson. And remember there is always more to the story. | ||