Posted on 10/13/2007 10:26:14 AM PDT by Dubya
Symposium draws meeting's largest crowd
The N.C. NAACP is giving the state two options related to telling the story of the 1898 Race Riot and compensating descendants of riot victims.
"You can do it through the General Assembly or we're going to build a case," state NAACP President William Barber said Friday during a national symposium focused on the coup d'etat.
Several hundred people attended the event, which was the highlight of the state NAACP's 64th annual convention that ends in Wilmington today.
"It is not about just saying, 'God, that was bad,'●" Barber said. "We want to say, 'We're going to take you to court North Carolina.'●"
Legal experts, professors and national NAACP board members discussed how moving forward recommendations made by the state-appointed 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission isn't just a local matter.
"It's a national issue," said Carolyn Q. Coleman, a National NAACP board member. She added that the national board has made a resolution calling for the recommendations to be passed.
"What we do here today and what you do in Wilmington after we leave from here will show the nation whether we're serious about dealing with our past and making our present and future better," she said.
Last year, the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission submitted a report to the N.C. General Assembly showing historical evidence that in November 1898, as part of a statewide white supremacy campaign, Wilmington's city government was overthrown, the campaign's black and white opponents were forced out of town, and violence claimed an unknown number of lives.
The commission made 15 recommendations the state could enact to bring healing to the city and descendants of 1898 victims.
Those included providing judicial redress to compensate heirs of victims who can prove loss and relationship to victims through statutes, and implementing a new redevelopment authority and economic incentives to encourage minority business and home ownership in the Northside and Brooklyn, which were among the sites of racial violence in the city more than a century ago.
About a dozen House bills supporting the recommendations stalled in committees after being introduced this spring.
Lewin Manly, the grandson of Alex Manly, spoke Friday about how his grandfather fled the city before the riot. In 1898, a mob of whites in Wilmington pursued Alex Manly, hoping to lynch him for an editorial he published in his newspaper, The Daily Record, Wilmington's only black-owned newspaper at the time. He escaped, but white mobs torched his business and vowed to kill him if he returned.
Lewin Manly said he would like the symposium to be a form of enlightenment and he favors the state awarding "compensation" related to the 1898 riot to provide funding for education and subsidized housing.
Historian John Hope Franklin, who could not attend the symposium, voiced his support for reparations via video clips the state NAACP recorded during a Friday interview.
Franklin connected the 1898 race riot to misdeeds done to blacks during the slave trade and before emancipation.
"I want us to stop and think about what this has done to the vast millions of people who are still crawling on the ground trying to get up. … We need to make amends for all of that," he said.
Barber encouraged state NAACP members to demand that their state representatives take action on the recommendations when the legislature reconvenes next year.
He also mentioned having a march in Raleigh on the issue and holding another symposium. Meanwhile, he said, the state NAACP plans to start an archive of testimony from descendants of 1898 victims.
Eleven descendants were recognized during the symposium Friday.
Inez Campbell-Eason said the riot cost her family part of its legacy. Through research she learned that in 1898 her great-great-grandfather, Isham Quick Sr., owned real estate downtown, operated a moving company and was a board member of the Metropolitan Trust Co., a black-owned Wilmington bank, she said.
"We often wonder what happened to the bank and the funds," she said.
Campbell-Eason said she hopes the symposium is not just another form of "lip service" to 1898 descendants.
"People like myself get lost in the shuffle," she said. "I hope it brings about national attention."
Angela Mack: 343-2009
angie.mack@starnewsonline.com
Still have those reparations are we?
How about amends for the NAACP race riot at Duke University last year?
You know, the one with the paid NAACP screaming thugs terrorizing the campus demanding the lynching the 3 innocent white lacrosse players?
There’s more to the Wilmington Riot that just the typical black/white issues. A newly elected city/county government was thrown out of office by force and a new one was appointed to replace it.
I love the way they DEMAND reparations — or what will you do? Thuggery at its best. In the name, of course, of hurt feelings. Will it just never end?
I love the way they DEMAND reparations — or what will you do? Thuggery at its best. In the name, of course, of hurt feelings. Will it just never end?
Hey, call up those Indians again.
Sure, I want to work for the rest of my life to pay because sometime, somewhere, somehow, something wasn’t fair.
>There’s more to the Wilmington Riot that just
So what? The salient point here is that we are not liable for every single injustice or unfairness in history and thats it.
I’m not about to go down that road.
I meant my comment in the context that the Wilmington Riot is “swept under the rug” historical event. 100 years ago a legally elected government was overthrown by armed insurrectionists. That should be in the history books, but the black executions overshadow that fact.
Try that today without the deaths and see if the story is suppressed for 100 years.
"I want us to stop and think about what this has done to the vast millions of people who are still crawling on the ground trying to get up. … We need to make amends for all of that," he said.
Ok. I stopped. I thought.
Here's what you need to do . . . you and the vast millions still crawling on the ground trying to get up because of something that happened more than a hundred years ago.
Stop playing the pity pot. It got boring a long time ago.
Stop whining.
Stop making excuses.
Stop behaving like children.
Get up off your hands and knees. Stand up straight. Take responsibility for the here and now. Behave like men and women.
Am I missing something? How does this make the State of North Carolina culpable? Sue the descendants of the arsonists, if you can. I hope the legislature ignores this completely. And if these racial golddiggers somehow get a like-minded jury to agree...do not pay a cent. What's a judge going to do, fine the State? What will s/he do to enforce such a bill?
That is certainly interesting in itself. And worth discussing. But, it is hardly unique.
The same thing happened to the entire state of Rhode Island in 1841. That is not widely known, either.
Thank you. I’m sick of this idiocy.
Why not just stipulate that any reparations owed to blacks for slavery are equal to payments owed to whites for the hundreds of thousands who died in the civil war to get the slaves their freedom, shake hands and move on.
No mention in this article (no surprise there), but this infamous episode, probably the darkest chapter in North Carolina history, was a full-on violent political coup d’etat of a legitimately elected Republican government by the NC Democrats. This is why I fully support the Democrat party being sued into bankruptcy for reparations for having violently and murderously oppressed Blacks since the early 1800s (and even White Southern Republicans from Reconstruction onward). Of course, the NAACP now is a wing of the very party that engaged in that terrorism. Again, quite interesting they don’t mention the “D” or “R” words anywhere.
How is the State of North Carolina, today, responsible for something that happened over 100 years ago? Seems to me the "white mobs" were responsible. Get the money from them.
What about the “race riots” in Jersey City (1964), Harlem (1964), Watts (1965) and Detroit (1967)? Why shouldn't the NAACP pay reparations to those cities and those businesses destroyed?
Sounds like a good plan. Now if the rest would only follow suit. But no, the NAACP is still after the taxpayers money.
This is different from the Dorr Rebellion of RI. In that instance, you had the legitimate RI government that prevented huge numbers of male RI residents from having a voice in their government (then, only the elites even had a right to vote, and an extremely small number of people could dictate who was elected to office). This was a revolution of the majority (the same people that would be enfranchised in almost any other state at the time) demanding their right to vote.
In the case of Wilmington, this was a revolution of a rabidly racist White Democrat minority seeking to overthrow a Black-White Republican majority coalition (not right after the Civil War when vast numbers of White Confederates were disenfranchised — this was 33 years after the war, and 2 decades after their power had been restored). Big difference in the two cases.
OK, just as soon as the NAACP steps up and offers to pay for black on white crime.
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