Sandie and I took a long weekend and drove up/over to Wilmington, NC, last Friday. She lived there for about 14 years and wanted to show me around a bit and reconnect with some old friends.
We tried to go to a seafood place at Wrightsville Beach for dinner Friday, but the line to get is was so long that we bailed on the idea and got Mexican food instead.
Saturday, we went to the historic district, took a walking tour, and got some seafood at a bar and grill (which was actually really good). Saturday night, we drove past Sandie’s old house and she spotted a neighbor “kid” (now with two kids of his own) that she recognized from her time there, so we wound up spending an hour at their house. Not overly thrilling for ME (shoot, I didn’t know anybody), but she had a good time.
That evening, we went to one of her old hangs – a pool/dart bar – and hung out with some of her old friends while being filled with bourbon by one of her old bartenders.
Fortunately, we got an Uber driver for that last, because the bourbon was pretty freaking good.
Wilmington has an extraordinary history as one of the earliest, largest, and most influential towns in North Carolina – Cornelius Harnett, for example, was a signer of the Articles of Confederation and a native Wilmingtonian – but it also has a pretty dark period which was nearly forgotten until just the last 10 years or so. I’m speaking, of course, about the Wilmington Massacre of 1989. During a few days in November of that year, a group of White Supremacist Democrats not only completed the only successful coup d’etat in American history, but also exiled the majority of the city’s prominent blacks (and a good number of sympathetic whites), and murdered between 10 and 200 other blacks (nobody seems to have a good grasp on the actual number). As a result, huge numbers of blacks fled the city, flipping it from majority black to majority white literally overnight, draining it of skilled and unskilled labor, and pretty much handcuffing it economically.
The massacre can in some ways be considered to be the spark that spread Jim Crow throughout the south, as it became a blueprint for Southern Democrats on how to disenfranchise blacks without also losing the poor/illiterate whites. One enduring legacy – in 1898, blacks made up 56% of the population in Wilmington. Today, that number is 16%. This is not a spurious relationship – Wilmington today is still seen by many blacks as somewhat of a sundown town.
If you’d like to learn more about this, check out Wilmington’s Lie – a well-told and well-researched tome covering the event itself, the political causes of it, and the political fallout from it. I found it to be eye-opening, depressing, and fascinating – and quite relevant to today’s political and racial climate.
