r, the legislature,
and the Supreme Court as well. Before the November elections in 1898 the
Democrats in Wilmington announced their determination to prevent Negroes
from holding office in the city. Especially had they been made angry by
an editorial in a local Negro paper, the _Record_, in which, under date
August 18, the editor, Alex. L. Manly, starting with a reference to a
speaker from Georgia, who at the Agricultural Society meeting at Tybee
had advocated lynching as an extreme measure, said that she "lost sight
of the basic principle of the religion of Christ in her plea for one
class of people as against another," and continued: "The papers are
filled with reports of rapes of white women, and the subsequent lynching
of the alleged rapists. The editors pour forth volleys of aspersions
against all Negroes because of the few who may be guilty. If the papers
and speakers of the other race would condemn the commission of crime
because it is crime and not try to make it appear that the Negroes
were the only criminals, they would find their strongest allies in the
intelligent Negroes themselves, and together the whites and blacks would
root the evil out of both races.... Our experience among poor white
people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any
more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men
than are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on
for some time until the woman's infatuation or the man's boldness brings
attention to them and the man is lynched for rape." In reply to this
the speaker quoted in a signed statement said: "When the Negro Manly
attributed the crime of rape to intimacy between Negro men and white
women of the South, the slanderer should be made to fear a lyncher's
rope rather than occupy a place in New York newspapers"--a method of
argument that was unfortunately all too common in the South. As election
day approached the Democrats sought generally to intimidate the Negroes,
the streets and roads being patrolled by men wearing red shirts.
Election day, however, passed without any disturbance; but on the next
day there was a mass meeting of white citizens, at which there were
adopted resolutions to employ white labor instead of Negro, to banish
the editor of the _Record_, and to send away from the city the
printing-press in the office of that paper; and a committee of
twenty-five was appointed to see that these resolutions were car