Эхом из 1898 - не только речь Рузвельта, но и расистский путч в Северной Каролине, о котором рассказывается в книжке, только что подучившей Пулитцеровскую премию https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/david-zucchino-0
DAVIES: Right. So there were clearly preparations for a military assault. But there was a huge effort here also in propaganda, in information, in disinformation, fake news, if you want. Give us a sense of what kind of information was propagated which helped to create the atmosphere for this counterrevolution. ZUCCHINO: Yeah. At the time, newspapers were the king of media. They were really the only media. And The News & Observer in Raleigh was the king of media in North Carolina. And Josephus Daniels orchestrated probably the most effective and impressive disinformation campaign up until that time. It was two-pronged. It focused on telling white voters that Black public officials were incompetent and corrupt and utterly incapable of governing and utterly incapable of having the intelligence to vote and, at the same time, being sexually insatiable and on the prowl for white women. They even used a term for it - it was the Black beast rapist. And Daniels planted these false stories around eastern North Carolina, and particularly in Wilmington, of Black men supposedly attacking and assaulting white women and without any protection from a police force that they said was run by Black policemen. So this was very, very effective, and it was picked up by other papers around the state and particularly the papers in Wilmington. And they incited whites to attack Blacks. And part of the plan was to make sure that Blacks did not register to vote because Blacks outnumbered whites in Wilmington, and they could overwhelm them with sheer numbers. So during the summer, as part of this campaign, the whites created a Red Shirt militia. These were gunmen who dressed in red shirts, went out at night into Black areas and would break into Black homes, yank men out and beat them and whip them and threaten them - threaten to kill them if they registered to vote. At the same time, as part of this campaign, white merchants were told to find out whether any of their Black employees had planned to register to vote or had registered to vote. If they had registered, they were fired. If they hadn't, they were told that they would be fired if they did register to vote. <...> DAVIES: You know, this was an occasion of horrific violence inflicted upon Blacks, and it was a stolen election in that all of these state offices went from Republican to Democratic hands in what were clearly circumstances of corruption and intimidation. But there's a third element of this. I mean, you say that this was America's first and only armed overthrow of a legally elected government, and that's because there were local officials who were not on the ballot; that, even after these horrific events, were technically still in office, legally elected - some of them African Americans. What happened to them? ZUCCHINO: A mob of Red Shirts marched on city hall, led by a former Confederate colonel named Alfred Moore Waddell, at gunpoint, confronted the city councilmen and ordered them to resign. And they had no choice. They did resign. But the amazing thing was that they held an impromptu, quote, "election." And the mob leaders, the people who actually led the riot and had run through the streets killing Black men, were appointed or, quote, "elected" to fill their positions on the city council. And Colonel Waddell was, quote, "elected" as mayor. So the mob leaders put themselves in charge, and they ran the city for years afterwards. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/12/975653675/wilmingtons-lie-author-traces-the-rise-of-white-supremacy-in-a-southern-city
According to the historian David S. Cecelski, presenting Waddell as a righteous campaigner for “sobriety and peace” was standard in Wilmington until the 1990s. “I grew up in a small town in eastern North Carolina 90 miles from Wilmington,” Cecelski says. “I had a book in my middle-school classroom that listed the 12 greatest North Carolinians ever. It included the Wright brothers, Virginia Dare, and then it included three of the people who were the leaders of the white supremacy campaign.” “For something like Wilmington in 1898,” Cecelski continues, “it’s hard to describe the level of indoctrination. In the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, they bragged about [the coup]. After that, they backed off but it stayed in the history books and they talked about it as an unfortunate but necessary event.” In fact, part of how historians have pieced together the real story of the Wilmington Massacre is by looking back at newspaper archives-from towns all across North Carolina, not just Wilmington-where similar violence was coordinated that day. “They burned down black newspapers all over the state,” Cecelski says. “They shut down entry to the city from blacks and Republicans ... It’s important not to forget that this was a planned thing. This wasn’t two people getting in a fight in a street corner and sparking underlying racial tensions or something like that.” But state officials solidified their grip on power by promoting that very fiction: They originally called the 1898 incident the “Wilmington Race Riot,” with the implication that the event was instigated by a riot from blacks and quelled by Waddell’s fighters. After open celebration of white-supremacist violence lost favor, a sort of bland sanitizing of history dominated recollections. That lasted until around the time of the centennial of the massacre, in 1998, when scholars and the descendants of the Wilmington black community that had been nearly destroyed in 1898 began to push for recognition of what really happened. The state’s acknowledgement of its 70-year reign of white supremacy during the “Solid South” period followed the same pattern. Men like Charles B. Aycock, an agitator of the Wilmington riots who three years later was elected governor on a platform of white supremacy, were revered in the state until recently-and, in some cases, still are. Glenda Gilmore, a North Carolina native and a professor of history at Yale, refers to the whitewashed period as “a 50-year black hole of information.” According to Gilmore, the bloody history of white supremacy was largely unacknowledged in the state’s educational system. “Someone like me, I had never heard the word ‘lynching’ until I was 21,” she says. “This history was totally hidden from white children. And that was deliberate.” But now that history is being uncovered and spread. Aycock’s legacy has been reconsidered, and the collection of buildings and landmarks named after him in the state has dwindled. The Wilmington Massacre is widely acknowledged as a coup and as a foundational moment in creating a white-supremacist state. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/wilmington-massacre/536457/
Эхом из 1898 - не только речь Рузвельта, но и расистский путч в Северной Каролине, о котором рассказывается в книжке, только что подучившей Пулитцеровскую премию https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/david-zucchino-0
DAVIES: Right. So there were clearly preparations for a military assault. But there was a huge effort here also in propaganda, in information, in disinformation, fake news, if you want. Give us a sense of what kind of information was propagated which helped to create the atmosphere for this counterrevolution.
ZUCCHINO: Yeah. At the time, newspapers were the king of media. They were really the only media. And The News & Observer in Raleigh was the king of media in North Carolina. And Josephus Daniels orchestrated probably the most effective and impressive disinformation campaign up until that time. It was two-pronged. It focused on telling white voters that Black public officials were incompetent and corrupt and utterly incapable of governing and utterly incapable of having the intelligence to vote and, at the same time, being sexually insatiable and on the prowl for white women. They even used a term for it - it was the Black beast rapist.
And Daniels planted these false stories around eastern North Carolina, and particularly in Wilmington, of Black men supposedly attacking and assaulting white women and without any protection from a police force that they said was run by Black policemen. So this was very, very effective, and it was picked up by other papers around the state and particularly the papers in Wilmington. And they incited whites to attack Blacks.
And part of the plan was to make sure that Blacks did not register to vote because Blacks outnumbered whites in Wilmington, and they could overwhelm them with sheer numbers. So during the summer, as part of this campaign, the whites created a Red Shirt militia. These were gunmen who dressed in red shirts, went out at night into Black areas and would break into Black homes, yank men out and beat them and whip them and threaten them - threaten to kill them if they registered to vote.
At the same time, as part of this campaign, white merchants were told to find out whether any of their Black employees had planned to register to vote or had registered to vote. If they had registered, they were fired. If they hadn't, they were told that they would be fired if they did register to vote. <...>
DAVIES: You know, this was an occasion of horrific violence inflicted upon Blacks, and it was a stolen election in that all of these state offices went from Republican to Democratic hands in what were clearly circumstances of corruption and intimidation. But there's a third element of this. I mean, you say that this was America's first and only armed overthrow of a legally elected government, and that's because there were local officials who were not on the ballot; that, even after these horrific events, were technically still in office, legally elected - some of them African Americans. What happened to them?
ZUCCHINO: A mob of Red Shirts marched on city hall, led by a former Confederate colonel named Alfred Moore Waddell, at gunpoint, confronted the city councilmen and ordered them to resign. And they had no choice. They did resign. But the amazing thing was that they held an impromptu, quote, "election." And the mob leaders, the people who actually led the riot and had run through the streets killing Black men, were appointed or, quote, "elected" to fill their positions on the city council. And Colonel Waddell was, quote, "elected" as mayor. So the mob leaders put themselves in charge, and they ran the city for years afterwards.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/12/975653675/wilmingtons-lie-author-traces-the-rise-of-white-supremacy-in-a-southern-city
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“For something like Wilmington in 1898,” Cecelski continues, “it’s hard to describe the level of indoctrination. In the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, they bragged about [the coup]. After that, they backed off but it stayed in the history books and they talked about it as an unfortunate but necessary event.”
In fact, part of how historians have pieced together the real story of the Wilmington Massacre is by looking back at newspaper archives-from towns all across North Carolina, not just Wilmington-where similar violence was coordinated that day. “They burned down black newspapers all over the state,” Cecelski says. “They shut down entry to the city from blacks and Republicans ... It’s important not to forget that this was a planned thing. This wasn’t two people getting in a fight in a street corner and sparking underlying racial tensions or something like that.”
But state officials solidified their grip on power by promoting that very fiction: They originally called the 1898 incident the “Wilmington Race Riot,” with the implication that the event was instigated by a riot from blacks and quelled by Waddell’s fighters.
After open celebration of white-supremacist violence lost favor, a sort of bland sanitizing of history dominated recollections. That lasted until around the time of the centennial of the massacre, in 1998, when scholars and the descendants of the Wilmington black community that had been nearly destroyed in 1898 began to push for recognition of what really happened. The state’s acknowledgement of its 70-year reign of white supremacy during the “Solid South” period followed the same pattern. Men like Charles B. Aycock, an agitator of the Wilmington riots who three years later was elected governor on a platform of white supremacy, were revered in the state until recently-and, in some cases, still are.
Glenda Gilmore, a North Carolina native and a professor of history at Yale, refers to the whitewashed period as “a 50-year black hole of information.” According to Gilmore, the bloody history of white supremacy was largely unacknowledged in the state’s educational system. “Someone like me, I had never heard the word ‘lynching’ until I was 21,” she says. “This history was totally hidden from white children. And that was deliberate.”
But now that history is being uncovered and spread. Aycock’s legacy has been reconsidered, and the collection of buildings and landmarks named after him in the state has dwindled. The Wilmington Massacre is widely acknowledged as a coup and as a foundational moment in creating a white-supremacist state.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/wilmington-massacre/536457/
Reply
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