Several years ago, I wrote a post concerning my great-great-grandfather, George Davis, a Confederate senator and later Confederate Attorney General, a statue of whom was in Wilmington, N.C. The post was light-hearted: yes, the Confederacy was bad, but he was a man of his times and it was kind of cool to have a statue of your ancestor displayed in the middle of a city.
But there is a darker side to this beautiful port city on the Cape Fear River. Wilmington is also notorious as the place of “America’s only successful coup,” which took place in 1898. In that year, a group of white citizens orchestrated a campaign of white supremacy — a term that is not a 21st century “woke” designation, but one that they themselves proudly used — to elect one of their members as a congressman (through an intimidation campaign to keep black people from voting) and then to take over the city government by force, ejecting a multiracial administration and installing an avowed white supremacist governing clique, with Alfred Waddell installed as the new mayor. In the process, a number of their multiracial opponents were killed or run out of town. In the ensuing year, Wilmington — and North Carolina as a whole — re-wrote a number of its laws, effectively disenfranchising most of its black citizens and instituting what became known as Jim Crow laws. The events in Wilmington, which saw active state government complicity and lackluster and ineffective federal intervention, in turn inspired other areas of the South to institute Jim Crow laws and to return race relations to a strict caste system.
The history of the 1898 coup was deliberately downplayed and whitewashed, with history books calling it a “race riot,” in which a corrupt and dangerous city government was “rescued” by the upstanding white citizens; and the white leaders were portrayed as having “saved” many black residents from an outraged white mob (which they themselves had stirred up) and then restored order, expelling citizens in order to save lives. Thus the narrative was changed from a disgraceful event into an act of courage and resolve.
There have been several books written about the Wilmington coup, and a new one was published in January 2020, just a short while before the pandemic gripped the world. This book is Wilmington’s Lie, by David Zucchino, and it is a detailed and fascinating recounting of what really happened and brings to light this sordid and pivotal event.
What role did great-great-grandfather George Davis and other members of my family play in this shameful affair? George himself had died two years previously, in 1896, but in the decades following the end of the Civil War, he had actively campaigned for white supremacy, often together with Alfred Waddell, a distant cousin, the man who later became the mayor installed at the point of a gun during the coup.
George Davis had nine children from two wives, and three of his children had preceded him in death. By 1898, the remaining six children — my great-grandfather Junius Davis and his five sisters and half-sisters — were grown and married. Junius had served as a corporal with the 10th North Carolina Regiment during the Civil War, and was at the siege at Petersburg right before the war’s conclusion.
George Davis’s Confederate background and mindset lived on vigorously in the next generation, and those who were veterans were lauded in the white community. Junius, George’s only surviving son in 1898, and his three brothers-in-law present in Wilmington were not only heavily involved in the coup, but several were in prominent leadership roles. Junius Davis and John Ennes Crow, husband of Junius’s sister, Emily Polk Davis, were both members of the Committee of Twenty-Five, and Junius spoke at the “white men’s" meeting on November 9, just days before the coup. Two other brothers-in-law of Junius played even more important roles: George Rountree, husband of Junius’s sister, Meta Alexander Davis, was one of the White Supremacist organizers; and Donald MacRae, new husband of Junius’s half-sister, Monimia “Cary” Davis, was commander of a Wilmington Light Infantry unit.
The women of the family were also involved in asserting white supremacy and preserving the memory of the Confederacy. Junius’s second wife, Mary Walker Cowan Davis, was president of the Cape Fear chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy in the early 1900s, and it was through her efforts that the statue of George Davis, “revered son of the Cape Fear,” was erected in 1911. This statue, an overt homage to white supremacy, stood tall for more than a century, until it was finally taken down in June 2020, in the wake of nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd.
So my family members were not simply “men of their times,” in their actions and attitudes, but rather people who actively worked to turn back the clock and restore white supremacy in as strict a form as they could get away with, convinced that their cruel system was just. They had fought hard and valiantly to maintain the slavery system, and when that failed, they fought to erect a system of rigid racial hierarchy in its place. The noticeable progress towards civil rights and a more just society, happening over a full generation after the Civil War, was not only halted but ferociously taken backwards, with white domination of the city and the South as a whole lasting for over sixty years.
This history is relevant to today, both in light of the words and actions of the Trump Administration, and in the backlash to the multiracial demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. In the summer of 2020, there seemed to be a broad societal consensus that “black lives matter” and that policing and other reforms should follow, along with a deeper look into our history. The kumbaya feeling did not last long, and I was shocked at how quickly and ferociously the pushback came. This has been very evident where I live, in Northern Virginia, where vicious and often false attacks launched against so-called “critical race theory” in public schools have been relentless for over a year. Astonishingly, this push against CRT was a huge contributor to the Republican win in Virginia’s gubernatorial election this past November, just one year after Biden defeated Trump. The VERY FIRST executive order the new governor issued, on the day of his inauguration this past Saturday, and which also happened to be Dr. Martin Luther King’s actual birthday, was to ban the use in public schools of “divisive concepts,” including “Critical Race Theory.” And we all know who gets to decide which concepts are divisive, and what constitutes critical race theory.
The belief that progress may be slow but at least is always moving forward has been shown yet again in the 21st century to be false; people must stand up and work to make progress happen— the long arc of history only bends towards justice if people make it do so.