Waddell, a leader of the Red Shirts, a White terrorist group in North Carolina, launched a “White Supremacy Campaign,” vowing to overthrow a democratically elected integrated government in Wilmington. Waddell pledged that white supremacists would win the upcoming election “by any means necessary,” even if they “had to shoot every Negro in the City.”
On Nov. 7, Waddell spoke again to rally the mob. “You are Anglo-Saxons. You are armed and prepared and you will do your duty. Be ready at a moment’s notice,” Waddell shouted. “Go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns.”
Two days after the election, on the morning of Nov. 10, a mob of 500 White men gathered at the armory in Wilmington. Waddell led them to the Daily Record, which billed itself as “The Only Negro Daily in the World.” Only three months earlier, its courageous editor, Alexander Manly, had published an editorial defending the virtues of Black men from false allegations of rape in the South. Sometimes called the editorial that shook the state, the column was published on Aug. 18, in response to a speech by Rebecca Latimer Felton, who would become the first woman and last enslaver to serve in the U.S. Senate, advocating for wide-scale lynchings of Black men.
The response by the Daily Record was swift. “Every Negro lynched is called a ‘big, burly, black brute,’” an unsigned editorial asserted, “when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers and were not only black and burly but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them.”
The editorial was widely cited as key to events leading to the Wilmington Massacre of 1898. Manly, who had been threatened, escaped the mob attack by fleeing for Philadelphia.
On Nov. 10, the mob stormed the office of the Daily Record, breaking down doors and lighting the newsroom on fire. As the presses burned, the mob grew to more than 2,000 armed White men. The mob roamed the city, which was considered a “Black mecca,” unleashing a reign of racist terror. It set fire to Black-owned homes and businesses. It killed Black people indiscriminately in a bloody shooting rampage. Black people were banished from Wilmington. In what historians have called a war on democracy, the mob of insurrectionists overthrew the government, forcing elected Black officials to resign and replacing them with white supremacists.