A Black Editor Rebutted a Lynching Lie and Lost His Paper
Alex Manly named white assaults on Black women and consensual love across the color line, and white leaders used his words to justify a massacre.
Stuff You Should Know · The Wilmington MassacreAlex Manly had seen enough. As editor and publisher of the Daily Record, the Black newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina, he watched white papers depict Black residents as criminals and warn of assaults on white sisters, mothers, and cousins.
In 1898, he answered in print. He wrote that the real pattern was white men assaulting Black women with impunity, and that some relationships between Black men and white women were consensual, secret, and loving.
He argued that those rape charges were false, and said the accused men were sometimes lynched. That rebuttal would cost Manly his paper, and white leaders would twist it into justification for driving him out and burning his press.
He was responding to Rebecca Latimer Felton, a white Southern speaker who had called on white men to defend their honor by lynching more Black men to protect white women.
Manly broke the South's deepest taboo by saying it aloud, that white women sometimes willingly loved Black men. At the time, that claim alone landed like a bomb in a Southern city.
The backlash was swift. White advertisers abandoned the Daily Record, its landlord evicted the paper from its offices, and Manly received death threats.
Democratic-aligned newspapers in other towns and Southern states pulled his words from context and used them to frighten white voters. The editorial became fuel for what was openly called a white supremacy campaign.
The day after the election, about 450 mostly middle and upper class white men signed a declaration demanding that the Record be closed and that its editor, along with the mayor and police chief, be removed.
On November 10, about 500 armed white men gathered at the local armory and marched toward the Record office, growing to about 2,000 in the streets. Manly had already fled, so the mob burned the building to the ground.
Questions people ask
Who was Rebecca Latimer Felton?
Felton was a prominent Georgia writer, temperance reformer, and white supremacist orator. In an 1897 speech she urged Southern white men to lynch more Black men to protect white women, which prompted Manly's reply. In 1922 she became the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate, appointed from Georgia for one day.
What happened to Alex Manly after he fled Wilmington?
Manly escaped Wilmington before the mob reached his office and never published the paper again. He lived first in Washington and later in Philadelphia, where he remained active in Black civic life. He survived the massacre by decades and died in 1944.
Why was a Black newspaper such an important target?
The Record was one of very few Black owned daily newspapers in the country, and a symbol of Black political and economic independence in a Black majority city. That visibility made it a natural target for a campaign that aimed to end Black voting and officeholding. Destroying the press also silenced a voice that could dispute false claims.