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From PRX. If you are a fan of Studio 360, here's another show we think you'll enjoy. I'm Ashley C. Ford, host of Monumental, a podcast series from PRX. Monumental explores the state of monuments across the country and what their future says about our own. In this 10-episode series, audio journalists from around the country piece together the complex stories behind some of the thousands of monuments that exist in every corner of the U.S. Monumental is produced by PRX Productions and made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the show. And to learn more about the series, go to prx.org slash monumental. We talk a lot about learning from history, but there's still so much of it we can't see. What if the truth was deliberately hidden, erased, covered up? That's a kind of anti-monument, where no matter what the facts are, you can't see an acknowledgement of them. We're used to recognizing someone powerful with a statue. But what happens when there's no statue or memorial to a traumatic event? Whoever lives with the impact of that history has to confront the kind of power it takes to keep it hidden.

People have carried those stories for generations and generations and generations and generations.

That's Elizabeth Alexander. She's a poet and scholar who leads the Mellon Foundation. Under her leadership, Mellon has committed itself to transforming the commemorative landscape in this country. She says some stories survive only because the people affected won't forget, can't forget. And with enough time, those memories often come out into the light.

And so imagine what can happen in a moment of restoration. And imagine also how powerful it is to tell the entire story. Don't act like it never got taken. Tell the entire story.

No monument can tell the entire story. And no monument can heal a community whose story was denied. But can a monument take part in that effort? This is Monumental. A podcast series produced by PRX. I'm your host, Ashley C. Ford. This episode is about the only successful coup d'etat ever on American soil. An act of racial violence designed to eliminate all memory of a highly successful Black community. That suppression involved racist mobs, yes, but also historians, city planners, journalists, and countless others. They conspired for decades to make a Black community's one-time prosperity and strength unimaginable. Almost unimaginable. Producer Michael Betts takes the story from here.

My name is Michael Betts. I'm an Afro-Indigenous North Carolinian. I grew up in Greensboro, in the middle of the state. From my earliest childhood, in an ever-continuing effort to give our impoverished family a vacation, my parents would make the drive down to the coast, to Riceville Beach just outside of Wilmington. I never much liked those vacations. To this day, I'm not sure which it was. Did I dislike Wilmington because I never really liked the beach? Seriously, folks, sand is an agent of the devil itself, if you ask me. Or did I not like the beach because the beach was in Wilmington? Something about this small coastal city just felt off. Something wasn't right here. As a child, I had no idea what that might be. Turns out, others felt this way long before me. When I arrived in Wilmington, it was a culture shop. Bertha Todd is 94. She moved to Wilmington way back in the 1950s. Coming from Durham, North Carolina, she noticed how even by the standards of the Jim Crow South, Black Wilmingtonians seemed strikingly timid towards white people, she says.

100% it had to do with the 1898 atmosphere.

1898.

What happened in Wilmington in 1898 is easily one of the most pivotal events in North Carolina history, in United States history even. So how did I grow up to be an adult in North Carolina and not hear about it? The answer to that question is central to the story I'm here to tell, because I'm not the only one who's been kept in the dark.

All right, great. So we are now at the 1898 Memorial.

This is Cedric Harrison. He's about my age in his 30s. But he grew up in Wilmington. He runs a company called Wilmington in Color, giving tours of the city's black history. Cedric starts his tour at the 1898 Monument and Memorial Park. As he tells his customers, local citizens didn't get serious about acknowledging the events of 1898 until the centennial in 1998.

Literally 100 years after the coup d'etat or government overthrow successfully happened here in Wilmington, which was the only successful government overthrow that happened here on U.S. soil.

Cedric Harrison wouldn't learn about 1898 until he left for college. As a kid, I didn't hear about the Wilmington massacre and coup either, despite being a product of North Carolina private and public schools. My history teachers certainly didn't talk about it. They did teach me about some mass killings in history, just not of black and brown people. Now Cedric knows the whole story, and he's close friends with some of the older Wilmingtonians who finally began public conversations about what happened 100 years later.

For many, many years up until that point, there were just whispers in private dining rooms and in family functions, and it was to a very limited amount of ears. But in 1998, that's when a lot of individuals came together publicly and started to connect the dots and dig a little bit deeper with the research and find out a lot more tragic facts around 1898.

It took another 10 years after the centennial to get the Memorial Park established in 2008. It's at the edge of town close to the Cape Fear River. It's not a place that gets much foot traffic, and when I visit, there's often nobody here. The park includes a lawn and a couple of sitting areas shaded by trees. On a concrete slab at the center of the park, there are two low stone walls with an inscription that tells the story of 1898. Behind those walls is the monument's main feature, an array of six bronze structures, each 16 feet tall. They're stylized boat paddles. To Cedric, the paddles evoke a deep relationship between black Americans and water.

Now, of course, we can talk about the positive connection as we look at religion and Christianity, baptism, renewing, rebirth, refresh. But this is more so the connection to the negative struggle that people of African descent had with the water spiritually. The connection between people of African descent coming over the bodies of water during the time of enslavement, but then more locally, the connection between Wilmington black natives being thrown into the Cape Fear River during 1898.

You heard that right. Eyewitnesses said the bodies of murdered black people were thrown into the river. I'll have more to say about that soon when I tell you the story of what happened here in 1898. Those traumatic events slammed the door on multiracial democracy in Wilmington, in North Carolina, and really in the United States. Certainly, black Wilmington has never recovered. Thanks to the efforts of dozens of Wilmingtonians, black and white, the city has taken big steps to acknowledge that terrible stain. The monument, now 15 years old, is a symbol of that progress. But even now, getting the truth told, and its meaning widely understood, feels like an uphill climb after so many decades of silence and lies.

Hello.

Hello, hello. How are you? How are you? Doing all right? We've already heard from one indispensable leader of Wilmington's truth-telling efforts, who arrived in the city more than 70 years ago.

My name is Bertha Boykin-Todd. I'm a retired administrator in the school system of New Hanover County.

She's 94 and small in stature, but Mrs. Todd is a presence. She's elegantly dressed, and her mid-century home feels welcoming and familiar. She listens to my questions intently, making steady eye contact. In 1952, she was fresh out of her master's program at the historically black North Carolina Central College in Durham. She applied for a media specialist job at Williston, the black high school in Wilmington. I was accepted immediately. She attends the showoff to her….

Because in 1952, very few white or black individuals, educators, had masters.

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I signed the contract.

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But I don't think that superintendent at that time liked people of color.

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He said, if she breaks this contract, I'll see that she doesn't get a job anywhere in the state of North Carolina. Now what would you do? I came on kicking and crying. I did not really plan to remain in Wilmington the past one year.

As a newcomer, she had questions. Because back then, hardly anyone was talking openly about 1898. But its impact could be felt.

When I arrived in Wilmington, it was a culture shock.

In Durham, Mrs. Todd's experiences included integrated dances with white university students from Duke and UNC Chapel Hill.

In Wilmington, I did not see blacks and whites openly talking with each other. And I saw most blacks not even looking white straight in the face. I was not brought up that way. My mother always said to us, when you talk with individuals, look them in the face. I was pretty outspoken. And the blacks looked at me as if I may have come from Mars. And the whites looked at me as if I just said, where did she come from? She's not like the people around here, which I wasn't.

Mrs. Todd stayed. Later, in the 1960s, she would lead efforts to desegregate the schools in New Hanover County.

I was angry with members of the black community during school desegregation.

She felt they weren't pushing hard enough.

I said, well, these black folk don't care about their kids.

Mrs. Todd didn't understand, at the time, why black folks in Wilmington seemed so resigned to their second-class status. But now, she does.

One hundred percent, it had to do with it. We're talking about the 1898 atmosphere? Yes. Blacks whispered this to me as if they would think somebody would hear it. Nader MacDonald Cotton, she was the one who told me consistently about her forebears during the massacre and the coup. I was usually a good listener, and she wouldn't let me go every time. She'd pick another opportunity to tell me about something, and I would listen. I didn't really realize the profound residual effects of 1898 then.

The residual effects were profound, and maybe I felt that too, in some visceral way, on those childhood visits. For one thing, the city was mostly white. I didn't know it was once a place of black influence and black excellence. Wilmington was majority black before the massacre and coup. But an untold number of black people were shot down in November 1898, and thousands more fled, never to return. Today, only about one in six residents is black. Wilmington is whiter than most North Carolina cities. But how was I supposed to know how Wilmington had gotten this way? It turns out most people couldn't know what really happened in 1898 because of how it was told or not told over the years. In the immediate aftermath, North Carolina's major white-owned newspapers framed the massacre and coup as a triumph of reluctant white men who were forced to put down an uprising of out-of-control black people. Prominent white men in Wilmington reached out to newspapers across the country to correct their published narratives and ensure that the whitewashed version of the story stuck. And it did. But mostly, there was silence. The state's most influential historian for many decades, Professor J.G. DeRolack Hamilton, of the University of North Carolina, was a prominent member of something called the Dunning School. They were this dominant group of U.S. historians who pushed a grossly misleading understanding of both the Civil War and Reconstruction through most of the 20th century. And he was a person who was very sympathetic to the slaveholders of the Antebellum South. One of the things he wanted to do, and we have a smoking gun on this, he did say at one point in one of the letters he was looking for documents that...

wanted to make slavery appear better. This is historian William Sturkey of the University of Pennsylvania. Sturkey says Hamilton applied that same distorted white supremacist view of Southern history to his account of Wilmington 1898. In short, for Hamilton, there was nothing to see here. Sturkey says Hamilton was asked in the 1930s whether the state should put up a marker to

commemorate what happened in Wilmington. He said, no, there shouldn't be anything about Wilmington that might offend the sensibilities of the leading white citizens of space. And that, you know, that's basically how the history was treated. If it makes white people upset, then you just don't tell

it. A few black writers and scholars did try to get the story out. The celebrated writer Charles Chestnut wrote The Marrow of Tradition, a novelized version of the Wilmington Massacre and Coup,

published in 1901. The Wellington riot began at three o'clock in the afternoon of a day as fair as was ever selected for a deed of darkness. The book would all but end his writing career

because it offended prominent white people in the literary world. Two black historians wrote books, Helen Edmonds in 1951 and H. Leon Prather in 1984. Their accounts were mostly ignored too. So all the way up to the 1990s, a deafening silence prevailed. In Wilmington, black and white people passed down fragments of the story through generations, but almost no one had a comprehensive picture. Now in the 21st century, we can tell a much fuller story.

Hi. Hi. I'm Leray. Nice to meet you. I'm Shannon Vaughn. Nice to meet you.

I'm spending a day visiting sites around Wilmington with Leray Umfleet. At the moment, she's chatting with a couple research librarians at the New Hanover County Library. They're gushing over this rare visit by Umfleet because she's arguably the leading historian on Wilmington 1898.

When I began doing the research on 1898, I began immediately to realize that this is a contentious topic and that there are competing narratives of what happened. Umfleet is a manager and research

historian with the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. When the General Assembly created what it called the Wilmington Race Riot Commission in 2003, it assigned Umfleet to produce an official state report. She completed it in 2005. My book came out in 2009. The book is called A Day of Blood, the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot. The commission was formed after community leaders in Wilmington brought closer attention to the story of 1898 at the time of the centennial. Wilmington's two black state lawmakers, Senator Luther Jordan and state assemblyman Thomas Wright, pushed to create the

state commission. The commission wanted us to create a more solid, cohesive narrative of the causes and the effects, particularly those effects for the black community in Wilmington. And it was my charge to look at the economic impact, the social impact, and the cultural impact of the violence. And I took it and ran with it.

When we come back, producer Michael Betts tells us the remarkable story that these efforts finally uncovered. That's next on Monumental from PRX. Back in a moment. This is Monumental from PRX. I'm your host, Ashley C. Ford. Let's get back to our story.

So, based on years of research by LeRae M. Fleet and others, here's what happened in 1898.

Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina at the time. A little bit larger population in the black community than the white. Wilmington was an example of what the turn of the 20th century could be for the South with everyone prospering regardless of your race or your status prior to freedom in the Civil War. Not to say it was a wonderful place to live for everyone and that it was a utopia, but of the Southern states, Wilmington residents had a higher rate of home ownership among African

Americans. Wages and education levels for black people were higher in Wilmington than elsewhere

in North Carolina, too. So, if you were an African American and you wanted to prosper and you had the ability, you might consider coming to Wilmington to begin to make it in the new world that we were

looking at at the turn of the 20th century. As for politics at the time, the labels we're familiar with now meant different things. Democrats were conservatives. They openly billed themselves themselves as the white supremacist party.

Republicans were the party of Abraham Lincoln. Seeking to court the newly available black voting population, Republicans promoted civil rights for African Americans. It should be noted, though, in 1898, that the sentiment had already begun to erode. Here's how Republican Governor Daniel Russell spoke about the black people in his party in 1897.

I promise that there should be no attempt to avoid the necessity of protecting the taxpayers of these municipalities against the danger of misrule by the propertyless and ignorant elements.

But 20 years after the collapse of Reconstruction in most southern states, North Carolina still had a thriving multiracial democracy thanks to its powerful fusion movement. The fusionists were a coalition of two parties, the populist, who were mostly white and moderate, disaffected Democrats, joining forces with mostly black Republicans. Going into the 1898 elections, fusionists held the governor's office, controlled the state assembly, and dominated North Carolina's congressional delegation. In Wilmington, they held the mayor's office and a city council majority. Leading up to the 1898 elections, Wilmington was a prime target for Democrats determined to make the South great again. They promised to end what they called Negro rule.

From the Wilmington Morningstar, October 30th, 1898. The proof cited of the progress of Negro rule.

Democrats and their allies in the mainstream press kept up a drumbeat of fear-mongering. They focused in particular on the racist claim that rapacious black men posed a threat to white womanhood.

If it needs lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand times a week if necessary.

That's from a speech that a woman named Rebecca Lattimore Felton gave in Georgia in 1897. She was a writer, pro-Confederate, and women's rights activist, and a former slaveholder. It was common then to reprint popular speeches in the paper. To fan the flames of the white supremacist campaign in North Carolina, A Wilmington newspaper, The Messenger, printed the text of Felton's speech a year after she gave it in August 1898.

Wilmington was the only populated town that actually had black political power at that time.

Cedric Harrison, who we met earlier at the Memorial Park, points out Wilmington also boasted a black-owned newspaper, The Daily Record. It was popular with both black and white readers. Its owner was 32-year-old Alexander Manley.

And he responded to this article by saying that the interracial couples that he had seen grown over the South were very passionate and willingly and consensual on both sides.

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 bring attention to them and the man is lynched for rape. Tell your men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman.

Manley's article, for all its truth-telling, was an unintended gift to the white supremacists. The local white press strategically reprinted it in the lead-up to the election. It trumpeted the article, using it to rouse white men to go to the polls and to commit violence if necessary to disenfranchise black people and their white allies. Leray Umfleet continues her story as we walk around town.

One of the major tools of the white supremacy campaign was speechmakers. One of the leading speechmakers was Alfred Moore Waddell, a native of Wilmington, a Confederate veteran, and a very fiery speaker that could inflame the hearts and minds of his audience.

In one speech that Waddell gave many times, he said this.

We shall never surrender to a ragged rabble of Negroes if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with the carcasses of dead bodies.

And that became a rallying cry for the white elements of the town, but it became a point of fear and intimidation within the black community.

This is from a speech Waddell gave the day before the election on November 7th.

Go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find the Negro out voting, tell them to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill them. Shoot them down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns.

The key organizers of the campaign in Wilmington were a group of elite white men that called themselves the Secret Nine. They formed an alliance with a paramilitary organization, the Red Shirt.

• DOMATIC Waddell gave the

Much like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers of today, the Red Shirts became the enforcement arm of the conservative political movement in 1898.

Red Shirts and white supremacy campaign leadership watched to make sure that they voted the correct way. And to keep African Americans away from the polls and Republicans away from the polls, a lot of work was also done for intimidation.

human rights for theanche women.

— Umfleet says this work started months prior to the actual election, preventing people from registering to vote, challenging the list of approved voters, removing people from the voter rolls. Threats to people's safety and livelihood carried on to the polling places on Election Day.

— And it was an extremely brave thing to do to go to the polls and vote for a Republican candidate. It didn't matter if you were white or black. It was putting your name out there as someone who was willing to stand up to the white supremacy campaign. The Democratic Party won every seat for which it had a candidate up for voting.

Through incendiary racist rhetoric, voter intimidation, and ballot stuffing, the Democrats had swept the election of 1898. But the white supremacists weren't done. On the morning after the election, November 9th, the White-owned newspaper, the Wilmington Messenger, ran an ad that read,

— Attention, white men. There will be a meeting of the white men of Wilmington this morning at 11 o'clock at the courthouse. A full attendance is desired, as business in the furtherance of white supremacy will be transacted.

600 white men showed up. At that meeting, they were asked to sign a statement read by that inflammatory speechmaker, Alfred Moore Waddell. It would come to be called the White Declaration of Independence.

We, the undersigned citizens of the city of Wilmington and the county of New Hanover, do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled and will never again be ruled by men of African origin.

The statement singled out the Black-owned newspaper, The Daily Record. It demanded that the paper's owner, Alexander Manley, leave town immediately. 457 men signed the declaration. It was delivered to a group of Black leaders, the Committee of Colored Citizens, with a demand that they respond by 7.30 the next morning. Alfred Moore Waddell would later claim he never got an answer. White supremacist leaders called hundreds of white citizens to meet at the armory of a local militia on the morning of November 10th, two days after the election.

The crowd that met Alfred Moore Waddell here on the steps grew rapidly to hundreds of men who were angry and eager to see something happen. Because if you can imagine, they had months and months and months of propaganda and white supremacy rhetoric being sent to them. And the Democratic Party had won the election, but there had not been a breaking point for the average citizen. And shouts were made to fumigate the city with the ashes of Manley's printing press. Waddell took control of the crowd, arranged them in skirmish lines, and marched them as a good Confederate general would up Market Street to then turn and go to the Manley printing press building where the building would eventually be caught on fire and burned and ending the career of the record in Wilmington at the time.

Alexander Manley had slipped out of town before the mob came for him. Cedric Harrison, who leads those tours about Black Wilmington history, says the armed white supremacists brought their frustration at Manley's escape into nearby neighborhoods.

In the Deep South, a lot of neighborhoods weren't exclusively Black or white because Blacks had to live close to where they worked. And so when some of the whites went back to their homes, they ended up seeing some Blacks just going about their day-to-day, minding their own business, and ended up shooting them when they stood. And that started a massacre that happened throughout the night.

Even as this massacre raged, the white supremacist Democrats had more violence to carry out against democracy. The Democrats had swept the election through intimidation and fraud. However, the mayor and city council in Wilmington hadn't been on the fall ballot. They were not up for re-election until the following spring. Remember, this government was fusionist, a multiracial Republican and populist coalition. The Secret Nine and their allies decided they wouldn't wait to try to vote them out.

While bullets are still flying in the streets, the existing mayor and board of aldermen were summoned to the town hall where they were summarily required to resign their position as a representative of the state. their ward in the city, and a hand-selected group of white supremacy supporters were put in their place.

The insurrectionists chose Alfred Moore Waddell as mayor. As each alderman resigned, the board elected his replacement.

So they followed the rule of law in the way that this happened. However, there were about 200 armed men in the building at the time. So this was all done under duress, and this is the exact definition of a coup d'etat, armed overthrow of a legally elected government.

On the day we spent together, Leray Umfleet and I went to the corner of 4th and Harnett. This is where the killing started on November 10th.

I get asked a lot how many people died on the day of the violence. So officially the count was less than 20, but in my research and in my digging, I kept a card file of every time I saw a reference to someone getting shot and murdered or anything like that. And once I started compiling all that information, I feel safe to say that between 40 and 60 men lost their lives that day. But it could be considerably more. And many men who were shot, and it was all men as far as I can tell, their bodies were left to lay in the street until nightfall, and their families came and buried their bodies in secret. And we don't necessarily know where all of those burial locations were.

Historian William Sturkey. It was like, how do we deal with this in a way that we can safely process the death of our loved ones, bury them, and then in some cases get out? So, Sturkey says they could not document their dead. That was in the hands of the white supremacist-controlled government agencies. A century later, the official state report verified the deaths of at least 22 people, but noted that eyewitness estimates ranged into the hundreds. Eyewitnesses also told of black people being shot and thrown into the river in large numbers. Bertha Todd first heard those whispers as a child, but couldn't understand why people were tossing bodies into the water.

Yes, it was what my stepfather said. And I said, who's throwing those dogs and cats in the river? That's all I knew. I didn't dare think they were humans.

It was only after she led the Centennial Commemoration in 1998 that she learned it wasn't just black people circulating those whispers. A white woman phoned Mrs. Todd and told her she'd heard from an ancestor a detailed account of gruesome scenes at the riverside. Mrs. Todd decided to run this account past a friend and ally, Betty Cameron, who was prominent in the white community.

And I told Betty, because we had gone beyond friendship, I told her how the red shirts kill lots of blacks when it wasn't necessary and threw them in the Cape Fear River. And Betty said to me, Well, Bertha, that's all I've heard. I was so shocked. I couldn't discuss it anymore.

So, Betty Cameron confirmed that white Wilmingtonians had passed down similarly grisly accounts. This moved Mrs. Todd to confront the reality behind the whispers. When Bertha Todd and her collaborators began calling attention to the events of 1898, it was the 1990s.

With the swearing in of Nelson Mandela as this African nation's first black president. So help me go. If it doesn't fit, you must acquit. Tickle me Elmo is the hardest thing. Can we all get along?

Tiger Woods for the record.

There it is. A win for the ages.

And it's easy to forget in our time of bitter fights over history that things weren't so noisy back then. The civil rights movement had won its victories in the previous generation, and many thought racism was declining. So when folks in Wilmington formed a committee to commemorate 1898, nobody went to yell at city council. No neo-Nazis or Confederates held threatening marches. White people's resistance was more soft-spoken. Bertha Todd remembers the reaction when she reached out to leaders of the city's mostly white civic organizations.

Let sleeping dogs lie. Don't bring this up. Why do you want to bring this up now after almost a while?

100 years. That was the first question from all white groups. But I finally got over to them with a more comprehensive analogy that I developed. At first I said, well, don't you celebrate anniversaries, wedding anniversaries, birthdays? We all celebrate those. Why not bring this up? This is history. Finally, I said, sometimes wounds don't heal properly. And the physician has to lance the wound. It's painful. The massacre, the violence in 1898 was a bad wound on New Hanover County. We're simply trying to get the data, face the facts, and begin to heal and develop a process of reconciliation.

Mrs. Todd's main partner in those efforts was Dr. Bolton Anthony. He was hired at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in the 1990s to improve race relations within the university and the city. Dr. Anthony and Bertha Todd co-chaired the 1898 Memorial Foundation. Anthony, who was white, died in 2020.

We felt as if every committee, a major committee, a black and a white, needed to do this simultaneously. Nobody talking down to anybody. No one making the decisions and coming back and informing the other. This gave a feeling of inclusivity that everybody needed.

The local Rotary Club invited Mrs. Todd to speak to their group without Anthony.

I said, no. Bolton is my co-chair and I'm not doing it. We presented a united front.

One challenge in talking to Wilmingtonians about 1898 was moving past the often glossed over story that the city had told itself for a century, that black people had gone wild and whites had been forced to subdue them. Euphemistic language would not do for what had occurred on November 10, 1898.

We didn't begin calling this a massacre. We used riot. We used negative occurrence. In the very beginning, we had to get the public accustomed to massacre. And I'm not saying Rosewood, Florida, and Tulsa didn't help us with that part, except we are much further behind in trying to bring it out to the public.

She's referring to the massacres of black people in Rosewood, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1920s. Those tragedies had gained more national attention. Bertha Todd and her team didn't hesitate to approach Wilmington's most prominent white families, including the descendants of the coup d'etat's ringleaders, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the Secret Nine themselves.

When I went to talk with the special ones, they knew that we weren't beginning a gotcha group.

They knew that. As the 1898 Memorial Committee raised funds, it was gifted a site by the North Carolina state government to build a memorial. After a worldwide search and selection process, the Memorial Committee chose a sculptor and professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

I'm Ayo Akume Odileye, and I manage the Odileye Sculpture Studios here in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

This is audio from a promotional video that the studio released in 2008. Odileye is showing a model of what would become the 1898 Memorial Park and monument.

And currently, my studio is working on a project entitled the 1898 Memorial for the city of Wilmington, North Carolina.

I listened intently to hear what Odileye himself, who created those 16-foot boat paddles, would say about their meaning. Remember, for Cedric Harrison, the paddles evoked the horrors of slavery and of black Wilmingtonians being killed and thrown into the river, as well as Christian imagery. Odileye may have had these things in mind, but he put it this way.

In African religious belief, individuals of the time believed that water played an important part in the transition from life to death and vice versa. It is as if one would take a boat ride from this life to the next. So we represented water by the use of a paddle, as in a boat paddle.

The memorial was presented to the public in November 2008. After over a hundred years, what difference

is it?

can a memorial make? I spoke with Dr. Valerie Ann Johnson, an expert on historical monuments, about their significance. She's dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, and a professor of sociology at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. She grew up in San Diego, but her parents were from Alabama and Georgia.

So I have a Southern upbringing that's just displaced. We were part of that diaspora.

She's also connected to her Gullah Geechee roots through her great-grandmother, Kizzy Elizabeth Wright.

One of my research areas is looking at African American, African diasporan cuisine, especially as it impacts the U.S. That is part of my framing of monuments, not just as something tangible and enduring, but as ephemeral. I love that word because it means that things come and go as when you prepare a meal.

Memorials do come and go. And sometimes, as Dr. Johnson says, they're put up to tell a story that isn't true or to inspire terror. And those should be removed. But some monuments can serve a useful purpose, if only as a taking-off point for more education and more conversation.

How do we tell the story about ourself? How do we tell the story about our community? And how do we tell the story about what's happening within our particular context in our particular time? And then those monuments are what we leave, thinking that they are going to tell a particular kind of story. But they're not static. There's always an interplay. Until you have constant conversation and understanding about the thing, you're not going to ever have the real truth of the thing, the truth of the story.

The 1898 memorial stands as a testament to the hard work it took to get to the truth of the story. It's also a marker of secrets still submerged under the waves of the Cape Fear River. None of the black people I spoke with in Wilmington sees the 1898 monument as anything other than a beginning. A first step to making things right, or at least less wrong. In some places, we can see the next steps in that work. What's good? What's good? What's good? How you doing? Doing well, doing well. A little tired, but you know.

He said, man, he in there praying to y'all come.

This is the Just Cut It Barbershop, one of the few black-owned businesses left in the city. I have a standing Monday morning haircut with one of its many talented barbers. See, I spend a couple of days a week in Wilmington now, ironically after all those years of hating those beach vacations with my family. I commute from Durham to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where I'm an assistant professor in the film studies department. And now I find myself a part of the effort to get the story of 1898 told. And heard. For black Wilmingtonians, taking ownership of 1898 and telling the story fully is inseparable from their efforts to rebuild a strong black community, economically, socially, and politically. They're also working to make a welcoming space for brown and white anti-racist communities to thrive.

I didn't learn about 1898 until after I graduated high school.

Sedron Emerson Sr. opened Just Cut It in 2017. His shop is part of a movement to build back a version of Wilmington that was amputated by white supremacy so long ago.

You know, you can read the history and blacks had barbershops. Wilmington was a black, you know, town. Chocolate City. You know, and to see it now that it's majority white. And those are, you know, the wealthy families and they're still eating off of that. Those funds are what they took. You know, that's just unbelievable, man. Unbelievable. You know, and they still make it hard for blacks to, you know, succeed in Wilmington, period. You know, I know it's a saying that if you can make it in New York City, you can make it anywhere. I think if you can make it, you know, a down south small town like this, you can definitely make it anywhere.

When I asked Sedron Emerson about the 1898 memorial, he had this to say.

Nah, that's just, that's nothing. You know, is that going to help, you know, the black situation in Wilmington? What's that going to do? He's focused on other work. Hey, Messiah.

Our interview was interrupted by a volunteer from the Barbershop Initiative that Just Cut It created. The shop partners with a local hospital to provide wellness checks and health information to the community. Sedron is one of a...

number of Black business owners actively building community supporting the most vulnerable.

Actually, on Wednesdays, we usually do special needs haircuts for people that really can't come to the barbershop during regular hours.

Sedron and all of the hair specialists who work alongside him understand that if you don't grow social space, Black Wilmington will never recover its political and economic power. Building Black homeownership in the city is another crucial part of that growth.

I had a download in the middle of the night that I was just given this mantle to run with.

Brenda Dixon is the founder of Get That Deed, a first-time homebuyer program that supports Black Wilmingtonians getting keys to their first home 18 months after they begin.

We've had, to date, 162 families that have become homeowners through our initiative, most of them making $12, $13, $14, $15 an hour.

Mrs. Dixon is very aware of what they're up against. Incomes have not kept up with home prices, forcing many Black workers to live far away from Wilmington.

Once I found out about all of the injustice and what was stolen from our community, it became even more passionate to me to help to restore some of that one family at a time.

She tells me the story of one disabled veteran in his 70s.

He was in a particular area. There was activities that was going on outside his door quite frequently, so he was afraid to go sit out on his porch. There again, being frail with oxygen and everything. He had been renting for 50 years, 5-0, before he found out about our program and came to us. And I sent him to the bank and read out the gate. He was pre-approved for over $200,000. And we was able to find him a brand new construction across the bridge.

With 100% financing and builder incentives.

He ended up purchasing a home for less than $200 out of his pocket. And I remember at close, and he's almost in tears, he told me, he said, Brenda, he said, I know I'm never going to pay this off, but I know now I got something to leave my kids. He said, if everybody wants to fall on hard times, they can all pile up in this house, pay the mortgage, and nobody have to be homeless. And he said, that gives me such peace. But he finally got the belief level just to try. And after 50 years, he became a homeowner within 45 days of calling me.

And for Mrs. Dixon, even after seeing so much triumph in such a tangible way for these Black Wilmintonians, she still senses the dissonance from 1898.

Some say there's still some sort of an air in this area that you have to overcome the negative and the past doubts and the fears and limited beliefs that you can still have something in this area.

As Professor Valerie Johnson reminded us earlier in the episode, monuments are meant to tell us stories about ourselves. But a structure in concrete and steel is just one form they can take. Maybe the biggest monument we're left with is the burden to rehabilitate, repair, and restore in our quest to recover. Now as a member of the community in Wilmington, I too feel the weight of the psychic cost that is still present. It is this monument that stays with me when I'm on campus and heading back home after a long day's work. It pushes me toward the monument of restorative justice and reparations that many Black, Brown, and White accomplice Wilmingtonians are so desperately focused on building. And if we miss this opportunity, to me, it will feel like a dream deferred.

This episode of Monumental was written and produced by Michael A. Betts II and John Bewan. Special thanks to the State of North Carolina, the New Hanover County Library, and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Archival voiceovers by Mike Wiley. This episode is adapted from an upcoming series on the podcast Seen on Radio from the Kenan Institute.

for Ethics at Duke University. It's part of the Kenan Institute Initiative, America's Hallowed Ground. The senior editor for Monumental is Rosalind Torticilius, and our senior producer is Nancy Rosenbaum. Jamie York is our writer, and our associate producer is Lauren Francis. The show is recorded by Bryce Bowman and Ben Erickson at Earshot Audio Post and mixed by Tommy Bazarian, with support from Emmanuel Disarme, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Morgan Flannery, and Sandra Lopez-Mansalve. Fact-checking by Christina Rebello. Our theme was composed and produced by Jelani Bowman, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. Edwin Ochoa is our project manager and our executive producer is Jocelyn Gonzalez. Monumental is produced by PRX Productions and made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. For more on the show, visit us at prx.org slash monumental. A note to you, our listener. We're taking a break and will return on January 29th, 2024. In the meantime, you can follow us on Instagram at MonumentsPod and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We'll be back in the new year with more monumental stories from around the U.S.

I grew up in a majority Black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. To get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. My parents still live on the street today, named after someone who owned 150 enslaved people.

What happened to my parents should not happen to any group of people. And that's why we wanted to preserve these stories.

Is ignorance bliss? For some people in this country, it is. But for others, we're trying to blow away their bliss.

I'm Ashley C. Ford. Thanks for listening.