The Mystery of the Confederate Statue

I thought I’d repost this bit of history sleuthing I did several years ago since it seems even more relevant now than it did to me at that time.

When I heard about a controversy surrounding the removal of a statue of a white Confederate soldier in front of the Winston-Salem Federal Courthouse a few blocks from my wife Susan’s downtown studio, I mentioned it to some local artists I know. My black friends insisted that the statue had been erected as a symbol of white supremacy, while many of my white friends said that the statue wasn’t meant as a racist symbol to intimidate blacks, but was simply a monument of heritage that honored Confederate soldiers that had fought valiantly for their culture and freedom.

Being irrationally Manichaean in my thinking about most things, I knew only one of the two views could be right, so I began researching Forsyth County’s Confederate monument to find clues to what it symbolized at the time it was created. It had been paid for by donations to The Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled on October 3rd, 1905. The guest speaker invited that day was the Honorable Alfred Moore Waddell, Mayor of Wilmington, North Carolina.

I wondered why the city would ask the mayor of Wilmington to make such a long trip out to Winston-Salem to dedicate a statue?

So, I dug in deeper beyond contemporary newspapers and learned that Alfred Moore Waddell had been a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate cavalry — and had been a United States representative for NC during the 1870s — and . . . (pause for dramatic effect) . . . had participated in what is known as the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 (a race riot of whites, not blacks) where an armed white mob in Wilmington decided to seize control of the city (which was majority black at the time) and murder a whole lot of Black people. Before sunset, Waddell and his fellow mobsters had burned down the Black-owned newspaper, broken into the capitol and forced the black mayor, the black board of aldermen, and the black chief of police to resign under threat of instant death.

“WHAT THE WHAT!?” I exclaimed aloud to my cat Theo, who just yawned and then went back to sleep. I double and triple checked this historical info to make sure it wasn’t propaganda made up by radical BLM (Bureau of Land Management) revisionists. But no, it was well documented, despite having been overlooked by all my school history books and every one of the local newspapers that mentioned Waddell as having spoken at the Winston-Salem statue’s dedication.

Turns out, no one was ever prosecuted for this single successful coup d’état in the history of the United States. I guess such a thing is embarrassing for the self-proclaimed greatest democracy in the world, which is probably why no one mentions it. What if China found out?

Not surprisingly, Honorable Al, after helping create a mayoral vacuum, decided, out of a sense of civic duty and patriotism, to run for mayor himself. In a speech the day before the 1898 Wilmington mayoral election, he said, “You are Anglo-Saxons. You are armed and prepared, and you will do your duty. Be ready at a moment’s notice. 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.” This patriotic anti-democratic Democrat concluded with this final inspiring election prediction. “We shall win tomorrow, if we have to do it with guns.”

And good old Al did win.

By the way, I found the above quote of Waddell’s speech in the archives of Atlanta’s Constitution newspaper. The speech was widely printed across the South and made Mayor Waddell a hero of the newly minted strategy of reasserting white hegemony over blacks (known as the system of Jim Crow). Within the next few years, nearly every black elected official was voted out of office throughout the South, both locally and in Congress. In fact, no new black candidates were elected until the civil rights era in the 1960s (which just happened to coincide with the second wave of Confederate Statuary thrust up in more public squares thanks to The Daughters of the Confederacy).

Waddell and The Wilmington Insurrection/massacre (not a riot) helped write the playbook of voting and white oppression of Blacks. There were no further armed insurrections to force black officials to resign at gunpoint because there were no longer elected black officials after this, thanks to the series of laws and intimidation tactics that convinced blacks that voting would be way too dangerous, and even illegal in many cases.

So, when the Honorable Mayor Waddell of Wilmington was brought in to do the dedication of the Winston-Salem confederate statue in front of the Federal courthouse in 1905, what symbolic message do you think the Daughters of the Confederacy and the city of Winston Salem had in mind?

One black artist told me that her family would go out of their way to never see that statue standing there in front of the courthouse since it was such a painful reminder of the racist purpose for which it was erected. She thanked me for posting the truth since she said it was hard for her to explain to our white friends without such specific historical proof, and out of fear of alienating people who defended the statue and the confederate flag as non-racist.

When I emailed this history to one of my white artist friends who had defended such Confederate monuments and symbols, she told me later that she burst into tears when she read it. She explained that she hadn’t known the history behind it, or how much pain it caused some of our mutual black friends who had never expressed their feelings about it to her.

Well, thank God such things as armed insurrections, storming statehouses to overthrow democratically elected leaders and voter suppression ended over a century ago. I mean can you even imagine a mob storming a government building with the intention of bringing about a coup d’état? What a wonderful thing it is to live in more enlightened times!

My novels can be found lurking on Amazon as well as audiobooks on Audible.

Nihala — God’s Dark Algorithm

https://www.amazon.com/Nihala-1-Scott-Burdick/dp/0996555412

https://www.audible.com/pd/Nihala-Audiobook/B01AIM6D00

The Immortality Contract

https://www.amazon.com/Immortality-Contract-Scott-Burdick/dp/0996555420

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Immortality-Contract-Audiobook/B075KLGV6B

My Artwork can be found at:

https://www.ScottBurdick.com
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