The sixth season of Scene on Radio, “Echoes of Coup,” begins with a reminder of January 6, 2021.
But “Echoes of a Coup” doesn’t stay in the present—or in Washington—for long. Instead, the season co-produced by Michael A. Betts II and John Biewen tells the story of Wilmington in 1898, when “men openly proclaiming white supremacy, in a well-planned conspiracy, removed the city’s mayor and city council at gunpoint.”
It was a coup and a massacre that white newspapers at the time referred to as a race riot. It’s also a story that, like many stories of American violence, still isn’t taught as widely as it should be. In the first episode, the hosts tell the story of the multiracial democracy that could have been in Wilmington. They introduce us to the heroic thinkers Abraham Galloway and David Walker. And they leave us with a reminder: History doesn’t just write itself. We actively decide who to remember, who to honor, and who to forget.
Scene on Radio survived the recent management tumult at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and found a new home with the school’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. The first three episodes of the new season are out now.
INDY: I’m from the North, and I remember hearing about the Wilmington massacre for the first time in college in North Carolina. What drew you to this topic for your sixth season of the podcast?
MICHAEL BETTS II: The [Kenan] Institute of Ethics at Duke brought Mike Wiley and Charlie Thompson on, and they formed a program called America’s Hallowed Ground. And they came to me and asked me to develop a podcast, and I was like, the only way that we can do this really well is that it needs to be multiracial and it needs to be with another really beloved and thoughtful radio person. So I called John and he almost immediately said yes. And then I got the job at UNC-Wilmington, which even more localized the focus.
JOHN BIEWEN: America’s Hallowed Ground is really a project that was about places in North Carolina that are of historical significance, and particularly with regard to race and racism. And Wilmington would literally be the place that you would think of to tell a really important story that is not exactly top secret at this point but is still undertold and under-understood, if I can coin that word.
Betts: America’s Hallowed Ground is starting in North Carolina but is moving out and is interested in looking at the entire country and the spaces where we haven’t really done our due diligence of remembrance in the right ways.
You start the first episode by mentioning January 6, 2021. Could you draw parallels between the late 1800s and American politics today?
Biewen: Our feeling was that we would not have to say a great deal about that, because the parallels are so obvious. We did want to make it explicit at the top that we see the parallels but that we are—as we say in the podcast—that we are again in a time when powerful people in this country, including elected officials, are working very hard and in organized fashion to undermine the democratic processes in this country in a way that we haven’t seen in many, many years.
“We are again in a time when powerful people in this country, including elected officials, are working very hard and in organized fashion to undermine the democratic processes in this country.”
And we have the threat and the reality of political violence, not just on January 6. So the echoes of the 1898 story can be felt very strongly and viscerally right now.
Episode 1 paints this picture of a thriving Black community in Wilmington before the coup. It was this “cosmopolitan, subversive, politically sophisticated” city full of Black men who had traveled the world. Could you paint this picture for us here?
Betts: David Cecelski, the historian and writer, does a phenomenal job of dropping us into that space. And it’s Black people, Black men and women who are well versed. There’s a story of a gentleman who was enslaved at the time, who was subscribed to The New York Times and Congressional Quarterly and is reading Marx and Engels. These are folks that are really thinking, that are subscribed to two publications while enslaved, and that’s completely antithetical to anything we’ve ever heard before.
These are individuals that spoke multiple languages. This is a space that—specifically on the dock—is orchestrated by Black hands. And they have power. They have real power in a way that doesn’t sound like they are victims. They’re definitely experiencing oppression, but they’ve created this space because of the necessity by white people to get their money.
He goes on to talk about if you have enslaved people working in the field, you never want them to see this world because Black people are giving orders to white men.
You got Black men who had walked down the street, arm and arm with white women in London. Things that you don’t want, fears that you have, are being realized in this world. And you don’t want the “commoners” to ever see that. There were actual laws that ended up being put on the books where it’s a death penalty for sailors to talk to enslaved people. They imprison them when they get to certain spaces because they’re so afraid of them passing on those ideas.
Could you introduce us to some of these other thinkers that you discuss and explain how Wilmington contributed to their politicization?
Biewen: We hear about two main figures, both of whom were born in or near Wilmington: David Walker, who was born at the end of the 18th century, born a free Black man in Wilmington, and went on to write one of the most radical abolitionist books of the 1820s, Appeal; and Abraham Galloway, who was born about 40 years later and did absolutely remarkable things—escaped from slavery in the 1850s and then worked for the Union, met with Abraham Lincoln, spirited his mother out of slavery in Wilmington during the Civil War, helped to orchestrate landings by the Union boats in Wilmington, and then was elected to the state assembly in North Carolina after the war, and then died at age 33.
And these are people that should be far better known, and the fact that they’re not says a lot about the things we prioritize in this country.
Betts: David Walker’s Appeal is a global appeal for the liberation of Black people everywhere. Abraham Galloway’s work is concerned, far more than just with Black liberation. He introduces the first bill for women’s suffrage when he goes to the statehouse. These are individuals that are concerned about more than just themselves. And we see that again and again. We learn about other characters, like Charles Chesnutt, who’s born in Ohio [and grew up in Fayetteville]. He’s a realism writer. He goes on to tell the first story that we really get about the massacre and coup. He understands the political space. And he’s a product of eastern North Carolina and is very eager to make sure that as a Booker T. Washington type—somebody who is a political moderate, if you will—he’s not trying to inflame the hearts of white individuals so that they’re angry with Black people, but he’s looking for ways to bridge the racial divide.
Why did you begin with that vision of Wilmington? This is maybe the worst question to ask a creator in any medium, but why did you tell the story in the order that you did, with the characters that you did?
Betts: It is so commonplace in this day and age to tell [stories of] Black and brown atrocities as victims, not as individuals who are self-reliant or community based, not as individuals that have any agency.
It became really important—because of what Wilmington was—to describe the agency of the region, to describe who Black people were at the time, and to describe that it’s really ironic to ask people who have consistently continued to overcome oppression and vanquishment and built really, really spectacular communities that just get burned down, to ask them to continue to bootstrap and pull themselves up.
The second thing is, as a storyteller and a creative, it’s the only way to get people on board to really understand the devastation of the action that happens. I’m not trying to downplay the loss of life as not impactful, I’m not trying to downplay the loss of political freedoms and the loss of social capital, but you can’t get an audience member to really care without telling them why they should care. And so when we start with what the world looked like, it’s an amazing place, and it’s antithetical to our imaginations. We—because of the Dunning School, because of people like the Daughters of the Confederacy, because of all of these actions of white supremacy—we don’t even imagine that world. It’s beyond us.
Part of having the first episode be the way it is, is [in order] to frustrate people and be like, why have I never heard these things? Why is Black History Month always Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks? We live in North Carolina, why don’t we know who Abraham Galloway is? He’s an actual Black action hero. There should have been 12 movies about him already. And then when we tell you why you don’t know about those things, then you start to go and hunt and ask the question: What else don’t I know?
When we tell you why you don’t know about those things, then you start to go and hunt and ask the question: What else don’t I know?”
You mentioned in episode one that Wilmington had come up previously in season three, a series about patriarchy. How does patriarchy fit into the story of this new season?
Biewen: That part is in episode two as part of the white supremacy campaign of 1898. And by the way, that’s not us calling it that, 125 years later—that’s what it was, very openly.
The Democratic Party at the time was an openly white supremacist party and they use that phrase, they put it on campaign buttons. It was in newspaper headlines, they called meetings where they said “business for the furtherance of white supremacy will be conducted at this meeting,” As part of that campaign, the Democratic Party, the white supremacist party was howling about a couple of things. One was what they called “Negro rule,” which was basically the idea that Black people were allowed to vote and run for office. This was just intolerable [to them]. As we say, there was no there was never Negro rule. There were just places where Black people were allowed to vote and maybe even hold a few offices and this was intolerable.
Also as part of the kind of fear-mongering campaign about the horrors of Negro rule and Black people’s enfranchisement was a sexist patriarchal argument about that Black men are rampaging rapists who are trying to attack white womanhood. And as a white man, you are complicit if you are not trying to stamp this out and push Black men back into the subservient role where they belong. So that that you are a failed patriarch if you are supportive of Black men having full citizenship in this country,
Could you tell me about the historiography behind this project and these events? At what point does history call this a “race riot” versus a “massacre”? At what point is it a “coup”?
Betts: We talked to LeRae Umfleet, who is the historian who did the vast majority of the uncovering of a lot of the texts. She was commissioned in 2003 [for] the Commission on the Wilmington Race Riot. And she always struggled with that title because she herself felt that it mischaracterized what was actually occurring. And we also talked to a woman named Bertha Boykin Todd who said we had to get the community on board with the notion of the language shift because, initially, they had to be OK with a “riot,” and then they had to be OK with a “massacre”—we had to get to those language developments. And she even says we benefited from the labor that was done [looking at subsequent massacres] in places like Tulsa, [Oklahoma,] and Rosewood, Florida. We’ve benefited from that labor.
Biewen: Episode 4 is really all about that question. We trace how initially there was a period of really triumphant gloating on the part of white supremacists in Wilmington and in North Carolina about the victory on November 10, 1898. And then there’s a long period of silence, in which this is just not something that gets talked about because it makes white folks uncomfortable.
We talk about the role of a very important historian at UNC-Chapel Hill, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, who was part of the Dunning School, and the role that he played in just establishing that “well, yeah, you know, we don’t talk about that.” And that really lasted all the way up to the 1990s. You get then, finally, people in Wilmington and then in the State Assembly taking tangible steps to get the facts first of all, to do a comprehensive historical study that LeRae Umfleet primarily did, to tell the story fully and accurately, and then to have acknowledgments like a memorial park and monument built 10 years later.
We’ve since had a Chris Everett documentary film, we’ve had other books that have come out, but the story still doesn’t loom as large in the American imagination as it should.
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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